Black radicalism’s 1980s crises persisted undiminished into the 1990s

Evidence

The crises faced in the early 1980s have hardly abated. We enter the new millennium with fewer well-paying jobs, fewer protections for the rights of oppressed people, poorer health care, more prisons, more wealth for fewer people, more racist backlash, more misery. In these cases, we end the twentieth century almost where we ended the last one. Here, in the 1990s, so-called legitimate intellectual circles openly proclaim a link between race and intelligence; some, in very serious tones, are proposing the return of formal colonialism as a way of solving Africa’s problems; the United States continues to wage imperialist wars; and the problem of the color line as Du Bois saw it at the dawn of our century is still with us. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 44

Categorization

• QUESTION: The framing of ‘the problem of the color line’ persisting invites comparison with how Robinson periodizes the tradition’s arc.