The Death of Imhotep: A Hermeneutical Framework for Understanding the Lack of Black Males in STEM Fields

Background of the Problem

On average, Blacks exhibit preferences for STEM fields that are similar to White preferences. However, their probabilities, especially among Black males, of persisting and earning degrees in these fields are much lower than Whites. Based on the last census data of 2010, African American men constitute less than 7% of the population between 18 and 64 years of age. Of that population, roughly 160,000 African American male students graduate high school each year, and just 3% of those who do go on to become scientists and engineers working in those fields (Bidwell, 2015; Gates, 2014). The majority who become employable, for the most part, seek fields in criminal justice (i.e., police, sheriff, and correctional officers), 14.2% of the employment population (Gates, 2014). Although a tiny fraction (less than 1%) of workers of the employed Black population, Black males are overrepresented in athletics, 66% in pro football and 76% of NBA basketball players, and the hip-hop entertainment industry vis-à-vis any other professions (Gates, 2014). The only other area in American society Black men tend to be overrepresented in is the prison industrial complex where they constitute more than 40% of the population (1 million out of 2.3 million incarcerated). In fact,

African-American males are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white males and 2.5 times more likely than Hispanic males. If current trends continue, one of every three black American males born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can one of every six Latino males—compared to one of every seventeen white males. (The Sentencing Project, 2013)

Be that as it may, to a foreigner, not to mention to young Black males in American society, it appears, given their overrepresentation and media coverage, as though it is easier and more likely for Black males to go to prison and become athletes and entertainers than it is for them to become scientists, engineers, mathematicians, doctors, lawyers, and teachers even though the sheer numbers of the latter professions outnumber the amount of NFL and NBA players in the labor market of the society (Gates, 2014). Albeit since the 1980s, they are more likely to be institutionalized than employed (Alexander, 2010).

The likelihood of young Black males going to prison and seeking to achieve economic gain, status, and upward economic mobility via sports and the entertainment industry over STEM fields ought not to be understood in isolation, but is tied to the overall Black/White and Black male/female academic achievement gap in the American capitalist social structure of racial-class inequality. In the United States, the academic achievement reading proficiency rate of Black males is twice as low as both White males and Black females; the employment rate of Black men aged 18 to 24 years is 30% lower than that belonging to young men of other races or nationality; two thirds of these Black males do not attend college compared with approximately 60% of both White males and Black females; Black men make up 40% of all prison inmates, but less than 7% of the entire population; and they are less likely to attend any form of religious institutions (Mocombe, Tomlin, & Showunmi, 2016). Conversely, Black women constitute more than 80% of the Black church; the unemployment rate of Black women is nearly 20% less than that of Black men while in the past three decades, the annual mean income of Black women has nearly equaled that of Black men; Black women enroll in college at the same rate as White males and graduate at twice the rate of Black men; Black women earn 63% and 71%, respectively, of graduate and professional degrees awarded to all African Americans (Mocombe et al., 2016).

As these statistics demonstrate, Black females, in the United States, are more likely to attend church, be academically successful, educated, and employed, than their Black male counterparts who overwhelmingly are unemployed, associated with athletics, the urban street life, and criminalized in the society. In this work, I posit the protestant capitalist social structure of racial-class inequality, its means of production (athletic and entertainment industries), and ideological apparatuses (i.e., the Black church, education, prisons, and the streets) in Black communities in the United States as the background and structure for “enframing,” contextualizing, and exploring the Black/White academic achievement gap, the intra-racial academic gender gap between Black boys and girls, and the lack of Black males in STEM programs.

Theory

The Black–White test score gap is an empirical problematic that dates back to the 1940s. On many standardized tests, the mean scores of Black students on average are typically at least 1 standard deviation below the mean scores of White students. A wide variety of possible explanations for the test score gap have been put forth. For the most part, conservative thinkers emphasize two approaches (i.e., genetic make-up and differences in family structure and poverty) and prescribe standardization of curriculum, testing, extra assistance programs for Blacks, and teacher training (in standards) as the basis for resolving the problem. Conversely, differences in school quality, racial bias in testing or teachers’ perceptions, and differences in culture, socialization, or behavior are emphasized by Afrocentric, postmodern, and liberal thinkers under the banner of identity politics and the opportunity gap. Be that as it may, they prescribe head-start programs, multicultural education, teacher training (cultural sensitivity and multicultural training), and equitable funding of schools and resources as the solution for the problem (Carter, 2003; Mocombe & Tomlin, 2010, 2013; Wilson, 1998).

