American social science long argued that slaves internalized submissive habits

Evidence

Still, it is useful to pause here for a moment to consider what revisionists such as Blassingame and Owens and a score of other historians, Black and non-Black, in the past twenty years or so, have taken to be the issue. Clearly, they have addressed themselves to one overriding claim: that the enslaved in time came to accept the terms of slavery. The practice of submission, so went the conventional wisdom embodied in the American disciplines of history, sociology, and psychology, became for the slaves the habits of inferiority; for their descendants, the psychological “marks of oppression,” the culture of the dominated, the perverted, twisted familial structures of matriarchy and matrilocality (notice, if you will, how often the violation of the slave is referred to as “emasculation,” “castration,” etc.). — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 617

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Moynihan Report’s matriarchy thesis and the broader historiography of slave personality (Elkins’ ‘Sambo’ thesis).