Colonial education deliberately created a Black functionary class for empire, not radicalism.

Evidence

Colonial rulers, especially in the British and French empires, very consciously sought to nurture a class of functionaries—a Black petit bourgeoisie willing and able to run things on behalf of the imperial order. After all, the love of reading was equally intense among U.S.-born Black people, as was argued in Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, and more recently, V. P. Franklin’s Black Self-Determination. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 61

Categorization

• XREF: Builds on Amilcar Cabral’s analysis of colonial education and connects to the radical Black intelligentsia formation discussed throughout Black Marxism.
• DEFINE: Clarifies that the Black petit bourgeoisie’s literacy was an imperial construct, not a cultural trait.