Racist historiography distorted and suppressed the record of Black rebelliousness.

Evidence

It is not surprising that the appearance of a world revolutionary Black intelligentsia in the twentieth century, rather than the issue of a longer process, might be presumed by most observers to be a phenomenon unique and specific to this century. Several quite easily identified reasons have contributed to this presumption. For one, as we have seen, the history of Black peoples has been recast consistently in both naive and perverse ways. Most particularly the memory of Black rebelliousness to slavery and other forms of oppression was systematically distorted and suppressed in the service of racialist, Eurocentric, and ruling-class historiographies. The sum total was the dehumanizing of Blacks. The native responsiveness of the species was denied to African peoples. This distortion might have been a simpler matter if it had been merely a question of a gap occurring in the record, but the space had been filled with nonsense that was made credible by the conventions of racist thinking. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 841

Categorization

• XREF: Explains why the Black radical tradition appears twentieth-century-born — connects directly to the reader’s stated need for the tradition’s origins and arc.