Africans survived slavery by conserving native consciousness rather than understanding Europeans

Evidence

For those African men and women whose lives were interrupted by enslavement and transportation, it was reasonable to expect that they would attempt, and in some ways realize, the recreation of their lives. It was not, however, an understanding of the Europeans that preserved those Africans in the grasp of slavers, planters, merchants, and colonizers. Rather, it was the ability to conserve their native consciousness of the world from alien intrusion, the ability to imaginatively re-create a precedent metaphysic while being subjected to enslavement, racial domination, and repression. This was the raw material of the Black radical tradition, the values, ideas, conceptions, and constructions of reality from which resistance was manufactured. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1429

Categorization

• DEFINE: Grounds the definition of the Black radical tradition’s raw material in preserved African consciousness.
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense claim that survival under slavery depended less on understanding the oppressor than on conserving one’s own metaphysic — a thesis that reverses assimilationist readings of resistance.