Racists presume any articulate Black figure is an expert on Black people.

Evidence

And just as racists presumed that all Black individuals represented the race, racists presumed that all articulate Black individuals were experts on Black people. They presumed, therefore, that Obama’s Blackness made him an expert on Black people. And media outlets routinely brought on eloquent Black voices to pontificate on all sorts of “Black” issues they had not been trained in, making the actual interracial cast of experts squirm as they listened. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1215

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the reader’s interest in Kendi’s core claim that racial assumptions operate regardless of individual merit or expertise.