Black radical ideologues emerged as internal aliens from the colonial middle class

Evidence

Still, for these Black middle strata just as it was the case for the vast majority of Blacks, the dominant class and whites in general were not intimates of any immediate sort. In the Caribbean and Africa for the most part, whites were of a relatively small number. In Latin and North America, where European populations were statistically dominant, for most Blacks the whites were existentially a distant, fearful, and oppressive presence. Whites marked the landscape, and in a way, the boundaries of Black life, their lives, their habits, their very appearance the testament and detail of a cruel and unyielding order of social and spiritual regulation. For the radical Black ideologues—almost entirely circumscribed by native petit bourgeoisies—it was not only inevitable but also imperative that they would first acquire the stance of internal aliens. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 863

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to later discussions of W.E.B. Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’ and the position of the radical intellectual vis-a-vis both masses and ruling class.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense claim that the radical Black intellectual’s ‘internal alien’ stance was a precondition of critique — is view of the trajectory of Black Marxism holds that the intellectual grows out of exiled petit-bourgeois intermediary stratum.