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Antiracist
In Stamped, an antiracist is someone who refuses—absolutely—to act in line with racist beliefs or practices, no matter their society’s norms or values. Because racist views were held by most people across the centuries that Stamped examines, antiracists were often extraordinarily courageous individuals, willing to accept the scorn and disdain of society in order to pursue what they knew to be right. To be antiracist, however, is to be committed not only to equality for some but, as Kendi notes in the introduction, to equality for the whole group. It takes a great deal of courage to be an antiracist, as it often involves rejecting dominant beliefs or privileges. If the racist is someone who hates, the antiracist is someone who has love for everyone, not just the people who resemble or benefit them.
Assimilationist
In Stamped, an assimilationist is someone who strongly objects to racist ideas and advocates for racial equality, but who advocates for the total absorption of Black people into white society. Reynolds and Kendi reject this mindset because it concedes that white feelings, norms, and priorities should determine the choices and behaviors of Black people. In Stamped, many of the revered figures in Black history are discussed has having held assimilationist views at least at some point in their lives. Some, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gradually abandoned assimilationist views and move toward antiracism. But Kendi and Reynolds do not shy away from harshly critiquing assimilationist viewpoints, regardless of who held them. In their view, rather than recognizing Black excellence on its own terms, the assimilationist settles for compromise and complicity with white supremacist values. Exposing the limitations of assimilationism is one of the book’s main goals.
Racist
In Stamped, Reynolds describes racists as “haters.” Too selfish to share or recognize the needs of others, racist ideas and people are greedy, eager to retain everything (privilege, property, prosperity) for themselves. Although racism may be propped up by the lie that some people are inherently better than others, Kendi and Reynolds argue that racist ideas are more likely the result of a person’s commitment to power and privilege than their intellectual attitudes about difference. As they explain, a racist might hate another group of people, but they are definitely comfortable with the domination over and tyrannizing of that group. In Kendi’s work as a whole, the category “racist” is capacious, encompassing everyone or everything that actively works to sustain structural systems of oppression in addition to the individual people who are passive and complicit with those systems.
Uplift Suasion
Uplift suasion is the idea that Black people can convince skeptical white racists that they have no reason to fear Black people. To do so, Black people must strive to fit into white society by adopting its norms of conduct and dominant values, in the hope that Black Americans will eventually convince white Americans to treat them as equals. In Stamped, Reynolds and Kendi point out that uplift suasion has historically been promoted by both white and Black opponents of racism. However, they are highly critical of uplift suasion for its assimilationist position. They strongly object to the assertion that Black people must change in order to be accepted within American society. Rather, Stamped urges its readers to resist all arguments that ask them to make themselves small or different for the comfort of white people.