Yet in spite of these efforts, which have been dialectically recycled over the past 40 years in the United States, Blacks continue to academically underachieve vis-à-vis their White and Asian counterparts (Carter, 2005; Gordon, 2006; Mocombe & Tomlin, 2010; U.S. Department of Education, 2003; Wilson, 1998).

The problem for this continual academic and educational underachievement, according to William Julius Wilson (1998), is based on the fact that both (conservative and liberal) analyses are incomplete. One approach places the emphasis for the problem on the individual, while the other on societal or environmental factors. Neither position, however, is able to adequately demonstrate the dialectical interaction between the individual and the social or environment, which can eventually lead to better solutions to resolving the gap (Wilson, 1998). Paul C. Mocombe’s (2005a, 2005b, 2012) “mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function” hypothesis seeks to highlight this dialectic by emphasizing both the opportunities afforded to Blacks in the American economy (i.e., the American social relations of production) and individual Black responses to its reproduction, differentiation, and ideological apparatuses as the basis for understanding the origins and nature of the Black–White test score gap, the Black male–female gap, and the underrepresentation of Black males in STEM fields.

Paul C. Mocombe’s (2005a, 2005b, 2008, 2010, 2014) structural Marxist “mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function” hypothesis posits that Black American students academically underachieve vis-à-vis their White and Asian counterparts because of two factors, comprehension, which is grounded in their linguistic structure/system, African American English Vernacular (AAEV), and the social functions associated with their linguistic systems and overrepresentation in social roles as criminals, athletes, and entertainers in the American capitalist social structure of class inequality as speakers of AAEV (Mocombe, 2005a, 2005b, 2008, 2010; Mocombe & Tomlin, 2010). In other words, Black American students, contemporarily, have more limited skills in processing information from articles, books, tables, charts, and graphs, place less emphasis on earning degrees in STEM fields, and the students who lose the most ground vis-à-vis their White and Asian counterparts are the higher achieving Black children because of their linguistic structure and the social roles associated with the former in the American capitalist social structure of racial-class inequality. Early on in their academic careers, the poor Black social class language game, “Black American underclass,” created by the structural differentiation of the social relations of American capitalism produces and perpetuates a sociolinguistic status group (social class language game) that reinforces a linguistic structure (Black/African American English Vernacular—BEV or AAEV), which linguistically and functionally renders its young social actors impotent in classrooms where the structure of Standard English (SE) is taught. Thus early on (kindergarten to fifth grade) in their academic careers, many Black American inner city youth struggle in the classroom and on standardized test because individually they are linguistically and grammatically having a problem with comprehension, “a mismatch of linguistic structure,” grounded in their (BEV or AAEV) speech patterns or linguistic structure.

This mismatch of linguistic structure component of Mocombe’s argument is not a reiteration of the 1960s’ “linguistic deficit” hypothesis made famous by Basil Bernstein, which suggested that working-class and minority children were linguistically deprived, and their underdeveloped slangs and patois did not allow them to critically think in the classroom. On the contrary, as William Labov (1972) brilliantly demonstrated in the case of African American youth, they are very capable of analytical and critical thinking within their linguistic structure, BEV. As such, what Mocombe posits through his mismatch of linguistic structure hypothesis is that the pattern recognition (generative grammar) in the neocortex of the brains of many poor African American inner-city youth is structured by and within the systemicity of BEV/AAEV. As a result, when they initially enter school, there is a phonological, morphosyntactical, and semantical mismatch between BEV/AAEV and the SE utilized in schools to teach and test them. Given the segregation and poverty of many young Blacks growing up in the inner cities of America, they acquire the systemicity of Black English and, early on in their academic careers, lack the linguistic flexibility to switch between BEV/AAEV and SE when they take standardized tests. As a result, many Black youth have a syntactical and semantical problem decoding and understanding phrases and sentences on standardized tests written in SE (Johnson, 2005; Mocombe, 2005, 2007, 2010; Mocombe & Tomlin, 2010, 2013).

