Measuring racial progress against elites and the past masks present disparities

Evidence

These branders of the New America ingeniously focused on the history of racial progress (and not the racist present) and on Black elites (and not the Black masses) as the standards of measurement for American race relations. The question was not whether America had eliminated racial disparities. That was deemed impossible—just as the elimination of slavery was once deemed impossible. The question was whether the Talented Tenth were experiencing less discrimination today than yesterday. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 922

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distills the assimilationist measurement strategy: compare Black elites’ present to their past, never to White masses’ present.
• SEED: Angle: how ‘progress framing’ reframes debates — the rhetorical move of choosing the metric that flatters your preferred conclusion, applied beyond race to any reform debate.