Even assimilationists who believed in Black development reduced Black achievement to white ancestry

Evidence

Du Bois had clearly been influenced by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s postwar New England, where ideas on race seemed to start and end in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. At Harvard, he had also been influenced by one of the professors, the historian Albert Hart, a hard-line moralist who deemed character—the “inner man not the outer”—as the key to social change. Du Bois consumed from Hart and other assimilationists the racist idea that African Americans had been socially and morally crippled by slavery (and Africa). Du Bois had more faith in future development than his professor did. In his 1910 travel book The Southern South, Hart claimed that “the Negro is inferior, and his past history in Africa and in America leads to the belief that he will remain inferior.” Thinking about Du Bois specifically, Hart reduced his talents to his European ancestry. Du Bois was “living proof,” Hart wrote confidentially, “that a mulatto may have as much power and passion as any white man.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 717

Categorization

• XREF: Powerful instance of the assimilationist trap the reader wants to master — Hart believed in African American development yet still coded excellence as whiteness, exactly the assimilationist racism Kendi describes.
• DEEPTHINKING: Hart’s confidential note distills the assimilationist doctrine’s poisonous core: even the most optimistic believer in Black progress simultaneously explains away Black achievement by erasing Blackness — the ceiling is always whiteness.