Later on in their academic careers as these youth become adolescents and acquire the linguistic flexibility to code switch between BEV/AAEV and SE, the test scores close dramatically and then widen again by the time they get to middle school. This widening of test scores from middle school onward, according to Mocombe, is a result of the fact that Black American students are further disadvantaged by the social class functions (a mismatch of function of the language) this status group, Black American underclass, and finance capital reinforces against those of middle class Black and White America within the larger society’s capitalist relations of production. That is, success or economic gain and upward mobility among this social class language game, “Black underclass,” who speak BEV/AAEV, is not measured by identification with and status obtained through education as in the case of Black and White American bourgeois middle class standards. On the contrary, prisons, the street life, athletics, music, and other activities not “associated” with educational attainment serve as the means to success, economic gain, and upward economic mobility in the United States’s postindustrial society. Thus, effort in school in general suffers, and as a result, test scores and grades progressively get lower. Grades and test scores are not only low for those who grow up in poor inner cities; it appears to have also increased as academic achievement and/or socioeconomic status (SES) rises. “In other words, higher academic achievement and higher social class status are not associated with smaller but rather greater differences in academic achievement” (Gordon, 2006, p. 25).

It is this epiphenomenon, “mismatch of linguistic social class function,” or the social bases of class-specific forms of language use of the “mismatch of linguistic structure” many scholars (Carter, 2003, 2005; Coleman, 1988; Ogbu, 1974, 1990, 1991) inappropriately label “the burden of acting White” or oppositional culture among Black American adolescents, who, males in particular, as they get older, turn away from education and fields that require degrees, not because they feel it is for Whites or identify more with the nondominant cultural capital of the Black poor or underclass, but due to the fact that they have rationalized other racialized (i.e., sports, music, pimping, selling drugs, hustling, etc.) means or social roles, financed by the upper-class of owners and high-level executives, to economic gain for its own sake other than status obtained through education (Carter, 2003, 2005; Mocombe, 2005, 2007, 2011a, 2011b; Mocombe & Tomlin, 2010, 2013). In America’s postindustrial economy, many Black American youth (Black boys in particular) look to athletes, entertainers, players, gangsters, criminals, and so on, many of whom are from the Black urban underclass, as role models over professionals in fields that require an education. Historically, Mocombe argues, this is a result of racial segregation and Black relations to the means and mode of production in America and its ideological apparatuses, that is, the church, education, prisons, and the streets.

Discussion

According to Mocombe (2005, 2013), ever since their arrival in America, two dominant social class language games/groups, a Black underclass and a Black bourgeois class, created by the racial-class structural reproduction and differentiation of capitalist processes and practices, have dominated Black America. In agricultural slavery beginning in the early 18th century, Black America was constituted as a racial caste in class dominated by the social class language game of the Black bourgeoisie (E. Franklin Frazier’s term), the best of the house servants, artisans, and free Blacks from the North under the leadership of Black Protestant male preachers, business leaders, and educational professionals, which discriminated against the practical consciousness and linguistic system (social class language games) of field slaves and newly arrived Africans, working in agricultural production, who constituted the Black underclass. As such, BEV/AAEV emerged among the field slaves whose way of life was juxtaposed against house slaves who identified and patterned their ways of dress, speech, and religiosity after their White slavemasters (Karenga, 1993; Mocombe, 2008).

Deagriculturalization and the industrialization of the Northern states coupled with Black American migration to the North from the mid-1800s to about the mid-1950s gave rise to the continual racial-class separation between this urban, educated, and professional class of Blacks and former house slaves whose practical consciousness and linguistic system mirrored that of middle class Whites, and a Black English speaking Black underclass of former agricultural workers seeking, like their Black bourgeois counterparts, to be bourgeois, that is, economic gain, status, and upward economic mobility, through education and industrial work in Northern cities. However, racial discrimination coupled with suburbanization (of Whites and Blacks) and the deindustrialization, or outsourcing of industrial work to Third World countries, of Northern cities left the majority of Blacks as part of the poor Black underclass with limited occupational and educational opportunities (Wilson, 1978, 1987, 1998). As such, hustling and illegal activities on the streets, prisons, athletics and entertainment industries, and church became the dominant means of production and ideological apparatuses for socialization and embourgeoisement, that is, achieving economic gain, status, and upward mobility, in the society. Hustling and illegal activities on the streets became the means of producing economic gain, status, and upward mobility among the youth; prisons became the dominant ideological apparatus for socialization and deterrent for those caught-up in hustling and illegal activities; the athletic and entertainment industries became emerging means of producing economic gain, status, and upward mobility over education; and the church became a place for socialization and solace for those (women especially) seeking refuge from the murder rates and high criminality of the inner cities.

