Du Bois’s class racism surfaced against Garvey’s West Indian followers

Evidence

It was a charge hardly anyone could deny, especially after Du Bois’s views on Marcus Garvey became known. Garvey’s movement would collapse “in a short time,” Du Bois had allegedly said, and “his followers are the lowest type of Negroes, mostly from the West Indies.” The reporter who published this quotation exhibiting class and ethnic racism probably caught Du Bois in a rancorous mood that August 1920. All month long, Du Bois had had to watch and listen to the massive parades and meetings of the first international convention of Garvey’s UNIA. … Du Bois and the Talented Tenth, however, felt deeply threatened by Garvey’s exposure of the touchy reality of light skin privilege. “Garvey is an extraordinary leader of men,” Du Bois admitted in The Crisis at the end of 1920. But it had been a mistake for him to try to bring Caribbean color politics to the United States. “American Negroes recognized no color line in or out of the race,” Du Bois said, “and they will in the end punish the man who attempts to establish it.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 829

Categorization

• QUESTION: Does Kendi classify Du Bois’s anti-Garvey line as assimilationist racism (class/ethnic) — and does that fit the reader’s three-way scheme? A case where an antiracist icon still held racist ideas.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s key discomfort: assimilationism is where even Du Bois, the chapter’s antiracist standard-bearer, lived — showing how the three-way scheme sorts a hero.
• ADDENDUM: Could support a piece on how intramural class/color hierarchies within a subordinated group reproduce majority racist structures — the Talented Tenth vs. Garvey as ‘respectability’ policing one another.