Racism scholarship fails by presuming only European history is determinative.

Evidence

It is now a convention to begin the analysis of racism in Western societies with the third moment; entirely ignoring the first and second and only partially coming to terms with the fourth. As we shall observe in the next section of this study, the results have been rather bizarre: some students of racism have happily reiterated the premise of a sort of mass psychology of chromatic trauma in which European reactions to darker-skinned peoples are seen as natural; others, including Marxists, have argued for a simplistic “empiricism” where the inevitable consequences of slavery and domination are the rationalizations of racial superiority and inferiority. In each instance, the root of the methodological and conceptual flaws is the same: the presumption that the social and historical processes that matter, which are determinative, are European. All else, it seems, is derivative. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 390

Categorization

• XREF: Robinson’s critique of Eurocentric analysis parallels the reader’s interest in Marxism’s limits for understanding the Black radical tradition — core to this book’s project.