Uplift suasion assumed Black conduct, not White power, drove racism

Evidence

Historically, Black people have by and large figured the smartest thing we could do for ourselves is to partake in uplift suasion—a strategy as unworkable as White self-sacrifice. Beginning around the 1790s, abolitionists urged the growing number of free Blacks to exhibit upstanding behavior before White people, believing they would thereby undermine the racist beliefs behind slavery. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1244

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘uplift suasion’ as the strategy of proving Black worth through upstanding conduct before whites.
• XREF: This is the mirror image of the assimilationist category of Kendi’s three-way scheme — the strategy of disproving racist beliefs through self-improvement, which the reader wants to map onto assimilationism.