The oppressed embraced the masters’ ideals more sincerely than the masters did

Evidence

Ralph Ellison reminds us, “The slaves often took the essence of the aristocratic ideal (as they took Christianity) with far more seriousness than their masters” (1964, xiv). In their language, in their religion with its focus on the Exodus theme and on Jesus’s tribulations (Glaude 2000), in their music with its figuring of suffering, resistance, perseverance, and transcendence (Du Bois 2007 (1935), in their interrogation of a political philosophy which sought perpetually to rationalize their bondage ina supposedly “free” society and theoretical synthesis of the themes and issues of black feminist thought. — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 135

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the vault’s treatment of how dominated groups internalize and invert ruling ideologies; also resonates with the Frankfurt School’s analysis of culture as both domination and resistance. — connects to: European ideals of freedom rebounded against imperial masters