Racism’s lumping of all black women together justified elite uplift toward the lowly

Evidence

Terrell’s statement, like the motto “lifting as we climb,” admitted the difference in class status between clubwomen and “lowly” black women. Moreover, the NACW did not define or represent itself as a collective body of “common toilers”; nor did the NACW actively recruit them into its ranks. As an elite, who otherwise “might wish to shun them and hold ourselves entirely aloof,” clubwomen understood only too well that American racism lumped and judged all black women together. Thus a sense of duty as well as expedience (“policy and self-preservation”) resonated in Terrell’s appeal to her sisters. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 943

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated purpose: the founding mechanism of the politics of respectability as external pressure producing internal class policing. — connects to: Elite Black women’s self-help efforts reproduced racist views of poor Black women — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 727; Educating elite black women was deemed essential to spreading correct values — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 156; Respectability discourse loaded black women with responsibility for the whole race (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Elite Black women’s self-help efforts reproduced racist views of poor Black women #expands (0.92) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 727
• Educating elite black women was deemed essential to spreading correct values #expands (0.88) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 156
• Educated mulatto women rationalize anti-Negro prejudice through shifting evasive justifications #exemplifies (0.87) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 209
• Black Baptist women saw their domestic teaching role as decisive for racial uplift #exemplifies (0.85) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 388
• Respectability discourse loaded black women with responsibility for the whole race #expands (0.78)
• Black middle-class women’s clubs asserted unity with the wider race #qualifies (0.74) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2167
• Black Baptist women actively promoted racial separatism and self-reliance #expands (0.72) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 331