Black resistance aimed at preserving consciousness, not transforming Europe

Evidence

The first forms of struggle in the Black radical tradition, however, were not structured by a critique of Western society but from a rejection of European slavery and a revulsion of racism in its totality. Even then, the more fundamental impulse of Black resistance was the preservation of a particular social and historical consciousness rather than the revolutionary transformation of feudal or merchant capitalist Europe. Why the pathology of race was so dominant a part of Western consciousness or what might be done to change that character was of less concern than how Black peoples might survive the encounter. This perhaps is part of the explanation of why, so often, Black slave resistance naturally evolved to marronage as the manifestation of the African’s determination to disengage, to retreat from contact. To reconstitute the community, Black radicals took to the bush, to the mountains, to the interior. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1431

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the origin impulse of the Black radical tradition—survival and consciousness-preservation rather than revolutionary social transformation.
• XREF: Marronage as disengagement echoes the reader’s prior interest in withdrawal/distance motifs (settler colonialism, escape from contact) across their library.