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

Introduction

Since the 1960s, there have been four similar schools of thought on understanding the origins and nature of black practical consciousness (the ideas blacks recursively reorganize and reproduce in their material practices, in the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), and the diaspora). The four schools are (i) the pathological–pathogenic, (ii) the adaptive-vitality school in the US, (iii) the anti-essentialist, and (iv) anti-anti-essentialist schools in the UK and in the diaspora. In the US, the pathological–pathogenic position suggests that in its divergences from white American norms and values, black American practical consciousness is nothing more than a pathological form of, and reaction to, American consciousness, rather than a dual (both African and American) hegemonic opposing “identity-in-differential” (Gayatri Spivak’s term) to the American one (Elkins, 1959; Frazier, 1939, 1957; Genovese, 1974; Moynihan, 1965; Murray, 1984; Myrdal, 1944; Sowell, 1975, 1981; Stampp, 1956, 1971; Wilson, 1978, 1987). Proponents of the adaptive-vitality school suggest that the divergences are not pathologies, but African “institutional transformations” preserved on the American landscape (Allen, 2001; Asante, 1988, 1990; Billingsley, 1968, 1970, 1993; Blassingame, 1972; Early, 1993; Gilroy, 1993; Gutman, 1976; Herskovits, 1958 [1941]; Holloway, 1990a; Karenga, 1993; Levine, 1977; Lewis, 1993; Lincoln & Mamiya, 1990; Nobles, 1987; Stack, 1974; Staples, 1978; West, 1993). The same is the case in the UK and the diaspora where the two main opposing schools of thought are the anti-essentialist and the anti-anti-essentialist (Clifford, 1997; Gilroy, 1993; Mercer, 1994; Mocombe & Tomlin, 2010, 2013; Mocombe et al., 2014; Smith, 1960; Vera, 1960). Anti-essentialists, as in the case of the US pathological–pathogenic school, argue against any ideas of a black innate cultural phenomenon that unites all black people, and contends that diasporic identities and cultures cannot place African origin at the center of any attempt to understand the nature of black practical consciousness in the UK (Mercer, 1994, p. 3). The anti-anti-essentialist position, in keeping with the logic of the adaptive-vitality school, posits, on the contrary, the idea that African memory retentions exist in diasporic cultures to some degree (Clifford, 1997, pp. 267–268). Contemporarily, all four positions have been criticized for either their structural determinism, as in the case of the pathological–pathogenic and anti-essentialist approaches, or racial/cultural determinism as in the case of the adaptive-vitality and anti-anti-essentialist positions (Karenga, 1993; Mocombe et al., 2014).

Evaluating Contemporary Criticisms of the Pathological–Pathogenic, Adaptive-vitality, Anti-essentialist, and Anti-anti-essentialist Positions

In directly or indirectly refuting these four positions for their structural and racial/cultural determinism, contemporary post-1960s and post-segregation era, black scholars in the UK and US attempt to understand black consciousness and communities by using post-structural and post-modern theories. They do so to either reinterpret Du Bois’s (1903) double consciousness construct as an epistemological mode of critical inquiry that characterizes the nature or essence of black consciousness (Gilroy, 1993; West, 1993), or offer an intersectional approach to the constitution of black consciousness and communities, an approach that emphasizes the diverse and different levels of alienation, marginalization, and domination, class, race, gender, global location, age, and sexual identity, by which black consciousness and communities get constituted (Collins, 1990; hooks, 1993; Reed, 1997). In spite of their efforts, these two dominant contemporary responses to the pathological–pathogenic, adaptive-vitality, anti-essentialist, and anti-anti-essentialist positions inadequately resolve the structural and racial determinism of the aforementioned approaches. They neglect the fact that their theories and they themselves are derived from the class division and social relations of production of global capitalism or the contemporary capitalist world-system.

