Even committed antiracists can reproduce racist ideas while pursuing equality

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

Categorization

• XREF: Sharpens the reader’s three-way scheme: Du Bois here straddles antiracist pluralism and assimilationist/racist grading — a boundary-case useful for the reader’s stated goal of placing any argument into the scheme. — connects to: Even anti-racist scientists accepted fixed cultural essences of races
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does grading a group’s ‘gifts’ always constitute racist idea even when the intent is to elevate that group? Tests where the line between recognizing difference and grading it sits.