Internalizing racist myths makes even their critics struggle to release them

Evidence

Ms. magazine presented the young Wallace on its January 1979 cover, advertising her erupting Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman as “the book that will shape the 1980s.” It certainly shaped the Black gender debate. Some hated her, some loved her for posing sexism as a greater concern than racism and for exposing the racist “myth of the black man’s castration” and the racist myth of the Black woman as a “woman of inordinate strength.” Wallace testified, “Even for me, it continues to be difficult to let the myth go” of the Black superwoman. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1054

Categorization

• QUESTION: Test case for the ignorance→hate→discrimination model: Wallace exposes the myth while admitting she cannot fully surrender it—does that fit Kendi’s causal inversion or complicate it?
• XREF: Wallace centering sexism over racism is a wedge in the reader’s project of sorting arguments into the three categories; it anticipates intersectionality debates.
• DEEPTHINKING: The admission that a critic still holds the myth she exposes complicates any clean model of ideology—knowledge of a racist idea does not automatically dissolve its grip, challenging simple versions of the ignorance→hate sequence.