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The “Southern Strategy”
“Uplift suasion” is the assimilationist racist idea that Black people should act “respectable”—or imitate middle-class white people—in order to show white people that they’re human and convince the government to give them equal rights.
Uplift Suasion Quotes in Stamped
The Stamped quotes below are all either spoken by Uplift Suasion or refer to Uplift Suasion. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 9
Quotes
[Uplift suasion] would be the cornerstone of assimilationist thought, which basically said:
Make yourself small,
make yourself unthreatening,
make yourself the same,
make yourself safe,
make yourself quiet,
to make White people comfortable with your existence.
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Chapter 19
Quotes
But not everyone was kissing Du Bois’s assimilationist feet. There was a resistant group of artists that emerged in 1926 who called themselves the Niggerati. They believed they should be able to make whatever they wanted to express themselves as whole humans without worrying about White acceptance. […] They wanted to function the same way as the blues women, like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, who sang about pain and sex and whatever else they wanted to. Even if the images of Blackness weren’t always positive. W. E. B. Du Bois and his supporters of uplift suasion and media suasion had a hard time accepting any narrative of Black people being less than perfect. Less than dignified. But the Niggerati were arguing that, if Black people couldn’t be shown as imperfect, they couldn’t be shown as human.
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Uplift Suasion Term Timeline in Stamped
The timeline below shows where the term Uplift Suasion appears in Stamped. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 9: Uplift Suasion
...that this would disprove stereotypes and make other white people more comfortable. But this “ uplift suasion ” theory is racist. White people should accept Black people the way they are, instead...
(full context)
Chapter 11: Mass Communication for Mass Emancipation
...immediate end to slavery. But at first, Garrison didn’t believe in immediate equality—he believed in uplift suasion . He changed his mind after the enslaved preacher Nat Turner launched a rebellion in...
(full context)
Chapter 19: Can’t Sing and Dance and Write It Away
When the NAACP’s new leaders pushed even harder for uplift suasion , Du Bois finally decided to quit. He started teaching at Atlanta University and advocating...
(full context)
