Racial myths rationalize existing power relationships

Evidence

Ultimately, Evans argues, racial myths emerge to justify and rationalize existing power relationships. Just how the myths of racial stratification made their way into Christian European cosmology is not made very clear in Evans’ account. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1786

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s knowledge from ‘One Square Inch’ and the social capital literature about institutions emerging from existing social arrangements rather than shaping them.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ideology follows and rationalizes material power arrangements, rather than preceding them, is core to understanding the Black radical tradition’s origin — race as a justification mechanism rather than a cause.

Related

• Capitalism developed along essentially racial lines, not rational universalist ones (similarity 0.82)
• Black radical theory was nurtured in the diaspora, not in Africa itself. (similarity 0.81)
• Racial ideology began as a slave-system byproduct and became a material force (similarity 0.81)
• The myth of inevitable change masks the class-serving reality of historical rupture (similarity 0.80)
• Racialism is rooted in European civilization itself, not a single era (similarity 0.80)
• Slavery’s rationalizing ideology made liberal democracy a mere myth (similarity 0.80)
• Racialism is an enduring principle of European civilization, not a modern invention (similarity 0.80)
• Racial theory rationalized conquest only after the founding violence was complete. (similarity 0.80)
• Deconstructing blackness as fiction does nothing to shift racial power relations (similarity 0.80)
• Marxism’s explanatory power made it irresistible to Black radical intellectuals (similarity 0.80)
• Capitalism integrated Blacks into production while shielding them from bourgeois ideology (similarity 0.79)
• Racist ideas justify discrimination against Black institutions, not just individuals. (similarity 0.79)
• Racial ideology in America concealed class divisions among whites (similarity 0.79)
• Racist historiography distorted and suppressed the record of Black rebelliousness. (similarity 0.79)
• Racialism permeated even the rebellious proletariat and radical intelligentsia (similarity 0.79)