Assimilationists coined ‘racism’ in the 1940s while defining only their rivals’ views as racist.

Evidence

Actually, assimilationists first used and defined and popularized the term “racism” during the 1940s. All the while, they refused to define their own assimilationist ideas of Black behavioral inferiority as racist. These assimilationists defined only segregationist ideas of Black biological inferiority as racist. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 17

Categorization

• QUESTION: Which specific assimilationist intellectuals coined and popularized the term in the 1940s? Worth tracing the genealogy of the word further.
• SEED: Angle: the term ‘racism’ was invented as a weapon between rival racist camps — a history of how the label itself was politically deployed.
• DEEPTHINKING: The term ‘racism’ served as a weapon that let assimilationists claim moral high ground while retaining their own behavioral-inferiority racism — the definition of a label is itself a site of self-interested contest.
• XREF: connects to: The word racism only entered general usage in the 1930s — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 696