The former understanding, Du Boisian double consciousness, put forth by Paul Gilroy and Cornel West is problematic because it reiterates Du Bois’s racial essentialism in constituting his notion of double consciousness (Mocombe, 2008; Mocombe et al., 2014; Reed, 1997). In addition, the scholars are also mistaken because they assume their Cartesian, transcendental, intellectual activity, the epistemological mode of critical inquiry in the academy have ontological and epistemological status among the black masses in general in constituting their identity within and by the dialectical class structure of global capitalist relations of production. In other words, they fail to recognize their interpretation of Du Boisian double consciousness as an epistemological mode of critical inquiry, as being a by-product of a Cartesian transcendental vantage point, a view afforded to them by their academic training and bourgeois class positions as black professors seeking to define black consciousness along the social class language game of the white bourgeois lifestyles of the upper-class of owners and high-level executives, a position that stands against and in relation to black underclass bodies, material conditions, language, and ideology. Gilroy and West assume their interpretation of double consciousness as an epistemological mode of critical inquiry. This is similar to the negative dialectics of the Frankfurt School that deals with the question as to how ontologically and epistemologically, black people, whether in the US or the diaspora, in general, come to constitute their practical consciousness within the modern state and the dialectic of the capitalist social structure of class inequality and differentiation of the West. In doing so, however, they neglect the fact that their conception, as was the case in Du Bois’s conceptualization of double consciousness following the American Civil War, derives from the racial-class divisions of the American industrial/post-industrial capitalist social relations of production. This created two social class language games, a black bourgeois educated and professional class juxtaposed against the material conditions, practices, language, body, and ideology of a black underclass. The latter was segregated in the ghettoes of Northern cities where industrial work was beginning to disappear to developing countries following the end of World War II (Wilson, 1998). West and Gilroy, as Du Bois attempted to do for Southern agricultural blacks vis-à-vis Northern urban blacks following the Civil War, use double consciousness to highlight the contradictions of society as encapsulated in, and revealed by, the material conditions of the black underclass of Northern cities. They do this in order to seek equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution for them vis-à-vis whites and black bourgeois material conditions, bodies, language, etc., in a declining industrial social relations of production.

Conversely, the predominantly feminist position in refutation of the assumed hidden logic of heterosexual and patriarchal domination inherent in the theories of Du Bois, Gilroy, and West, attempts to offer an intersectional approach to the constitution of black consciousness, an approach that emphasizes the different, intersecting levels of domination, class, race, gender, global location, age, and sexual identity, by which black communities and consciousness get alienated, marginalized, and constituted. This post-structural and black feminist theorizing of bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, especially epistemologically, dismisses the dominant ontological status of the capitalist system/social structure (by which the masses of blacks attempt to practically live out their lives) for the theoretical assumptions of the indeterminacy of meaning and decentered subject of post-structural and post-modern theorizing. They attempt to read back into the historical constitution of black identity and community life within and by the dialectic of a global capitalist social structure of racial-class inequality the indeterminacy of meaning and decentered subject of post-structural and post-modern theorizing. This is done in order to highlight how individual black subjects were, and are, alienated, marginalized, and dominated in terms of race, class, age, sexual identity, etc. In doing so, they commit the same bourgeois Cartesian transcendental intellectual fallacy that Gilroy and West do. Both hooks and Collins, from their transcendental vantage points, put the ontological status of the capitalist world-system, or “matrix of domination” (to quote Collins), as reflected in the practices of the majority of blacks, under erasure for the ontological and epistemological assumptions of post-modern and post-structural theorizing. This intellectual activity is a bourgeois epistemological assumption within a contemporary post-industrial capitalist social structure that attempts to reify and commodify individual identities for capital accumulation. It is not how all blacks, historically, initially encountered the matrix of domination and came to constitute their being-in-the-world within along with the global capitalist social structure of racial class inequality and differentiation. Collins and hooks fail to realize that intersectionality is a socio-political by-product of a post-industrial capitalist landscape or social structure seeks to decenter the subject and allow a diversity of identities to emerge within the class division and social relations of post-industrial capitalist production. This facilitates the accumulation of surplus-value by catering to the entertainment, financial, and service needs of these new identities (Balibar & Wallerstein, 1991 [1988]; Jameson & Miyoshi, 1998).

