Black and White readers of Darkwater drew opposite verdicts on its antiracism

Evidence

Northern, southern, and foreign racist reviewers almost unanimously condemned the book as a bitter madman’s “hymn of racial hate,” or “what the southerner would write if he turned negro,” as the socialist Harold Laski of the London School of Economics put it. Meanwhile, the overwhelming response of Black readers, including the legions of common sharecroppers and domestics, was that it was “a milestone in the history of the Negro race,” as the Washington Bee attested. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 828

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the reader’s core inversion: attitudes toward a work track racial position (racist vs. antiracist), not the work’s objective quality or the reader’s intelligence.