Robert Allen, born on this day in 1942, is an American professor, activist, and author who composed "Black Awakening in Capitalist America" (1969), a seminal text in the field of Internal Colonialism Theory.

Allen is Professor of African-American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and was Senior Editor of "The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research", published quarterly in Oakland, California since 1969 by the Black World Foundation.

In the "Black Awakening in Capitalist America", Allen details how corporate interests and white-led power structures co-opted and de-radicalized black power and black nationalism, also criticizing the concept of "black capitalism" as a means of achieving social change.

"This reformist or bourgeois nationalism - through its chosen vehicle of black capitalism - may line the pockets and boost the social status of the black middle class and black intelligentsia, but it will not ease the oppression of the ordinary ghetto dweller."

- Robert L. Allen