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🪵 The Threshold

Even anti-racist scientists accepted fixed cultural essences of races

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tagsja-picks, question, contrarian_or_surprising, singleton, xref, category/factual-claims
aliases@kumar_islamophobia_2012, loc. 192

3 min read

Even anti-racist scientists accepted fixed cultural essences of races

Evidence

Unlike eugenicists and assimilationists, Du Bois desired a multiracial pluralism, where differences were acknowledged, embraced, and equalized in antiracist fashion, not graded, suppressed, and ignored. But instead of merely sharing the cultural differences of African American spirituality, artistry, and music, Du Bois graded Black people himself in racist fashion, echoing the view of the nation’s leading urban sociologist, Robert Park of the University of Chicago. The Negro was “primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake,” Park wrote. “He is, so to speak, the lady among races,” and was interested in “physical things rather than … subjective states and objects of introspection.” Du Bois likewise said the Negro had an unmatched sense of “sound and color,” along with “humility” and “a certain spiritual joyousness: a sensuous, tropical love of life, in vivid contrast to the cool and cautious New England reason.” After all these years, Du Bois was still helping to reinforce Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ideas on the soft Black soul and the hard White mind. It seemed that nothing could erase this wholeheartedly racist idea from the mind of W. E. B. Du Bois. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 836 (#expands, via linked claim)

King’s other favorite scholar penned the most controversial Black book of 1957, possibly of the entire decade. The gender racism of E. Franklin Frazier in Black Bourgeoisie, depicting White women as more beautiful and sophisticated than Black women, Black wives as domineering, and Black husbands as “impotent physically and socially,” was as manifest as his historical racism. “Slavery was a cruel and barbaric system that annihilated the negro as a person,” Frazier said. This theory resembled the racist thesis of historian Stanley Elkins in his smash hit Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 934 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

  • XREF: connects to: Even anti-racist Orientalists held fixed cultural essences for the racialized; Even canonical antiracist scholars produced gender-racist and assimilationist ideas — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 934; Even committed antiracists can reproduce racist ideas while pursuing equality — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 836 (+4 more)

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