Emancipation freed the Black elite to pursue race power illusions

Evidence

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the ideological construction of the Black petit bourgeoisie had achieved its maturity. The tendency of the Black intelligentsia toward an elitist consciousness of race—a synthesis of Eurocentric racism and the preoccupation with imperial political forms—had achieved its broadest and most articulate expression. The social, and concomitant psychological and intellectual processes of the formation of a Black middle class begun in the eighteenth century had, by then, obtained an extensive and objective configuration. No longer retarded by the political and economic structure of slavery and its hegemonic envelopments, freed from the moral compulsion of social identification with the Black peasantry and peons by the slaves’ counterfeit freedom, the ambitions of the Black petit bourgeoisie found realization in institutions consciously designed by themselves and sponsors for class’s maintenance and augmentation. With their position as a broker stratum seemingly secured from above by a ruling class that proffered them increments of privilege while ruthlessly repressing mass Black mobilization, the ideological restraint that had been so much a part of the character of the class’s earlier generations became less evident. The Black petit bourgeoisie could now indulge in the delusion of being capable of challenging the capitalist world system on what they took to be its own terms: race power. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 891

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to chapter 1-2 discussions of the Black peasantry and the formation of the middle class; this is the payoff of the earlier class-formation analysis.