The Black petit bourgeoisie’s hybrid Western education drove its radicalization and critique

Evidence

Robinson continued the earlier legacy of Diaspora studies but also developed a conception of the Black Mediterranean as a precondition to the Black Atlantic and the making of Europe itself. As for Gilroy’s emphasis on the double consciousness and cultural hybridity of New World Black intellectuals such as Wright and Du Bois, this recognition is fundamental to Robinson’s argument about the radical petit bourgeoisie. Indeed, drawing on the writings of Amilcar Cabral and the various musings of C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, and others, Robinson demonstrates that their imbibing of Western Civilization and their hybrid cultural lives were key to their radicalization. When confronted with the limits of democracy under racial capitalism and colonialism and with the uprisings of the Black masses whose access to bourgeois European culture was limited, the Black petit bourgeoisie was forced to choose sides. Abandoning the West was never an option, Robinson argues, but critiquing and challenging it was. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 32

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Robinson’s distinctive account of what made the Black radical petit bourgeoisie radical — not rejection of the West but embattled hybridity.
• XREF: Connects to Gilroy’s Black Atlantic double-consciousness framework, which the foreword explicitly juxtaposes. — connects to: Black teaching was inherently political and antiracist, making segregated schools sites of revolution — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 10