The Black Radical Tradition originated in enslaved people’s cultural responses to violence.

Evidence

These particular critics of Marxism were products of other histories, other intellectual traditions, and other, neglected participants in the world economy. When I took up this work, I was interested specifically in those radical thinkers who had emerged from what I have termed the Black Radical Tradition; how some of the most illustrious and perceptive of them came to terms with Marxism is explored in Part III. Rather than belonging to the mercantile, bureaucratic, or technical classes of Western Europe, their foreparents had been the slaves and freedpersons of the West Indies and North America. More accurately, their predecessors had been human beings who happened to be slaves. And so in Part II, in lieu of simply locating these foreparents in some passive, residual economic category, it was critical to explore the histories of their cultures and then how these enslaved people responded to and reacted against the violence which instigated and patrolled their slave statuses. Only through such an interrogation was it possible to demonstrate their roles in the initiation of the Black Radical Tradition. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 83

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the origin of the Black Radical Tradition: not a passive economic category of slaves, but the cultural and active resistance of enslaved people to the violence policing their statuses.
• XREF: The corrective phrase ‘human beings who happened to be slaves’ is the central move — anchors the reader’s stated question about the tradition’s origin.