Contemporarily, America’s transition from an industrial base to a postindustrial, financialized service, economy beginning in the 1970s positioned the practical consciousness of this Black American underclass ideology and language, hip-hop culture, constituted via hustling and illegal activities on the streets, prisons, the church, poorly funded schools, and athletic and entertainment industries, as a viable means for Black American youth to achieve economic gain, status, and upward economic mobility (embourgeoisement) in the society over education. That is, finance capital in the United States beginning in the 1970s began investing in entertainment and other service industries where the segregated inner-city street, prison, language, entertainment, and athletic practical consciousness of Black America became both a commodity and the means to economic gain for the Black poor in America’s emerging postindustrial economy, which subsequently outsourced its industrial work to semi-periphery nations, thereby blighting the inner-city communities.

Blacks, many of whom migrated to the Northern cities from the agricultural South looking for industrial work in the North, became concentrated and segregated in blighted communities where work began to disappear, schools were under funded, and poverty and crime increased due to deindustrialization and suburbanization of Northern cities (Wilson, 1978, 1987). The Black migrants, who migrated to the North with their BEV/AAEV from the agricultural South following the Civil War and later, became segregated sociolinguistic underclass communities, ghettoes, of unemployed laborers looking to illegal, athletic, and entertainment activities (running numbers, pimping, prostitution, drug dealing, robbing, participating in sports, music, etc.) for economic success, status, and upward mobility. Educated in the poorly funded schools of the urban ghettoes, given the process of deindustrialization and the flight of capital to the suburbs and overseas, with no work prospects, many Black Americans became part of a permanent social class language game, AAEV speaking and poorly educated underclass looking to other activities for economic gain, status, and upward economic mobility. Those who were educated became a part of the Standard-English-speaking Black middle class of professionals, that is, teachers, preachers, doctors, lawyers, police officers, and so on (the Black bourgeoisie), moving to and living in the suburbs, while the uneducated or poorly educated constituted the Black underclass of the urban ghettoes where the Afrocentric ideology of certain segment of the Black bourgeoisie, prisons, the streets, athletics, and the entertainment industry became the dominant ideology, ideological apparatuses, and means of production for their interpellation and embourgeoisement. Beginning in the late 1980s, finance capital, to avoid the oppositional culture to poverty, racism, and classism found among the practical consciousness of the Black underclass, began commodifying and distributing (via the media industrial complex) the underclass Black culture for entertainment in the emerging postindustrial service economy of the United States over the ideology and language of the Black bourgeoisie. Be that as it may, efforts to succeed academically among Black Americans, which constituted the ideology and language of the Black bourgeoisie, paled in comparison with their efforts to succeed as speakers of Black English, athletes, “gangstas,” “playas,” and entertainers, which became the ideology and language of the Black underclass urban youth living in the inner cities of America. Authentic Black American identity became synonymous with Black American underclass hip-hop ideology and language as financed by the upper class of owners and high-level executives of the athletic and entertainment industries over the social class language game of the educated Black middle class (Gates, 2014; S. Steele, 1990).

