Racist policy adapts and progresses even as explicit racism recedes

Evidence

“We recognized that increased voting strength might encourage a shift in the tactics of discrimination,” Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach testified to Congress. “Once significant numbers of blacks could vote, communities could still throw up obstacles to discourage those voters or make it difficult for a black to win elective office.” Katzenbach’s recognition of the fact that racist policies could progress in the face of racial progress proved prophetic. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 989

Categorization

• XREF: This is Kendi’s adaptability thesis in a single quote — the same mechanism as his earlier chapters on how segregationist policy reinvented itself after emancipation and after Reconstruction. — connects to: State racism operates pragmatically rather than from coherent durable ideology.; Sympathetic multicultural portrayals can still legitimate racist policies — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 374; Racism operates as a changing process rather than a fixed project
• QUESTION: Moynihan’s statistical demonstration that civil rights legislation did not improve Black living conditions — does this complicate Kendi’s claim that effective antiracist policy requires outcome focus, since the 1964 Act was itself intent-focused?