Freed Black people directly refuted racist claims with lived counter-evidence.

Evidence

If any group should be characterized as “lazy,” it was the planters, who had “lived in idleness all their lives on stolen labor,” resolved a Petersburg, Virginia, mass meeting. It had always been amazing to enslaved people how someone could lounge back, drink lemonade, and look out over their fields, and call the bent-over pickers lazy. To the racist forecasts that Blacks would not be able to take care of themselves, one emancipated person replied, “We used to support ourselves and our masters too when we were slaves and I reckon we can take care of ourselves now.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 630

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘lazy master’ inversion parallels how stereotype projection works in other settings — connects to the reader’s standing interest in decorum and social signaling. — connects to: Black intellectuals claimed biblical descent to refute denigration of African ancestry. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1357
• CANDY: The image of planters lounging with lemonade calling bent-over pickers lazy is a sharp, funny-in-horror image good for an elevator conversation.