Black lower-class culture functioned as political resistance through moral rejection of bourgeois colonial norms.

Evidence

The sexual and moral customs of the Black lower classes, for all their vitality and attractiveness, amounted to a rejection of English bourgeois sensibility, they were an affront to the morality of the colonial model set before the natives. Unquestionably, in a Black family that knew the rules, this implicitly political statement had no place in the future of a properly instructed young Black man. “Good” society, white, Black, and colored, conspired against what it interpreted as Dionysian, Satanic humors. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1177

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the ‘immodesty’ moral-panic dynamics from the second cited article, where dress/custom policing carries political meaning across the whole social spectrum, including the colonized middle class. — connects to: Respectability reform clashed with and disavowed poor black folk culture — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 96; Black communities resisted Spelman graduates’ imposition of middle-class Victorian norms — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 199