Meeting Paul Robeson shattered C. L. R. James’s internalized colonial standards of Blackness

Evidence

Robert Hill adds an interesting and provocative element to the analysis of James’s development of consciousness: “At a very profound and fundamental level, Robeson as a man shattered James’s colonial conception of the Black Physique. In its place the magnificent stature of Robeson gave to him a new appreciation of the powerful and extraordinary capacities which the African possessed, in both head and body. Robeson broke the mould in which the West Indian conception of physical personality in James had been formed. That was a time when Black West Indians grew up with an unconscious prototype of the white Englishman and white Englishwoman as their absolute standards of physical perfection and development. James’s encounter with Robeson was nowhere more profound than in its forcing him to abandon these inherited values.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2423

Categorization

• SHARE: A striking biographical detail about James and Robeson worth sharing with someone interested in Black intellectual history.
• XREF: Links to the reader’s origin question: this interpersonal encounter shaped the consciousness behind The Black Jacobins.