Black lower-class customs amounted to a political rejection of English bourgeois morality

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

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Identity of African-derived cultural practices with resistance mirrors Robinson’s core argument about an autonomous Black radical culture.

Related

• Black lower-class culture functioned as political resistance through moral rejection of bourgeois colonial norms. (similarity 0.93)
• Black refusal of proletarian discipline blocked formation of a petit bourgeoisie (similarity 0.84)
• Black middle-class respectability politics rejected lower-class cultural expressions as immoral. (similarity 0.83)
• Black middle-class advancement sharpened cultural divisions within black society (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial middle-class Black parents policed their children’s cultural distance from the Black lower classes. (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism conserving non-capitalist modes produces racial and colonial ideologies. (similarity 0.79)
• Black Marxism grew as a new vision centered on cultural corruption of race (similarity 0.79)
• Racial ideology functions as a labor discipline for capital (similarity 0.79)
• Comintern orthodoxy narrowed revolutionary class to industrial workers while dismissing colonial masses (similarity 0.79)
• The petit bourgeoisie assumed proletarian leadership and then betrayed it. (similarity 0.79)
• Dismissing culture as class consciousness left Marxism unequipped for political forces (similarity 0.79)
• The 1930s lacked a militant radical working-class culture despite socialist expectation (similarity 0.79)
• The Black petit bourgeoisie’s hybrid Western education drove its radicalization and critique (similarity 0.79)
• Black radical historiography was founded by Western-educated Black petit-bourgeois intellectuals (similarity 0.79)
• Colonial education made deracination the price of Black middle-class status (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Black refusal of proletarian discipline blocked formation of a petit bourgeoisie #expands (0.60)
• Colonial moral categories coded racialized peoples’ aspirations as dangerous affective excess #expands (0.55) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 572
• Black middle-class respectability stigmatized calypso as lower-class degeneracy #qualifies (0.40) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1176