Theory

The above understanding of consciousness-constitution as the product of the indeterminacy of meaning unfolding, via social action, language, and communicative discourse (within structures of signification structured and determined by the dialectic of class division and the social relations of production of those who control, through their social class language games, that is, body, language, ideology, and ideological apparatuses, a material resource framework) leads me to the following conclusion; the conclusion that the majority of black American, British, and diasporic practical life and communities were not initially constituted by their intersectionality or doubleness, which are the contemporary bourgeois perspectives of members of a black bourgeois class operating in a post-industrial capitalist social structure of inequality interested in the commodification of subjective experiences for capital accumulation. Instead the indeterminacy of black American, British, and diasporic practical life, community, and consciousness as constituted in, and as the brain, and revealed as black practical consciousness via their bodies, languages, and ideologies were initially and forcefully constituted within, and by the structure and processes of the dialectic of a global Protestant mercantile, agricultural, and industrial capitalist social structure of racial-class inequality and differentiation, which dates back to the seventeenth century. Black American, British, and diasporic life and communities were initially constituted and differentiated along racial-class lines, as a racial-caste-in-class, differentiated by the mode of production or organization of labor between a black bourgeoisie and a black underclass. These became dual and pathological in relation to these two particular interpretive communities. The social class language games of the upper-class of white and black owners and high-level corporate executives, that is, the bourgeoisie, of the two societies were similar just as much as their bodies, language, and material conditions stood in relation to the bodies, language, and material conditions of the poor black underclasses. As such, the majority of the divergences of black life where they existed during the mercantile, agricultural, and industrial capitalism of seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, were for the most part class-based practices developed relationally in segregated racial-caste-class communities in the US, UK, and the diaspora that marginalized and discriminated against practices, black nationalism, homosexuality, transgender, etc., that were arrived-at through the deferment of meaning in ego-centered communicative discourse. The double consciousness discourse of W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Gilroy, and Cornel West was, and is, the rhetoric of the black bourgeoisie seeking equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution for themselves, and the black underclasses within the class differentiation of Protestant agricultural, industrial, and post-industrial capitalism. Contemporarily, as previously mentioned, as a result of the emergence of a post-industrial capitalism intent on allowing divergent meanings and subjective experiences to emerge around their class positions for capital accumulation in a service economy focused on entertainment and service, non-class meanings and subjective experiences, homosexuality, black feminism, nationalism, etc., which were, and to some extent continue to be, discriminated against by both the black underclass and bourgeoisie of earlier capitalist relations of production are fostered and allowed to emerge within the dialectic of the global (post-industrial) capitalist social class structure. These non-class meanings and subjective experiences, homosexuality, black feminism, Pan-Africanism, practical consciousness, which are the product of the deferment of meaning in ego-centered communicative discourse, contemporarily, are seeking equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution within the dialectic of a post-industrial capitalist social structure that stratifies and commodifies these non-class identities, meanings, and subjective experiences around their class positions or social relations to production for capital accumulation in the service economies of core, post-industrial nations, such as the US and UK. What has emerged, as a result, is this theory of intersectionality among bourgeois academics, highlighting the discourse by which these variant subjective positions have been marginalized and prevented from achieving equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution within the global (post-industrial) capitalist social structure of class inequality and differentiation of the US and the UK. Be that as it may, by no means can double consciousness and intersectionality be viewed against the discourse of the pathological–pathogenic, adaptive-vitality, anti-essentialist, and anti-anti-essentialist positions, as the universal mechanism by which black consciousness and communities were constituted as their rhetoric. Similarly, black consciousness and black communities in the US and UK, are the by-product of the global (industrial and post-industrial) capitalist social structure of class inequality and differentiation, which attempts to structure the practices of subjective experiences within reified class differentiation and thereby control diversity and meaning constitution.

Discussion and Conclusion

In the contemporary global economy under American hegemony and America’s post-industrial economy, black Americans following desegregation and the civil rights movement of the 1960s became both role models (agents of socialization) and a model for socialization: a model for integrating ethnic “others” into the capitalist world system as hybrid “others”; and agents of socialization for other black ethnic “others” within the capitalist world-system. This dual role of black Americans within the capitalist world-system is subsequently leading to what I am calling the African-Americanization of the black diaspora.

