Black resistance to enslavement came from African identity, not slave status

Evidence

After all it had been as an emergent African people and not as slaves that Black men and women had opposed enslavement. And long before the advent of the “madmen and specialists” (as Wole Soyinka phrased it), the military dictators and neocolonial petit bourgeoisies who in our own time have come to dominate Black societies in Africa and the Caribbean, the Black radical tradition had defined the terms of their destruction: the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 839

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that Africans opposed slavery ‘as a people, not as slaves’ — defining resistance through collective being/ontological totality rather than structural position — is a paradigm-defining insight that resists one-sentence summary.