Conclusion

Hence, contemporarily, in America’s postindustrial service economy where multiculturalism, language, and communication skills, pedagogically taught through process approaches to learning, multicultural education, and cooperative group works in school, are keys to succeeding in the postindustrial service labor market, Blacks, paradoxically, have an advantage and disadvantage. On one hand, their bodies and linguistic structure growing up in inner cities are influenced by the Black American underclass who in conjunction with the upper class of owners and high-level executives have positioned the streets, athletics, and the entertainment industries as the social functions best served by their bodies and linguistic structure in the service economy of the United States, which subsequently leads to economic gain, status, and upward social mobility for young urban Blacks in the society. This is advantageous because it becomes an authentic Black identity by which Black American youth can participate in the fabric of the postindustrial social structure. On the other hand, their linguistic structure inhibits them from succeeding academically given the mismatch between their linguistic structure and the function it serves in the postindustrial labor market of the United States, and that of Standard English (SE) and the function of school as a medium to economic gain, status, and upward social mobility for Blacks in the society.

School for many Black Americans, especially Black boys, in other words, is simply a place for honing their athletic and entertainment skills and hip-hop culture, which they can subsequently profit from in the American postindustrial service economy as their cultural contribution to the American multicultural melting pot. Many Black American youth of the inner cities enter school speaking BEV/AAEV. Their linguistic structure in schooling in postindustrial education, which values the exchange of cultural facts as commodities for the postindustrial economy, is celebrated along with their music and athletic talents under the umbrella of multicultural education. Therefore, no, or very few, remedial courses are offered to teach them SE, which initially leads to poor test scores on standardized tests. That is, the phonology, morphology, and syntax, or the way its expressions are put together to form sentences, of BEV/AAEV juxtaposed against that of SE linguistically prevents many Black Americans from the inner cities early on in their academic careers from grasping the meaning or semantics of phrases and contents of standardized tests, which are written in SE. As Blacks matriculate through the school system, with their emphasis of succeeding in music and athletics, those who acquire the systemicity of SE and succeed become part of the Black professional class celebrating the underclass practical consciousness, from whence they came, of those who do not make it and therefore dropout of school constituting the Black underclass of poorly educated and unemployed social actors looking to the entertainment industry (which celebrates their conditions as a commodity for the labor market) and the streets as their only viable means to economic gain, status, and upward social mobility in blighted inner-city communities.

Hence, American Blacks, as interpellated (workers) and embourgeoised agents of the American postindustrial capitalist social structure of inequality, represent the most modern (i.e., socialized) people of color, in terms of their “practical consciousness,” in the process of homogenizing social actors as agents of the protestant ethic or disciplined workers, producers, and consumers working for owners of production to obtain economic gain, status, and upward mobility in the larger American society (Frazier, 1957; Glazer & Moynihan, 1963; Wilson, 1978). They constitute the American social space in terms of their relation to the means of production in postindustrial capitalist America. This relational framework differentiates Black America for the most part into two status groups or social class language games. On the one hand, it produces a dwindling middle and upper class (living in suburbia) that numbers about 25 percent of their population (13 percent) and obtain their status as doctors, athletes, entertainers, lawyers, teachers, and other high-end professional service occupations. And, on the other hand, a growing segregated “Black underclass” of unemployed and under-employed wage-earners, criminals, gangsters, rappers, and athletes occupying poor inner-city communities and schools focused solely on technical skills, multicultural education, athletics, and test taking for social promotion given the relocation (outsourcing) of industrial and manufacturing jobs to poor periphery and semi-periphery countries and the introduction of low-end postindustrial service jobs and a growing informal economy in American urban-cities. Consequently, the poor performance of Black American students, vis-à-vis Whites, in education as an ideological apparatus for this postindustrial capitalist sociolinguistic worldview leaves them disproportionately in this growing underclass of laborers, criminals, rappers, gangsters, athletes, and entertainers at the bottom of the American postindustrial class social structure of inequality unable to either transform their world as they encounter it, or truly exercise their embourgeoisement given their lack of, what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) refers to as, capital (cultural, social, economic, and political).

