“This ‘Negro’ was a wholly distinct ideological construct from those images of Africans that had preceded it. It differed in function and ultimately in kind. Where previously the Blacks were a fearful phenomenon to Europeans because of their historical association with civilizations superior, dominant, and/or antagonistic to Western societies (the most recent being that of Islam), now the ideograph of Blacks came to signify a difference of species, an exploitable source of energy (labor power) both mindless to the organizational requirements of production and insensitive to the subhuman conditions of work. In the more than 3,000 years between the beginnings of the first conception of the ‘Ethiopian’ and the appearance of the ‘Negro,’ the relationship between the African and European had been reversed.”

Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism (via whatijustread)