Paul C. Mocombe

Postindustrial Capitalism, Social Class Language Games, and Black Underachievement in the United States and United Kingdom

Against Ogbus oppositional culture hypothesis, this article offers a class or structural/relational framework to contextualizing and understanding why it is that Blacks have more limited skills in processing information from articles, books, tables, charts, and graphs compared with their White counterparts in the United States and United Kingdom. We synthesize Marxian conceptions of identity construction within capitalist relations of production with the Wittgensteinian notion of “language games” to offer a more appropriate relational framework within which scholars ought to understand this Black–White academic achievement gap in America and the United Kingdom.

A social structural reinterpretation of ‘the burden of acting White’: a hermeneutical analysis

This essay explores how social psychologically the social structure of capitalist inequality has given rise to the Black–White achievement gap. This critical understanding is a reinterpretation of the ‘burden of acting White’ hypothesis, and suggests that research on the achievement gap should focus on how the Black–White achievement gap is more a result of two interrelated epiphenomena, ‘mismatch of linguistic structure’ and ‘mismatch of linguistic social functions’, which result from the class structure in Black America as opposed to a ‘burden of acting White’, the idea that Black students intentionally underachieve because of racialized peer pressure which, culturally, associates academic achievement and success with White Americans.

Karl Marx, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Black Underachievement in the United States and United Kingdom

This article synthesizes Marxian conceptions of identity construction within capitalist relations of production with the Wittgensteinian notion of “language games” to offer a more appropriate relational framework within which scholars ought to understand the Black–White academic achievement gap in America, the United Kingdom, and globally.

Race and class distinctions within black communities in the United States and United Kingdom: a reading in phenomenological structuralism

This article examines the constitution of black consciousness within the United States and Great Britain via structuration theory and phenomenological structuralism. Against the postmodern and poststructural logic of intersectionality and Du Boisian double consciousness as articulated contemporarily in the discourses of postsegregation black scholars in the likes of Cornel West and Paul Gilroy to explain the constitution of black consciousness, we argue that the aforementioned are postindustrial bourgeois identity constructions or discourses. Concluding that where they exist, the majority of the divergences of black practical consciousnesses from the social class language game of the upper-class of white owners and high-level executives, in the two societies are, for the most part, class, and not racially or culturally, based.

The Dialectical Problematic of Resolving the Black-White Academic Achievement Gap and Climate Change.

ABSTRACT In this article, I argue that resolving the Black–White academic achievement gap is incompatible with the emerging issues of global climate change. That is, solutions (equitable funding of schools and resources, school integration movements, and after-school and mentoring programs) for closing the gap in order so that Blacks in America and elsewhere can achieve equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with their White and Asian counterparts within the global capitalist world system undermine efforts to combat climate change caused by the aforementioned capitalist form of system and social integration. Climate change, via global warming associated with overaccumulation, resource depletion, pollution, and so forth, is a product of capitalist exploitation of the planet, and efforts to resolve the Black–White academic achievement gap, which is a product of capitalist structural reproduction and differentiation, seeks to integrate Blacks into the global capitalist world system so as to achieve equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with Whites. Doing the latter requires continuous economic growth within the finite resource framework of the earth, overaccumulation, and consumerism, which in turn perpetuate capitalism as a form of system and social integration amid its devastating effects (i.e., exploitation, ecological devastation, global warming, pollution, imperial wars, overaccumulation, and resource depletion).

The anti-dialectical signification of Erzulie Danthor and Bois Caiman of the Haitian Revolution

Abstract This work focuses on how and why the purposive-rationality of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution at Bois Caiman is an anti-dialectical, as opposed to a dialectical, movement against enslavement as offered by traditional interpretations of the Revolution. The author concludes that the intent, as reflected in Boukman’s prayer, of the originating moments of the Haitian Revolution at Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman) was not for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition with whites by reproducing their norms and structure, as in the case of the Affranchis under the purposive-rationality of the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois blacks, but for the reconstitution of a new world order or structuring structure ‘enframed’ by an African spiritual and linguistic community, Vodou and Kreyol, respectively, grounded in, and ‘enframing,’ liberty and fraternity among blacks or death. In fact, the author posits that it is the infusion of the former worldview, liberal bourgeois Protestantism via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, on the island by the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois free persons of color, Affranchis, looking to Canada, France, and America for equality of opportunity, distribution, and recognition that not only threatens Haiti and its practical consciousnesses, Vodou and Kreyol, contemporarily, but all life and civilizations on earth because of its dialectical economic growth and accumulative (neoliberal) logic within the finite space and resources of the earth.

The African-Americanization of the Black Diaspora in Globalization or the Contemporary Capitalist World-system:

This article puts forth the argument that people of African descent in the contemporary capitalist world-system under American hegemony, that is, globalization, are ever so slowly becoming African-Americanized because of the ideological and material influence of the black underclass via hip-hop culture and work and the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism promulgated throughout the diaspora by black American charismatic liberal bourgeois Protestant preachers like TD Jakes, Creflo Dollar, etc. The latter, representatives of the black bourgeoisie, given their material wealth, have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination in black America, and are seeking to do the same in the African diaspora. I am, therefore, suggesting that contemporarily the evolution of black diasporic practical consciousness in the capitalist world-system under American hegemony has to be examined against the backdrop of this class dualism as well as the cultural and religious heritage of the black American people responsible for its inception in globalization or the contemporary capitalist world-system under American hegemony.

Postindustrial capitalism and the problems with Bourdieu’s social and cultural capital in understanding the Black/White achievement gap in the United States and United Kingdom

This hermeneutical essay demonstrates why and how Pierre Bourdieu’s social reproduction theory is neither an adequate explanation for understanding praxis nor the Black/White academic achievement gap in contemporary postindustrial economies like that of the United States and the United Kingdom. The underlining hypothesis of the work is that the origins of Black academic underachievement vis-à-vis Whites in the United States and United Kingdom is structural and grounded in what Paul C. Mocombe refers to as “a mismatch of linguistic structure and social class functions” in postindustrial economies, which renders Bourdieu’s theory problematic. In other words, the structurally differentiated divergent identities created by the lack of (social and cultural) capital among Blacks vis-à-vis the capital of the upper-class of owners and high-level executives are no longer marginalized, but are celebrated and commodified in postindustrial economies to produce surplus value for capital, status, and upward economic social mobility. Hence, underclass cultural capital is reified along with bourgeois cultural capital as appropriate praxes for consumption in postindustrial societies, which makes the need for Blacks to succeed academically null and void.