American blacks, as interpellated (workers) and embourgeoised agents of the American dominated global capitalist social structure of inequality, represent the most modern (i.e., socialized) people of color, in terms of their “practical consciousness,” in this process of homogenizing social actors as agents of the protestant ethic or disciplined workers working for owners of production in order to obtain economic gain, status, and upward mobility in the larger American society and the world. Although they once occupied the social space as agricultural and industrial workers, the former were less educated than the latter. The latter were much wealthier because of their education and industrial work, and therefore made education and industry the means to economic gain and upward economic mobility. Today, they continue to occupy the social space with their practical consciousness in terms of their relation to the means of production in post-industrial capitalist America. This relation differentiates black America for the most part into two status groups, a dwindling middle and upper class (living in suburbia) that numbers about 25 percent of their population (13 percent) and obtain their status as preachers, doctors, athletes, entertainers, lawyers, teachers, and other high-end professional service occupations; and a growing segregated “black underclass” of unemployed and under-employed wage-earners, occupying poor inner-city communities and schools focused solely on technical skills, multicultural education, athletics, and test-taking for social promotion given the relocation of industrial and manufacturing jobs to poor periphery and semi-periphery countries and the introduction of low-end post-industrial service jobs and a growing informal economy in American urban-cities (Sennett, 1998; Wilson, 1978, 1998). Whereas hustlers, rappers, athletes, and entertainers are the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for the latter; the former is predominantly influenced by preachers and educated professionals as the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination. Both groups, however, share the same ideals and goals, that is, economic gain, status, and upward social mobility, within the class division and social relations of production of the capitalist world-system under American hegemony.

America’s transition to a post-industrial, financialized service economy beginning in the 1970s reified and positioned black American underclass ideology and language, hip-hop culture, as a viable means for black American youth to achieve economic gain, status, and upward economic mobility in society over education and succeeding academically as emphasized by black bourgeois discourse. Finance capital in the US beginning in the 1970s began investing in entertainment and other service industries where the inner-city language, entertainment and athletic culture of black America youth street culture became both a commodity and the means to economic gain for the black poor in America’s post-industrial economy, which subsequently outsourced its industrial work to semi-periphery nations thereby blighting the inner-city communities. Blacks, many of who migrated to the northern cities from the agricultural south looking for industrial work in the north following the Civil War (1861–1865), became concentrated in blighted communities where work began to disappear, schools were underfunded, and poverty increased. The black migrants, who migrated North with their Black/African-American English Vernacular (BEV/AAEV) from the agricultural South, 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, with no work prospects, many black Americans became part of a permanent, BEV/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 social class language game of the Standard-English-speaking black middle class of professionals, that is, preachers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc. (the black bourgeoisie), living in the suburbs, while the uneducated or poorly educated constituted the social class language game of the black underclass of the urban ghettoes. Beginning in the late 1980s, finance capital began commodifying and distributing (via the media industrial complex) the social class language game of the underclass black culture for entertainment in the emerging post-industrial economy of the US, over the ideology and language, social class language game, 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 to their efforts to succeed as speakers of Black English, athletes, “gangstas,” “playas,” and entertainers, which became the ideology and language of the black underclass living in the inner-cities of America. Authentic black American identity became synonymous with black underclass hip-hop ideology and language represented by young athletes and entertainers, Lebron James, Derek Rose, “Lil” Wayne, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, etc., over the social class language game of the educated black professional class under the ideological and linguistic domination of black preachers, T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, Jamal Bryant, Juanita Bynum, etc., and other educated black professionals.

