Even Du Bois began his career reproducing assimilationist uplift ideas

Evidence

Charitable local Whites, unwilling to send their town’s extraordinary Negro to the nation’s best historically White college, raised funds in 1885 to send him to the nation’s best historically Black college: Fisk University of Nashville. Controlled by White philanthropists and instructors, Fisk was one of the nation’s preeminent factories of uplift suasion and assimilationist ideas. Du Bois consumed these ideas like his peers and started reproducing them when he became the editor of Fisk’s student newspaper, The Herald. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 705

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s discomfort goal: shows that assimilationism is where even the future antiracist Du Bois started — the trap is real and nearly universal among well-meaning people.