Du Bois rejected biological race but kept racist trait notions

Evidence

Angry at its terrible lies, Black communities everywhere protested The Birth of a Nation. In the final days of his life, Booker T. Washington tried to accomplish behind the scenes what the NAACP and other civil rights groups were trying to do openly: block its showing. They failed. Du Bois took a different approach, challenging the film’s historical racism in his sweeping history The Negro, published right on time in 1915. He tore up the fairytales of the non-African ancient Egypt, the absence of sophisticated pre-modern African states, the horrors of Reconstruction, and so on. He had seemingly dropped his biological concept of race. But he had not dropped his racist notions about the traits of the Negro, whom he termed “the most lovable of men.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 804

Categorization

• XREF: Du Bois holding ‘racist notions about the traits of the Negro’ while rejecting biological race illustrates the assimilationist position — helpful for placing arguments into Kendi’s three-way scheme.