For these Black intellectuals and activists, their dissatisfaction with socialist realism had to do with the suppression of key elements of Black culture that surrealism embraced: the unconscious, the spirit, desire, magic, and love. That most Black radicals did not jump headlong onto the surrealist bandwagon, ironically, has to do with its similarity to the revolutionary core that was recognized as having always existed in African and Black diasporic life. To paraphrase Cedric Robinson, surrealism was not the path to inventing a theory of Black radicalism, but it might have been a path to recognition.

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making o…, loc. 70