The slaves’ revolutionary consciousness constituted a historical force against racism and capitalism

Evidence

In Black Reconstruction, Du Bois had tried to give these processes a concrete, historical appearance. Again he had had very little choice in the matter. The ideology of the Black struggle, the revolutionary consciousness of the slaves, had appeared to his Westernized eyes, part legend, part whimsy, part art. Yet he realized it had been sufficient to arouse them into mass resistance and had provided them with a vision of the world they preferred. Their collective action had achieved the force of a historical antilogic to racism, slavery, and capitalism. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1130

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives content to what ‘the Black radical tradition’ means as a revolutionary consciousness arising independently of Western proletarian models.
• XREF: connects to: Abolitionist slave resistance first publicly exposed race’s unequal burden — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 78