Critically Reading Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

Africa World Now Project · Sep 19, 2019 · 1h 2m

Robin D.G. Kelley argues that Cedric Robinson’s book is “a critique of Western Marxism and its failure to understand the conditions and movements of Black people in Africa and the Diaspora.” Kelley goes on to suggest that Robinson not only exposes the limits of historical materialism as a way of understanding Black experience but also reveals that the roots of Western racism took hold in European civilization well before the dawn of capitalism.” In fact, it was Robinson who proposed the idea that the racialization of the proletariat and the invention of whiteness began within Europe itself…