Colonial officials invented ideologies of racial superiority when confronted by evidence of native competence.

Evidence

On his arrival in the West Indies [the colonial official] experiences a shock. Here is a thoroughly civilised community, wearing the same clothes that he does, speaking no other language but his own, with its best men as good as, and only too often, better than himself. What is the effect on the colonial Englishman when he recognises, as he has to recognise, the quality of those over whom he is placed in authority? Men have to justify themselves, and he falls heavily back on the “ability of the Anglo-Saxon to govern,” “the trusteeship of the mother country until such time” (always in the distant future) “as these colonies can stand by themselves,” etc., etc. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1171

Categorization

• DEFINE: This names one mechanism by which colonial ideology rationalizes domination; connects to the reader’s origin-question about the tradition’s roots.