Racist historiography, not ignorance alone, sealed off the African past

Evidence

This anonymous writer’s tortuously comprehensive characterization of the history and social integrity of Black peoples had appeared in print midway between two desperate acts in American history: the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 by a Congress panicked into legislating martial law to defend slavery as a property right, and the desperate resoluteness of John Brown’s final bloody and radical blow against slavery in 1859.9 It was not, however, some sort of mathematical mean between the political sentiments, economic interests, and moral consciousness that inspired these two mutually contradictory but historically complementary public acts (each in its own way, of course, proved to be a necessary condition for the Civil War that followed). The division of opinion among whites and the European immigrant (who perhaps too would be “white” someday) could not be neatly correlated in arrangements of paired and equivalent moral postures: Black inferiority/pro-slavery; Black equality/anti-slavery. On the contrary, this confident declaration from the bleached bowels of mid-nineteenth-century American intelligentsia, wrenching history and historical consciousness from Black peoples, was the dominant ideological rationalization of racial oppression in the United States. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 404

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the claim that white supremacy’s denial of Black history was itself a product of 300 years of slavery — an ideological rationalization, not mere ignorance.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in the Black radical tradition’s origins: the erasure of Black historical consciousness is the precondition the tradition resists.