Elite Black women’s self-help efforts reproduced racist views of poor Black women

Evidence

If Jacks hoped to silence Wells and her sisters, then his plan backfired. By the summer of 1896, inflamed Black club women had united under the banner of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) to defend Black womanhood, challenge discrimination, and lend power to self-help efforts. But some, if not most, of the self-help efforts of these mostly elite reformers encouraged the assimilation of White women’s mores. They were based on the same old historical racism that said that low-income Black women had been morally and culturally ruined by slavery. “Lifting As We Climb” became the NACW motto. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 727

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence for the assimilationist category in Kendi’s three-way scheme: noble-sounding reform built on racist premise. — connects to: Respectability politics blamed black victims for their own oppression — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 923; Respectability discourse loaded black women with responsibility for the whole race; Black women who overcome sexism and racism develop liberatory strategies to share (+10 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: how ‘respectability politics’ inside a threatened group imports the oppressor’s ideology — the NACW as a 19th-century case study.