Foundational workers’ histories erased Black presence from the English working class

Evidence

Thompson himself, if I recall correctly, mentions Blacks in his study of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century English working classes on only two occasions! One of these instances is his reference to a Black artisan; the other is the appearance of a Black man as a representation of Satan in a nightmare recalled by a dissident minister. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1546

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• SEED: Angle: ‘The two appearances of Blackness in Thompson’s classic — the erased artisan and the demonized figure’ — an essay on how foundational labor history encoded racial exclusion.
• XREF: Core to this book’s critique: Western Marxism’s blindness to Black workers, continued across chapters on the black radical tradition’s erasure.

Related

• E.P. Thompson’s classic English working-class study nearly erased Black presence. (similarity 0.88)
• English workers’ internationalist class identity retreated into nationalism before the 1840s (similarity 0.82)
• English workers abandoned supranationalist class identity for protonationalism by the 1830s (similarity 0.81)
• English workers’ racialized consciousness gave no objective basis for universal class politics (similarity 0.79)
• English workers gained labor-aristocracy privileges within a world system (similarity 0.78)
• Racially conscious working-class nationalism emerged from English class formation (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Reconstruction historiography erased Black agency and labor exploitation #corroborates (0.55) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2159
• Early Black historiography challenged exclusion while accepting dominant values #responds-to (0.50) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 887
• English racial order prevented workers from separating class universality from racial particularism #complicates (0.45) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 115
• The unifying 1970s category of black suppressed internal differences among nonwhite Britons. #complicates (0.40) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 151