Colonial education made deracination the price of Black middle-class status

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. As intermediaries between Black labor and the world system in Africa, the Caribbean and North America, as mediators between Black workers and the social tapestry woven by capitalist-determined forms of production, their skills were functional and the naturalness with which they obtained them only apparently so. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 861

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Black middle class by its cultural alienation and service as intermediary between Black labor and the world system.
• XREF: Connects to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and the general pattern of colonial intelligentsia formation. — connects to: Postwar middle-class prosperity rested on colonial, racial, gendered, and ecological exploitation. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 519; Black British middle-class claims tied assimilation to property as much as to cultural recognition — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 325; US colonial education reforms aimed to Americanize Puerto Rican students — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 929 (+1 more)