Colonial Black middle classes rose through property, skills, and state functionary positions

Evidence

Another basis of the petit bourgeoisie was property. Some Blacks, but certainly with less frequency than occurred with what French colonialists termed the petit blancs, had translated particular skills, traditional positions and knowledge into property (including slaves during the slave era). With slavery abolished, some of this Black-controlled capital was reconverted into professional skills in succeeding generations. Frequently, however, the native middle classes had been directly formed as functionaries of the state—civil servants, minor as well as middling—and as agents of landed, mercantile, or manufacturing capital (often absentee). — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 853

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Black British middle-class claims tied assimilation to property as much as to cultural recognition — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 325; The New Black Aesthetic movement was post-bourgeois, built on inherited middle-class security — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1438