The slave trade gave racial ideology its specific object, creating the Negro

Evidence

In retrospect the Western potential for creating the Negro had moved closer in a way to its realization. The cultural and ideological inventory was at hand. A native racialism had already displayed its usefulness for rationalizing social order, and with the advent of the Islamic intrusion into European history it had further proved its value by its transformation into an instrument of collective resistance and a negation of an unacceptable past. For the Negro to come into being all what was now required was an immediate cause, a specific purpose. The trade in African slaves, coming as it did as an extension of capitalism and racial arrogance, supplied both a powerful motive and a readily received object. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 520

Categorization

• DEFINE: Robinson treats ‘Negro’ as an historically constructed category, not a natural one — the passage makes the racialist machinery that produced it explicit.