The Negro category was constructed to justify Black labor’s centrality to capitalism

Evidence

The creation of the Negro was obviously at the cost of immense expenditures of psychic and intellectual energies in the West. The exercise was obligatory. It was an effort commensurate with the importance Black labor power possessed for the world economy sculpted and dominated by the ruling and mercantile classes of Western Europe. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 118

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism: colonized subjects constructed to legitimate imperial extraction.