There is yet another reason for Robinson to begin in the heart of the West. It was there—not Africa—that the “Negro” was first manufactured. This was no easy task, as Robinson reminds us, since the invention of the Negro—and by extension the fabrication of whiteness and all the policing of racial boundaries that came with it—required “immense expenditures of psychic and intellectual energies in the West” (4). Indeed, a group of European scholars expended enormous energy rewriting of the history of the ancient world. Anticipating Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. I (1987) and building on the pioneering scholarship of Cheikh Anta Diop, George G. M. James, and Frank Snowden, Robinson exposes the efforts of European thinkers to disavow the interdependence between ancient Greece and North Africa.

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making o…, loc. 48