Casting poverty as the truest Blackness is racist, humanizing those characters is not

Evidence

Whenever Black artists ordained financially deprived Black folk as the truest representatives of Black people, they were trekking through the back door into racist ideas. Too often, they regarded the world of poverty, hustling, prostitution, gambling, and criminality as the Black world, as if non-Blacks did not hustle, prostitute, deal drugs, gamble, and commit crimes at similar rates. And yet, whenever these artists humanized pimps, gangsters, criminals, and prostitutes, they were at their antiracist best. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1039

Categorization

• DEFINE: Draws a clean antiracist line: romanticizing deprivation as authentic Blackness smuggles in racist ideas, while humanizing criminalized figures is antiracist — a useful discriminator for judging any cultural representation.
• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely subtle two-sided judgment — the same body of work can be both racist (romanticizing poverty as Black world) and antiracist (humanizing the criminalized) at once, resisting one-sentence summary.