Race and Class Distinctions Within Black Communities

A Racial-Caste-in-Class

Paul Camy Mocombe, Carol Tomlin, Cecile Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134690640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études afro-américaines

This book offers both a philosophical and sociological model for understanding the constitution of identity in general, and black social identity in particular, without reverting to either a social or racial deterministic view of identity construction. Using a variant of structuration theory (phenomenological structuralism) this work, against contemporary postmodern and post-structural theories, seeks to offer a dialectical understanding of the constitution of black American and British life within the class division and social relations of production of the global capitalist world-system, while accounting for black social agency.

1 Theorizing about Black Practical Consciousness in the US and UK

The shift, in the mid-to-late twentieth century, from biological “races” to sociohistorical processes (culture, social structure, or the social relations of production) as the underlying factor in consciousness formation did not rule out the inferiority issues associated with constructions of “blackness, ” which led to W.E.B. Du Bois’s attempt in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) at articulating the dual and enduring racial nature of black American consciousness. On the contrary, the sociohistorical turn raised some of these same issues as “many racist, liberal and Marxist social scientists argued that blacks had no real culture, that slavery destroyed it, and that what passed as black culture was simply a pathological reaction to whites, a duplication of them or an expression of lower-class culture rather than a specific black culture” (Karenga, 1993: 276). In other words, there is no “Negro-ness, ” “African-ness, ” or “blackness” associated with black American life, for these aspects of black life were destroyed during the slavery era (Frazier, 1939; 1957).

Like Du Bois, who in The Souls of Black Folk argued for the preservation of black folk’s dual racial and ethnic nature (African and American), many social theorists then as now responded to these “racist” ideas by pointing to African cultural as opposed to racial survivals among blacks as evidence that blacks did not completely internalize the negative images of slavery. Thus, black American culture or consciousness was viewed as a synthesis of these African survivals (Africanisms) with European cultural norms, giving blacks a “double consciousness” or making them “hybrids” or “bicultural” (Allen, 2001; Asante, 1988, 1990; Billingsley, 1968, 1970, 1993; Blassingame, 1972; Early, 1993; Gilroy, 1993; Gutman, 1976; Her-skovits, 1958 [1941]; Holloway, 1990a; Karenga, 1993; Levine, 1977; Lewis, 1993; Lincoln and Mamiya, 1990; Nobles, 1987; Staples, 1978; Stack, 1974; West and Gates, 1997; West, 1993).

These two contentious and controversial contemporary approaches in the American context for understanding the nature of black American life or ways of being-in-the-world, i.e., practical consciousness, Maulana Karenga calls “the pathological-pathogenic and the adaptive-vitality approaches” (1993: 280). The pathological-pathogenic approach, laid out most articulately by E. Franklin Frazier, Gunnar Myrdal, Stanley Elkins, and later Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is predicated on the assumption that the black person is “an exaggerated American” and essentially a “pathological” reaction to whites. Hence, “[i]n practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture. It is a distorted development, or pathological condition, of the general American culture” (Myrdal, 1944: 928). That is, the black person “is only an American and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect” (Glazer and Moynihan, 1963: 53). Therefore, the perpetuation of families, in the black community, marked by and conducive to matriarchy, broken and ineffective males, delinquency, economic dependency, poor academic performance, and unwed motherhood are nothing more than pathologies which stem from their reaction to the brutal institutional arrangements of slavery, industrialization, and urbanization (Elkins, 1959; Frazier, 1939, 1957; Geno-vese, 1974; Murray, 1984; Moynihan, 1965; Myrdal, 1944; Wilson, 1978, 1987; Sowell, 1975, 1981; Stampp, 1956, 1971), “forces, ” driven by the capitalist social relations of production of the American social structure, which caused the slaves and their descendants, as E. Franklin Frazier suggests, to “take over, however imperfectly, the folkways of the American [social] environment, discovering within the patterns of the white man’s culture a purpose in life” (Gutman, 1976: 260).

