Uplift suasion can backfire by confirming whites’ belief that racism is past.

Evidence

STAUNCH BELIEVERS IN uplift and media suasion looked to NBC’s The Cosby Show, which premiered on September 20, 1984, to redeem the Black family in the eyes of White America. While many viewers enjoyed Bill Cosby’s brilliant comedy and the show’s alluring storylines, and many Black viewers delighted in watching a Black cast on primetime television for eight seasons, it was Cosby’s racial vision that made The Cosby Show America’s No. 1 show from 1985 to 1989 (and one of the most popular in apartheid South Africa). Cosby envisioned the ultimate uplift suasion show about a stereotype-defying family uplifted by their own striving beyond the confines of discriminated Blackness. He believed he was showing African Americans what was possible if they worked hard enough and stopped their antiracist activism. Cosby and his millions of loyal viewers actually believed that The Cosby Show and its spinoffs were persuading away the racist ideas of its millions of White viewers. And it did, for some. For other Whites, Cosby’s fictional Huxtables were extraordinary Negroes, and the show merely substantiated their conviction—and Reagan’s conviction, and racist Blacks’ convictions—that racism could be found only in the history books. … Some commentators understood this at the time. The Cosby Show “suggests that blacks are solely responsible for their social conditions, with no acknowledgement of the severely constricted life opportunities that most black people face,” critiqued literary scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the New York Times at the crest of the show’s popularity in 1989. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1100

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s goal of applying Kendi’s three-way scheme: Cosby’s The Cosby Show is a textbook assimilationist artifact. This gives a concrete pop-culture test case for the assimilationism-is-racist claim.
• SEED: Sketches an essay: how uplift suasion narratives from The Cosby Show to modern ‘respectability’ media produce the opposite of their intended persuasion, confirming rather than erasing racist belief.
• CANDY: The fact that The Cosby Show was ‘one of the most popular shows in apartheid South Africa’ is a striking, low-effort conversation fact.
• DEFINE: This is a live example of Kendi’s definition of assimilationism: uplift by one’s own striving while denouncing antiracist activism.