Western language defined Black radicals before they could use it as a tool

Evidence

Among the vitalizing tools of the radical intelligentsia, of course the most crucial was words. Words were their means of placement and signification, the implements for discovery and revelation. With words they might and did construct new meanings, new alternatives, new realities for themselves and others. But language, that is Western culture, was more than some recumbent artifact to be used or not as the intelligentsia saw fit. Its place in their lives had been established long before they found the means of mastering it. Indeed, they were themselves in part defined by those languages of rule and commerce. In Frantz Fanon’s poetic description, they were Black skins under white masks. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 865

Categorization

• XREF: Direct portrait of the Black radical tradition’s constitutive tension, relevant to the reader’s origin question.