A civilization like Europe’s could not produce self-critique exposing its own racialism

Evidence

Those limitations relate directly to the “understanding” of consciousness, and the persistence of racialism in Western thought was of primary importance. It would have been exceedingly difficult and most unlikely that such a civilization in its ascendancy as a significant power in the world would produce a tradition of self-examination sufficiently critical to expose one of its most profound terms of order. Racialism, as I have tried to show, ran deep in the bowels of Western culture, negating its varying social relations of production and distorting their inherent contradictions. … Western culture, constituting the structure from which European consciousness was appropriated, the structure in which social identities and perceptions were grounded in the past, transmitted a racialism that adapted to the political and material exigencies of the moment. In the medieval and feudal social orders of the European hinterland and the Mediterranean, racialism was substantiated by specific sets of exploitation through which particular caste or classes exploited and expropriated disparate peoples. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 383

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the definitional core of racialism as Robinson’s organizing analytic.
• XREF: Core to the reader’s question about the tradition’s origin — explains why the critique of racialism had to come from outside/in the Black radical tradition rather than from Western Marxism.