The colonial intelligentsia were themselves partly constituted by the languages of their rulers

Evidence

With words they might and did construct new meanings, new alternatives, new realities for themselves and others. But language, that is Western culture, was more than some recumbent artifact to be used or not as the intelligentsia saw fit. Its place in their lives had been established long before they found the means of mastering it. Indeed, they were themselves in part defined by those languages of rule and commerce. In Frantz Fanon’s poetic description, they were Black skins under white masks. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 865

Categorization

• DEFINE: Characterizes the paradoxical position of the radical Black intelligentsia as defined by the Western culture they sought to overturn.
• XREF: Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks formulation. — connects to: Colonial intelligentsias are structurally compelled toward the colonizer’s language in public life — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1534; the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”