Ironically, contrary to John Ogbu’s burden of acting-White hypothesis, Mocombe suggests that it is due to their indigent (pathological-pathogenic) structural position within the American capitalist social structure of inequality, as opposed to a differing or oppositional cultural ethos from that of the latter, as to the reason why Black American schoolchildren underachieve vis-à-vis their White counterparts. That is, the majority of Black American school students underachieve in school in general and on standardized test in particular, vis-à-vis their White counterparts, not because they possess or are taught (by their peers) at an early age distinct normative cultural values from that of the dominant group of owners and high-level executives in the social structure that transfer into cultural and political conflict in the classroom as an ideological apparatus for these capitalists. To the contrary, Black American students underachieve in school because in acquiring the “verbal behavior” of the dominant powers of the social structure in segregated “poor” gentrified inner-city communities which lack good legal jobs and affordable resources that have been outsourced by capital overseas (outsourcing), the majority, who happen to be less educated in the “Standard English” of the society, have reinforced a linguistic (BEV) community or status group of criminals, rappers, aspiring athletes, and entertainers, the Black underclass, as the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for Black America, which have been reified and commodified by finance capital to accumulate surplus value in their postindustrial economy (Mocombe, 2005, 2006, 2011).

It is this “mismatch of linguistic social class function,” role conflict, the ideals of middle class Black and White bourgeois America against the perceived “pathologies” (functions) of the Black underclass as a sociolinguistic status group (social class language game) in the American postindustrial class social structure of inequality, Ogbu and other postsegregationist Black middle-class scholars inappropriately label, “acting-White,” “culture of poverty,” or oppositional culture. Blacks, boys in particular, are neither concealing their academic prowess and abilities when they focus, and defer their efforts, on athletics, music, entertainment, the streets, and so on for fear of acting White as Ogbu suggests, nor do they internalize residual White stereotypes of a remote past, a la the stereotype threat theory of Claude M. Steele (1992, 1997; C. M. Steele & Aronson, 1998). Instead, they are focusing on racially coded socioeconomic actions or roles reified and commodified in the larger American postindustrial capitalist social structure of inequality that are more likely to lead to economic gain, status, prestige, and upward mobility (embourgeoisement) in the society as defined for, and by, the Black underclass financed by White finance capital.

The Black underclass youth in America’s ghettoes has slowly become, since the 1980s, with the financialization of hip-hop culture by record labels such as Sony and others, athletics, and the entertainment industry, the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for the Black youth community in America. Their language, worldview, and practical consciousness as constituted through prisons, the street life, hip-hop culture, athletics, and the entertainment industry financed by finance capital, has become the means by which many Black youth (and youth throughout the world) aspire to recursively reorganize and reproduce their material resource framework against the purposive rationality of Black bourgeois or middle class America. The upper class of owners and high-level executives of the American-dominated capitalist world-system have capitalized on this through the commodification of Black underclass bodies, culture, and linguistic structure. This is further supported by an American media and popular culture that glorifies the hustler, athletes, entertainers, and the “Bling bling,” wealth, diamonds, cars, jewelry, and money of the culture. Hence, the aim of many young Black people, Black males in particular, in the society is no longer to seek status, economic gain, and upward mobility through a Protestant Ethic that stresses hard work, diligence, differed gratification, and education. On the contrary, a Protestant Ethic that stresses hard work in sports, music, instant gratification, illegal activities (drug dealing), and skimming is the dominant means portrayed for their efforts through the entertainment and athletic industries financed by postindustrial capital. Schools throughout urban American inner cities are no longer seen as means to a professional end in order to obtain economic gain, status, and upward mobility, but obstacles to that end because it delays gratification and is not correlative with the means, social roles, associated with economic success and upward mobility in black urban America. More Black American youth (especially the Black male) aspire to become, “gangstas,” hustlers, football and basketball players, rappers, and entertainers, like many of their role models who were raised in their underclass environments and obtained economic gain and upward mobility that way, over doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, and so on, the social functions associated with the status symbol of the Black and White middle professional (educated) class of the civil rights generation. Hence the end and social action remains the same, economic success, status, and upward economic mobility, only the means to that end have shifted with the rise, financed by finance capital, of the black underclass as the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination in black America given the commodification of hip-hop culture and their high visibility in the media and charitable works through basketball and football camps and rap concerts. These latter social functions reinforce the aforementioned activities as viable means/professions to wealth and status in the society’s postindustrial economy, which focuses on services and entertainment for the world’s transnational bourgeois class as the mode of producing surplus value.

