Casting discrimination’s victims as having been degraded by it is itself racist

Evidence

It is one antiracist thing to say discriminators treated Black people like they were barbarians. It is yet another racist thing to say the discrimination actually transformed Black people into barbarians. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 21

Categorization

• DEFINE: A sharp working distinction for placing arguments: describing degrading treatment (antiracist) vs. claiming the treatment degraded the people (racist assimilationism).
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the ‘imbruted by oppression’ move — how humanitarian campaigns historically smuggled in racist descriptions of the very people they defended.
• XREF: connects to: Respectability discourse blames victimized blacks, especially women, for their own discrimination — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 923