Even leading Black intellectuals reproduced racist ideas by accepting faulty crime data

Evidence

In all of his intellectual power, Du Bois proved unable to stop the cycle of racial profiling and crime statistics and racist ideas. He substantiated the disparities in arrest and prison rates through both antiracist (“dogged Anglo-Saxon prejudice” had “subjected [Blacks and Whites] to different standards of justice”) and racist explanations (the “dazed freedman” lacked a moral foundation). Du Bois was far from alone. None of the scholars who became members of the first national Black intellectual group, the American Negro Academy, formed in 1897, could reject the statistics, or refute them as indicators of greater Black crime. Instead, they accepted the numbers as fact and tried to push against the stereotypes of criminal Blacks through education and persuasion, thus reproducing the racist ideas they were working to eliminate. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 744

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Kendi’s most uncomfortable point lands here: Du Bois himself — the hero of the antiracist tradition — could not break the cycle and even reproduced racist explanations. This nuances and troubles the three-way scheme by showing even the best-intentioned antiracists remain captive to the producing structures.
• QUESTION: If Du Bois — the exemplary antiracist — couldn’t reject the data, what does that say about whether individuals can escape racist thinking through will or education alone? Worth testing against the scheme.
• SEED: Essay angle: how even the most rigorous antiracist thinkers of 1897 accepted bad statistics as fact — the assimilationist reflex of fighting stereotypes with education rather than attacking the data.