Enslaved Africans carried coherent cultures into the New World, not merely labor.

Evidence

Robinson observes, “Marx had not realized fully that the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality. These were the actual terms of their humanity. These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or deculturated Blacks—men, women, and children separated from their previous universe. African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension” (121). — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 20

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the root of the Black radical tradition: resistance to enslavement arises from carried-over African culture, not from reaction to capitalism.
• SEED: Potential essay angle: the survival of African cosmological and linguistic ‘cargo’ as a corrective to both Marxist economism and claims of total deculturation.