Even W. E. B. Du Bois once held assimilationist views of Black family life.

Evidence

Aside from Benedict’s Race: Science and Politics, the most influential assimilationist scientific text of the era came from E. Franklin Frazier, the former student of assimilationist Robert Park. In 1939, the Howard University sociologist published a definitive study entitled The Negro Family in the United States. In his introduction, Frazier expressed a debt to Du Bois’s Atlanta University Study on the Negro American Family thirty years prior, when Du Bois had concluded that “sexual immorality is probably the greatest single plague spot among Negro Americans.” Du Bois returned the compliment by praising Frazier’s brilliance as a Black sociologist, showing some of the holdover of his assimilationist ideas. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 881

Categorization

• XREF: Doubles as evidence for the reader’s testing of the causal inversion: here ideas (Du Bois’s) seem to precede policy, a candidate counterexample to examine.