Cedric J. Robinson and racial capitalism: Africana liberation resistance structures and black internationalism in the twenty-first century

Abstract

African Americans' interest in world politics can be traced back to the American Revolutionary War, the Haitian Revolution, and the Abolition Movement in the pre-Civil War era. New World Africans' interest in influencing international affairs took on a new life when the USA established its overseas empire and Europe divided Africa into spheres of influence. At this critical juncture when much of the world came under the control of Europe or of descendants of Europe in the USA, African Americans developed a view of world affairs that drew connections between the discrimination they faced at home and the expansion of empire abroad. Black internationalism, as a worldview, was an ideology that stressed the role of race and racism in world affairs drawing attention to the linkages, interconnections, and interrelationships between racial capitalism and the color line in world affairs. For this reason, this belief in the existence of a color scheme or hierarchy in global affairs served as a guiding theoretical framework of black internationalism. As an upshot to that main principle, black internationalism believed that, as victims of racial capitalism and imperialism, the world's darker races, a term they employed to describe the non-European world, shared a common interest in overthrowing white supremacy and creating a new world order based on racial equality. This article will address Cedric J. Robinson's contribution to our understanding of the linkages between racial capitalism, black internationalism, resistance, and black liberation.

Keywords:

• racial capitalism
• black resistance
• Africana liberation/Black liberation
• imperialism
• African (Black) diaspora
• racial regimes
• Black internationalism and global Africa