White radical historians reproduced stereotypes of black South Africans as passive and unsophisticated

Evidence

The more assertive and controversial interventions on the subject of race, however, have tended to come from a new cohort of young scholars, many of whom are black, who have drawn attention to the racialized politics of intellectual production in South Africa. … Maloka, for example, accuses “radical” social historians of reproducing stereotypes of black people as Other, in their less politically organised and sophisticated form - an approach which is tacitly informed by a Eurocentric sense of superiority. Of course, Africans do feature as workers or peasants (or as “class”), as well as women (or as “gender”); but they are generally “crowds”, “rebels”, “gangs”, runaway wives or prostitutes. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 588 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The American revisionists have attempted to supply academic substance to the insistence of their own generations that the material, political, and social circumstances of Blacks in the twentieth century are not the consequences of private or even collective psychopathologies among Blacks. They have transformed this African people into human beings capable of judgment, injury, accommodation and heroism. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 617 (#complicates, via linked claim)

As the new century opened, those increasingly formally marked as black were torn asunder between the warrings among political theologies, the wars of world-views and ways of being. They too were bound by messianic legacies of their own imaginary making, visions of driving devil figures into the sea in the urge to be left alone in a land being taken from under their feet. … This was a political theology striving to exit from bondage by hard labor and the promise of liberty, Zion as the delivery from slavery, a liberation if not for quite some time to come yet. The commitment to uplift through effort, ultimately blocked through emerging and institutionalizing apartheid, became fused quite quickly with the quest for a sort of salvation, of deliverance from bondage, the messages of mission and messianism finding their resolution in the convictions of struggle. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1493 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Spectacular anti-apartheid narratives displaced ordinary black rural life from fiction — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 521; Black scholars accused white radical historians of reproducing Eurocentric stereotypes of Africans — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 588; Racialism subverted radical theories by blinding them to an active historical subject — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 213 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Black scholars accused white radical historians of reproducing Eurocentric stereotypes of Africans #corroborates (0.95) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 588
• Revisionist historians refuted claims of Black collective psychopathology #complicates (0.78) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 617
• Black South Africans converted missionary uplift theology into liberation struggle convictions. #complicates (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1493