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).

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