Equating antiracists with segregationists is a racist assimilationist political maneuver

Evidence

“If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech,” Clinton volleyed at Sister Souljah’s post-rebellion comments. This dismissive assimilationist maneuver of equating antiracists with segregationists, this planned political stunt, thrilled racist voters nearly as much as Clinton’s campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it.” Clinton gained a lead in the polls that he never lost. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1125

Categorization

• XREF: This is the heart of the reader’s project: the Sister Souljah moment shows an assimilationist (Clinton) deploying the rhetoric of equivalence to win racist voters — a textbook case for placing an argument in Kendi’s three-way scheme. — connects to: Race’s rendered irrelevance stigmatizes antiracist invocation as the real racism — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1863
• DEEPTHINKING: The maneuver — ‘equating antiracists with segregationists’ — is a genuine paradigm-swapping move: it collapses the antiracist/racist distinction by reverse-engineering the racist’s own equivalence logic. Worth sitting with.