Statewide racist policy in the North made Whites complicit in southern violence

Evidence

Davis did not view the Birmingham church bombing on September 15, 1963, as an isolated incident carried out by southern White extremists. “It was this spectacular, violent event, the savage dismembering of four little girls, which has burst out of the daily, sometimes even dull, routine of racist oppression,” in Davis’s words. But Davis’s classmates in France—indoctrinated by the mythology of the antiracist North and racist South—refused to accept her persisting analysis of “why the whole ruling stratum in their country, by being guilty of racism, was also guilty of this murder.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 967

Categorization

• QUESTION: Davis’s claim that the entire ruling stratum was ‘guilty of racism’ and therefore guilty of the bombing is a strong version of systemic complicity — worth chasing how Kendi reconciles this with his ‘racist policy before racist ideas’ frame.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated test of Kendi’s inversion: Davis here treats racist ideas/mythology (the North=antiracist myth) as what blinds people, a case where ideas seem to precede rather than follow policy. — connects to: White backlash developed nationally, not as a southern import to the North. — Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of…, 37