The colonial category ‘Negro’ was invented alongside slave labor growth

Evidence

The invention of the Negro was proceeding apace with the growth of slave labor. Somewhat paradoxically, the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists. Just as instructive, the rebels among these Africans and “negroes” were described as “runaways,” a term that has endured in the historiography of the period. It should be remembered, however, that it was from the efforts of men and women such as these that the Black settlements of Virginia’s piedmont and the Afro-Creek “Exiles of Florida” (the Seminoles) would consist. In similar fashion, the maroon peoples of the Caribbean and South America would be formed. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 599

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox — assimilation made Africans less human in colonial eyes — is a dense, paradigm-shifting observation about how racial categories work inversely to cultural contact; Robinson’s ‘invention of the Negro’ strands racial ideology to economic need.