Racist ideas persist because they are launched by self-interest, not ignorance

Evidence

The Obama campaign released a scanned copy of his US birth certificate, but the rumors of Obama being born in Kenya or some Islamic anti-American nation did not suddenly go away. They were not started out of ignorance, so why would they go away out of knowledge? — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1223

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates Kendi’s core inversion: ideas (birther rumors) served self-interested producers and are not corrected by facts — the same mechanism applied to Obama that Kendi traces historically. — connects to: Ideas matter only as they strengthen the race and subjugate others; Racist beliefs persist because emotional investments, not logic, sustain them — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1243
• QUESTION: The birther case is a useful test of Kendi’s model against a case where one might read ignorance first — worth pressing whether any evidence shows the producers themselves believed the claim.