Black racists recited racist talking points for financial and occupational favor

Evidence

Like racist Whites, racist Blacks believed their “success” was due to their extraordinary God-given qualities and/or their extraordinary work ethic; that if they “made it,” then any Black person could, if he or she worked hard enough. For many of these Black racists, their expressions may have been deeply political: they may have been cunningly reciting racist talking points in order to receive financial and occupational favor, whether they actually believed these racist ideas or not. Opportunities proliferated in political offices and think tanks and news mediums for Black racists willing to look down on African Americans in the twenty-first century. In 2003, McWhorter left academia for a posh position as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. But if science mattered more than self-interest, then the Manhattan Institute’s preeminent production of racist ideas would have ceased three years before McWhorter arrived. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1174

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the core causal inversion — policy and self-interest precede ideas — into Black conservative intellectuals themselves; connects to the reader’s goal of placing arguments into segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist categories. — connects to: Interviewed black servants suppressed negative truths out of politeness; Segregationist preachers patronized Black audiences while demanding gratitude for past white charity — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 248
• QUESTION: The ‘deeply political’ framing invites testing whether self-interested performance of racism, without genuine belief, still counts as the same causal structure Kendi describes for white racists.