i.’s Reviews > Black Movements in America > Status Update

Writing on the Jim Crow era & WWI, Robinson emphasizes the degree to which capital and the state converge in denegrating Blackness while exploiting Black labor. Resistance, here, was geographical: in the South, insularity, in the North, radical movement politics. Particularly interesting here is Robinson's focus on the makings of global whiteness through imperial conflict in WWI, an understated theoretical juncture.

Robinson claims that DuBois anticipated Lenin's work on imperialism, writing about WWI's imperialist origins in May 1915. This speaks to an important way that we conceptualize the canon of the development of the canon of political theory.

A major theme echoed through Robinson's work is here: that Black arriculations of Christian religion, unlike white Christian modes of being, are rooted in their historical context & legacies of African religion and chattel slavery, making for a theology of critical resistance. This is in direct contradiction to Marx's "opium of the masses" claim, but also must be understood re: Black elites/Black mass movements.

Key to Robinson's analysis of the Civil War are the processes of mythmaking that surrounded it & the resistance that Black people exhibited, not only to the Confederacy, but to Union interests, as well; Robinson does much work to recenter the agency of Black soldiers in this chapter, all the while outlining the bifurcated modes of resistance that develop as Reconstruction fails. Lays the groundwork to "Forgeries."

Robinson outlines different modes of resistance held by free Black elites (sovereignty/reformism) and free Black radicals and their allies (insurrection). Visible in this bifurcation is the influence of capital and the chance at power; however, this also emphasizes the importance of understanding the nuance & contradictions of political opposition to the institution of slavery.

According to Robinson, the early American era saw the character of slave rebellion include types of resistance that sought to destroy the institution. This coexisted with rejecting the slave system, and, as Robinson seeks to point out in the next chapter, movements from free Blacks. Interesting, as well, are the complex relationships between indigenous tribes and Black rebels in the development of American empire.

In outlining the early years of the American colonial project and the American Revolutionary War, Robinson points out that both marronage and revolutuonary resistance/violence was a collective, coalitionary radical act; poor whites, indigenous people, free Blacks, and escaped slaves worked in community against the American colonial project alike.

In the earliest section of this monograph, Robinson seeks to outline the early development of the Thirteen Colonies by looking at the population count of slaves in each region. Robinson does this while emphasizing that the stark binaries between "free" and "slave" and "Black" and "white" were not at this time so rigid; from contemporaneous accounts, it is clear that this mode of being was chaotic, and had to be made.