Black labor’s post-slavery mobility opened its subcultures to ruling-class penetration

Evidence

The masses of Black peoples in the New World and in their ancestral homelands—as peasants, farmers, peons, agrarian workers, migrant and immigrant workers, domestics, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled industrial laborers, and as labor reserves—now assumed more diverse and diffuse positions in the economic order. Black labor’s new mobility, organization, and adaptability also meant that the subcultures within which it had been historically enveloped were subject more often to the intrusions of material and ideographic elements from the agents of the economically determinative social order. Though it might be correctly argued that much of this penetration was at first incidental, some of it clearly was not. Language, that is the languages and consciousness of rule and the ruling classes, was an instance of the latter. These accretions would have profound effects on the ideologues of the Black world. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 847