Colonial education defined Black middle class status by cultural deracination and European fluency

Evidence

In the Anglophone, Francophone, and Latin territories of both hemispheres, the Black “middle classes” had become broadly identified by culture and language, that is, their abilities to absorb the cultures of their ruling classes and the reading and speaking of European tongues. Deracination, social, and cultural alienation had become the measures of their “civility,” loyalty, and usefulness. And of course they shared with the mass of Blacks the knowledge that these veneers were the historical artifices of the structuring of authority, caste, race, and class, and that their particular adaptiveness was the mark of privilege and status. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 861

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how the ‘Black middle class’ was constituted across colonies by its linguistic and cultural absorption of ruling-class norms.
• XREF: Relates to Fanon’s notion of the colonized intellectual and the ‘Black skins, white masks’ dilemma. — connects to: Black middle-class advancement sharpened cultural divisions within black society — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 224