Even antiracist Black feminists could harbor class-based racism toward poor Blacks

Evidence

Wells knew that immoral constructions about Black women hindered them from fully engaging in the burgeoning women’s club moral movement that cascaded across the 1890s. … Like Wells, Cooper wrote in the antiracist feminist tradition. “The colored woman of to-day occupies, one may say, a unique position in this country,” Cooper explained. “She is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is as yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both.” And yet, Cooper did espouse some class racism. She praised, for instance, the “quiet, chaste dignity and decorous solemnity” of the Protestant Episcopal Church, while demeaning the “semi-civilized religionism” of low-income Black southerners. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 725

Categorization

• XREF: Underlines the core scheme: even an ally can hold racism, foreshadowing Kendi’s later insistence that anyone can hold racist ideas regardless of identity or good intentions. — connects to: Lowered expectations toward black women’s feminism is itself a racist patronizing act — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 204
• SEED: Angles: ‘the respected antiracist who was still a class snob’ as a template for interrogating today’s elite reformers.