The invented Negro erased Africa’s civilizational contributions from Western memory

Evidence

The Negro—whose precedents could be found in the racial fabrications concealing the Slavs (the slaves), the Irish and others—substantially eradicated in Western historical consciousness the necessity of remembering the significance of Nubia for Egypt’s formation, of Egypt in the development of Greek civilization, of Africa for imperial Rome, and more pointedly of Islam’s influence on Europe’s economic, political, and intellectual history. From such a creature not even the suspicion of tradition needed to be entertained. In its stead there was the Black slave, a consequence masqueraded as an anthropology and a history. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 117

Categorization

• QUESTION: Robinson’s genealogy — Slavs, Irish as prior ‘racial fabrications’ concealing slave status — is worth verifying against his sources; would deepen the claim that Black racialization was not sui generis.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports my grief/trees/historical-erasure interests: the mechanism by which a category (‘the Black slave’) is made to substitute for a suppressed history parallels arguments about what gets memorialized and what gets forgotten.
• XREF: connects to: Rhodesian memoirism erases 90 years of black land hunger as legitimate motive — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 80