Colonial middle-class Black parents policed their children’s cultural distance from the Black lower classes.

Evidence

I was fascinated by the calypso singers and the sometimes ribald ditties they sang in their tents during carnival time. But, like many of the black middle class, to my mother a calypso was a matter for ne’er-do-wells and at best the common people. I was made to understand that the road to the calypso tent was the road to hell, and there were always plenty of examples of hells inhabitants to whom she could point. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1176

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s distinction mechanisms and to the general pattern of colonized elites internalizing the colonizer’s cultural hierarchies.