First Black newspaper editors blamed lower-class Blacks for racist prejudice.

Evidence

The editors and the elite Blacks they represented often focused, however, on the conduct of the “lower classes of our people,” whom they blamed for bringing the race down. Class racism dotted the pages of the Freedom’s Journal, with articles pitting lower-income Blacks against upper-income Blacks, and the former being portrayed as inferior to the latter. Cornish and Russwurm did sometimes defend low-income Blacks. As New York planned to emancipate its remaining captives on July 4, 1827, the mainstream newspapers announced their disapproval. Freed Africans would “increase” the city’s “criminal calendar, pauper list and dandy register,” stammered the Morning Chronicle. Cornish and Russwurm admonished the newspaper for its “vulgar” attack while agreeing with much of the reasoning behind it. The Africans about to be freed were “an injured people,” the editors pleaded, “and we think it beneath the character of a public Editor, to add insult to injury.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 415

Categorization

• XREF: A crisp example of assimilationist class-racism inside an antiracist-adjacent institution — demonstrates Kendi’s point that assimilationism is a spectrum many well-meaning people occupy. Connects to the reader’s goal of placing any racial argument into the three-way scheme.
• SEED: Angle: the internal class hierarchy within oppressed groups as a sustaining engine of racist policy — how uplift suasion assigns blame downward rather than confronting power.