Even Du Bois produced assimilationist racist ideas in his early race writing.

Evidence

For instance, in his 1897 address for the opening meeting of the American Negro Academy, entitled “The Conservation of Races,” Du Bois put forth the argument of biologically distinct races with distinct histories, characteristics, and destinies. African Americans were “members of a vast historic race that from the dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland,” he said. “The first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races,” that is, toward social equilibrium, he said, “lies in the correction of the immorality, crime, and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage of slavery.” … But it was riddled with racist ideas, speaking of “blood” races, race traits, backward Africa, imbruting enslavement, criminally minded and effeminate African American men, strong Europeans, and the idea that African Americans were superior to continental Africans. Du Bois reinforced as much racism as he struck down. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 745

Categorization

• XREF: Directly exercises the reader’s three-way scheme: Du Bois’s ‘Conservation of Races’ is textbook assimilationism (Black self-correction as the cure for racism), a position the reader must learn to recognize as racist.
• QUESTION: If Du Bois, the arch antiracist, slid into assimilationist ideas while rejecting segregationist ones, when does the scheme allow someone to be ‘in between’? Worth testing whether Kendi allows any gradation.
• DEEPTHINKING: The trajectory of a genuinely great mind who was ‘assimilationist’ by instinct on class/gender while ‘antiracist’ on race proper suggests the categories may interact with each axis of oppression in ways the chapter’s simplicity hides.