Post-slavery Black ideologues were strangers to every world they entered

Evidence

Still, in the post-slavery world order that was their setting, the Black ideologues who were to work in the twentieth century could not be other than strangers. This was to be their lot in whatever part of the Black world they were formed. C. L. R. James might have spoken for all of them when he wrote of the end of his school days: “There was no world for which I was fitted least of all the one I was now to enter.” In Africa and the West Indies, European empires and colonies were either being dramatically reshaped by the dictates of state and commerce or spawned at points formerly less accessible to capitalist expansion. In the United States and the Caribbean again, Black peoples were no longer conveniently lodged in or organized by slave systems. The Blacks of the New World could no longer be casually pinioned by the curious as slaves or—at the margins of such systems—as freemen. And, inevitably, their societies and subcultures upon which the intelligentsia drew were steadily becoming less autochthonous. … The social patterns, the habits of thought, language, and custom that had congealed in the laborers’ communities of the Western hemisphere’s slave systems, though in many senses fundamentally conservative, were no longer as impervious to the penetrations of Western cultures as they had been in their “native” circumstance. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 847

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the predicament that defines the twentieth-century Black intelligentsia: formed out of but no longer lodged within slave-based subcultures, they belong to no existing world.