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

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, long before Europe's modern encounter with African and New World labor. Accordingly, such insights give the "Dark Ages" new meaning.

I have argued, elsewhere, rooting my perspectives in a critical reading of Robinson, Marimba Ani, Oliver Cox, Audrey Smedley, Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James and W.E. B. Du Bois, that race must be understood at a deeper level. To better understand the salience of a fictitious, yet deadly concept, it must be examined as a cultural-ideological class construct, further building on the argument of Du Bois, that “the world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity.

According to Audrey Smedley in, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview, race is a “cosmological ordering system structured out of the political, economic, and social experiences of peoples who emerged as expansionist, conquering, and dominating nations on a worldwide quest for wealth and power.”

Being so, we can see that race is expressed in material and non-material ways. It is, in fact, a culturally ingrained, ideologically-driven mechanism that has permeated sociopolitical structures and economic imperatives which guide institutional practices for the expressed purpose to serve deeply rooted insecurities that are wrapped in the myths of white superiority.

Today, we bring you, a public critical reading of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition with Acklyn Lynch, Haile Gerima and AWNP collective’s member, Josh Myers. This critical reading is part of a series that is curated at Sankofa Video and Books in Washington, DC.

Dr. Acklyn Lynch is a revered scholar/activist of African and African Diaspora history, culture and politics. He has taught at University of Maryland Baltimore County, Howard University, and University of Massachusetts Amhurst. He is author of Nightmare Overhanging Darkly: Essays on Black Culture and Resistance.

Haile Gerima is an independent filmmaker and professor of film at Howard University.
After the award-winning Ashes & Embers (1982) and the documentaries Wilmington 10—U.S.A 10,000 (1978) and After Winter: Sterling Brown (1985), Gerima filmed his epic, Sankofa in (1993). His films have won numerous awards and are internationally acclaimed for the range and scope of their storytelling, cinematography, and innovations.

Gerima continues to produce and distribute his films, including his most recent award-winning film, Teza (2008). He also lectures and conducts workshops in alternative screenwriting and directing both within the U.S. and internationally.

Josh Myers currently teaches Africana Studies in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Howard University. He has published a number of scholarly journal articles exploring Africana history, politics and culture. He is author of the forthcoming, We Are Worth Fighting For: A History of the Howard University Student Protest of 1989. He serves on the editorial board of The Compass and is editor of A Gathering Together: Literary Journal.