The black underclass in America’s ghettoes has slowly become, since the 1980s, with the financialization of hip-hop culture as an art form and entertainment by record labels such as Sony and others, athletics, and the entertainment industry, the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for the black community in America. Their language and worldview as constituted through hip-hop culture, athletics and the entertainment industry financed by finance capital, has become the means by which black youth (and youth throughout the world) attempt to recursively reorganize and reproduce their material resource framework against the purposive-rationality of educated 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 culture, which mainstreamed it. This is further supported by an American media and popular culture that glorifies athletes, entertainers, and the “Bling-bling,” wealth, diamonds, cars, jewelry, and money. Hence the aim of many young blacks in 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, sports, music, instant gratification, illegal activities (drug dealing), and “skimming” are the dominant means portrayed for their efforts through the entertainment industry financed by post-industrial capital. Schools throughout urban 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 they delay gratification and are not correlative with the means associated with economic success and upward mobility in black urban America. More black American youth (especially the black male) want to become football and basketball players, rappers and entertainers, like many of their role models, Lebron James, Derek Rose, “Lil” Wayne, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, etc., who were raised in their urban underclass environments and obtained economic gain and upward mobility that way, over doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.; the social functions associated with the status symbol of the black and white middle class of the civil rights generation. Hence, the end and social action of the larger society 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. This process is given a fillip by the commodification of hip-hop culture and its high visibility in the media and charitable works through basketball and football camps and rap concerts, which reinforce the aforementioned activities as viable professions (means) to wealth and status in the society’s post-industrial economy, an economy which focuses on services and entertainment for the world’s transnational bourgeois class as the mode for producing surplus-value.

This linguistic and ideological domination and the ends of the power elites (rappers, athletes, gangsters) of the black underclass are juxtaposed against the Protestant Ethic and spirit of capitalism of the educated black middle and upper middles classes. These are represented in the discourse and discursive practices of black American prosperity preachers represented by the likes of T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, Jamal Bryant, Juanita Bynum, Eddie Long, etc. They push forth, via the black American church, education and professional jobs as the more viable means to economic gain, status, and upward economic mobility in society over the street life of the urban ghettoes. Therefore, whereas, for agents of the Protestant Ethic, in the likes of Jakes, Dollar, Bryant, Bynum, and Long, 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 inner-cities throughout the US, where industrial work has disappeared, represent the means (and not education) to the status position of “Bling-bling.” So what I am suggesting here is that contemporarily black American 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 society by being “black.” This involves speaking Ebonics, rapping, playing sports, hustling, etc., in a racialized class-based post-industrial capitalist social structure. Here, the economic status of “blackness” is (over) determined by the white and black capitalists class of owners and high-level executives, and the black proletariats of the West, the black underclass, whose 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 post-industrial capitalist America. This underclass culture, as globally promulgated throughout the black diaspora by finance capital via Black Entertainment Television (BET) and other media outlets, is counterbalanced or opposed by black preachers promoting the same ethos; the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. This is done through black American churches and televangelisms, to other blacks around the world via biblical conversion or salvation, over the pathologies of the black American underclass, as the medium to and for success in the capitalist world-system. Hence, the social structure of class (not racial or cultural worldview) inequality that characterizes the black American social environment is subsequently the relational framework, which black youth in the diaspora are exposed to and socialized in, when they encounter the globalizing processes under American hegemony through immigration, the outsourcing of work from America, and the images of the entertainment industry (Ntarangwi, 2009; Watkins, 1998; Wilson, 1998).

Throughout the continent of Africa, the Caribbean, and black Europe, black American charismatic preachers are promoting a prosperity gospel among the black poor, which is usually juxtaposed against the emergence of an underclass culture among the youth in these areas influenced by the hip-hop culture of the black American underclass (Ntarangwi, 2009). Nigerian, South African, East African, St. Lucian, Jamaican, Haitian, and black British Caribbean Hip-hop, gangsta rap music, Bling-bling, dress code, etc., influenced by the black American underclass, are juxtaposed against the Protestant evangelism of Nigerian, South African, East African, St. Lucian, Jamaican, Haitian, and black British Caribbean preachers influenced by T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, Juanita Bynum, and other black charismatic preachers whose global outreach throughout the diaspora are converting other blacks to agents of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. These two class identities, which emerge out of post-industrial America, the hegemon of globalization, represent the class dynamics within which black “others” throughout the world are dialectically integrated into the capitalist world-system. Future research in the likes of Ntarangwi (2009), who looks at the emergence of East African hip-hop (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania) in his work East African Hip Hop, must continue to explore the aforementioned African American class dynamics, led by black American athletes, entertainers, hip-hopsters and preachers as the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination, by which other blacks throughout the world are integrated into the capitalist world-system under American hegemony. Albeit Ntarangwi, in contradistinction to my position, views the African-Americanization of African youth not as a form of cultural imperialism, but as an authentic voice for African youth to contest power and oppression.