Revisionist historians fought the claim that slaves accepted and were psychologically marked by slavery

Evidence

Still, it is useful to pause here for a moment to consider what revisionists such as Blassingame and Owens and a score of other historians, Black and non-Black, in the past twenty years or so, have taken to be the issue. Clearly, they have addressed themselves to one overriding claim: that the enslaved in time came to accept the terms of slavery. The practice of submission, so went the conventional wisdom embodied in the American disciplines of history, sociology, and psychology, became for the slaves the habits of inferiority; for their descendants, the psychological “marks of oppression,” the culture of the dominated, the perverted, twisted familial structures of matriarchy and matrilocality (notice, if you will, how often the violation of the slave is referred to as “emasculation,” “castration,” etc.). The American revisionists in the main have sought to refute the tradition deposited in their national record and consciousness that Blacks became slaves, finally. They have chosen to come to terms with the reiterated public fantasy that the subsequent generations of “native sons” were fatally marked culturally and emotionally by the accommodations effected by their forebears. The American revisionists have attempted to supply academic substance to the insistence of their own generations that the material, political, and social circumstances of Blacks in the twentieth century are not the consequences of private or even collective psychopathologies among Blacks. They have transformed this African people into human beings capable of judgment, injury, accommodation and heroism. In short, a people possessing, as Blassingame put it, “the same range.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 617

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the academic context against which Robinson will argue that Black resistance stems from an African cultural tradition, not merely reactive revolt.