This linguistic and ideological domination and the ends of the power elites (rappers, athletes, gangsters, criminals) of the Black underclass, “mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function,” which brings about the role conflict Ogbu interprets as the burden of acting White, are juxtaposed against the Protestant Ethic and spirit of capitalism of the Black middle and upper middle educated professional classes represented in the prosperity discourse and discursive practices of Black professionals and American preachers in the likes of T. D. Jakes, Juanita Bynum, Creflo Dollar, Eddie Long, and so on who push forth with their educated professional counterparts, via the Black American church, education, and professional jobs as viable means to prosperity, status, and upward economic gain, that is, the agential moments of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Hence, whereas, for preachers and educated agents of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism in the likes of Jakes, Dollar, Eddie Long, and Juanita Bynum the means to “Bling bling,” or the American Dream, is through education and obtaining a professional job as a sign of God’s grace and salvation, Rapping, hustling, sports, etc., for younger black Americans growing up in gentrified inner-cities throughout the US, where industrial work has disappeared, represent the means (not education) to the status position of “Bling bling.” Many Black youth are not “acting White” when education no longer becomes a priority or the means to economic gain, status, and upward mobility, as they get older and consistently underachieve vis-à-vis Whites. They are attempting to be White and achieve bourgeois economic status (the “Bling bling” of cars, diamonds, gold, helicopters, money, etc.) in the society by being “Black,” speaking Ebonics, going to prison, rapping, playing sports, hustling, and so on, in a racialized postindustrial capitalist social structure wherein the economic status of “Blackness” is (over) determined by the White capitalist class of owners and high-level executives and the Black proletariats of the West, the Black underclass, whose bodies, linguistic structure, way of life, and image (“athletes, hustlers, hip-hopsters”) has been commodified (by White and Black capitalists) and distributed throughout the world for entertainment, (Black) status, and economic purposes in postindustrial capitalist America. This underclass culture or practical consciousness as globally promulgated to urban Black youth throughout the Black diaspora by finance capital via Black Entertainment Television (BET) and other media outlets is counterbalanced or opposed by the bodies, linguistic structure, and images of Black preachers promoting the same ethos, The Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, via the prosperity gospel, patriarchy, misogyny, and so on, of the Black American churches, to the Black administrative bourgeoisies around the world via biblical conversion or salvation, over the so-called pathologies, promiscuity, misogyny, patriarchy, and so on, of the Black American underclass, as the medium to and for success in the capitalist world-system. Hence, the social structure of racial-class (not racial or cultural worldview) inequality that characterizes the Black American social environment is subsequently the relational framework, which Black youth and the Black administrative bourgeoisie in America and the diaspora are exposed to and socialized in when they encounter globalizing processes through immigration, the outsourcing of work from America, and the images of the entertainment industry and Black church. Throughout America, the continent of Africa, the Caribbean, and Black Europe Black American charismatic preachers are promoting a prosperity gospel among the Black poor and administrative bourgeoisie, which is usually juxtaposed against the emergence of an underclass culture among the youth in these areas influenced by the hip-hop, prison, and athletic and entertainment practical consciousness of the Black American underclass.

Globally, more blacks, of any nationality, are overrepresented in the media as having achieved status and upward economic mobility speaking their patois, hustling, playing sports, and entertaining than achieving academically and speaking the lingua franca of the power elites. As a result, Blacks, Black males in particular, are less likely to identify with or place much effort into education, unlike their female counterparts, as a viable means to economic gain, status, and upward mobility in a global marketplace under U.S. hegemony dominated by images of successful Black males as hustlers, athletes, and entertainers, social class roles Black females are less likely to achieve status, economic gain, or upward economic mobility in. Young Black people (males in particular) globally are beginning to put more effort on achieving economic gain, status, and upward mobility (embourgeoisement) in the global marketplace via hustling and the athletic and entertainment industries over education in general and STEM programs in particular. As such, it would appear that in the global division of labor in postmodernity/postindustrial America, Whites are capitalists and business persons, that is, the upper class of owners and high-level executives, Asians are your engineers and doctors, and Blacks are your criminals, hustlers, entertainers, and athletes. Future research must continue to explore this relationship between linguistic structure and racial-class social roles as the driving force behind the Black/White achievement gap, Black male/female academic achievement gap, and the lack of Black males in STEM programs as they aspire to achieve status, economic gain, and upward mobility via the streets, athletics, and the entertainment industry.