Uplift suasion shifts blame for racism onto the discriminator targets.

Evidence

In the aftermath of The Souls of Black Folk and Du Bois’s Talented Tenth essay, racial reformers and scholars of race, whether White or Black, whether applauding or critiquing Du Bois, seemed to have formed a consensus on the solution to the “Negro problem.” They spoke of the need for more strident uplift suasion, for upwardly mobile Talented Tenths persuading away the racist ideas of White folk. The strategy remained deeply racist. Black people, apparently, were responsible for changing racist White minds. White people, apparently, were not responsible for their own racist mentalities. If White people were racist and discriminated against Blacks, then Black people were to blame, because they had not commanded Whites’ respect? Uplift suasion had been deployed for more than a century, and its effect in 1903? American racism may have never been worse. But neither its undergirding racist ideas, nor its historical failure, nor the extraordinary Negro construction ensuring its continued failure had lessened the faith of reformers. Uplift suasion had been and remained one of the many great White hopes of racist America. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 775

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion is concentrated here: the assimilationist ‘solution’ itself is racist because it makes Black people responsible for changing White minds — exactly the difficulty the reader flagged about where well-meaning people live.
• XREF: Ties directly to the reader’s test case — Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk could be the historical case where ideas seem to precede policy, so this passage deserves scrutiny against Kendi’s reversal. — connects to: Treating race as a form of ethnicity enables blaming the victim. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 702