The problem with this social structural approach, like Du Bois’s biological and racial determinism, is that it too is deterministic, replacing “race” and “nation” as determinants of consciousness with culture, social structure, or the capitalist social relations of production. That is, black Americans are presented as passive and “impulsive” automatons or “blank slates” programmed by their white masters with a defective (pathological) version of the structural ideology of American society (Frazier, 1966 [1939]: 32). Thus the American capitalist social structure, as recursively (re)organized and reproduced by bourgeois whites, dominates and effaces, by threatening their (blacks’) ontological security, anything “subjectively” African about the black American. Whereas Du Bois in his Hegelian parallel to the pathological-pathogenic approach—“[i]t is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”—was able to maintain the distinctive-ness and agency of the African with his reliance on the nineteenth-century understanding of race, i.e., that biological races each have a message for the world (Du Bois, 1995 [1903], 1972 [1897]), the structural-functional and Marxist approaches of the pathological-pathogenic school posit that the “other world, ” the American world, forced blacks to internalize its negative stereotypes (poor, uncultured, irrational, barbaric, affective, and emotional) of their “blackness, ” which led to black self-hatred and their attempts to live like whites (Woodson, 1969; Frazier, 1957; Hare, 1991; Kardiner and Ovesey, 1962).

Conversely, the adaptive-vitality approach, supplanting Du Bois’s concepts of race and nation with culture, contends “that black Americans could not possibly live and develop for over three hundred years simply by reacting [to and adopting ‘the white man’s culture’]. On the contrary, blacks [as a racial class ‘for-itself’] have made self-conscious and self-constructive efforts which have contributed to American culture, not simply borrowed from it” (Karenga, 1993: 277). In this understanding, the pathologies or “divergences” of the pathological-pathogenic school are seen as African adaptive responses to the American condition, or “institutional cultural transformations” (Asante, 1988, 1990; Blassingame, 1972; Gutman, 1976; Herskovits, 1958 [1941]; Levine, 1977; Sudarkasa, 1981) from Africa to America, which makes the culture of the descendants of slaves “neither African nor American but genuinely Afro-American” (Gutman, 1976), a group “identity-in-differential” to that of the American one, which cannot be compared to it. That is, “just as surely as black American family patterns are in part an outgrowth of the descent into slavery, so too are they partly a reflection of the archetypical African institutions and values [i.e., an affective rather than economic approach to family life, collectivity rather than the individualism which is endemic to European culture, an egalitarian quality to relationships, an extended kin base, etc.] that informed and influenced the behavior of the Africans who were enslaved in America” (Karenga, 1993: 282–283).

This “adaptive-vitality” response is problematic for two reasons, however. The first is related to the critique mentioned above concerning the structural determinism of the pathological-pathogenic school. That is, there is ambiguity in the concept of a unified African cultural inheritance, which for the most part is a biologically determined notion of blackness, structurally organizing the African’s way of life against the external structural ideology of (white) American society.1 Such a concept, presupposes, however, like Du Bois, a biologically, as opposed to a culturally or structurally, determined uniformity and uniqueness of African cultures institutionalized and practiced within the American social structure which ethnography and historical records do not support (Smith, 1957: 36; Holloway, 1990: 1).2

For example, the “adaptive-vitality” school commonly interprets the divergences of the pathological-pathogenic school to be matriarchy, “an improvisational communal consciousness, ” emotionalism, musical style, and intuition, elements of African culture or racial identity, which blacks have adapted to their American conditions (Gilroy, 1993; Herskovits, 1958 [1941]; Levine, 1977; Sudarkasa, 1981). The problem with this position, however, is that there are numerous cultures (Mali, Berbers, etc.) of Africa among which these elements are not found. Moreover, there are many other peoples, including whites, among whom these practices have been reported.

This fact leads us to the second problem of the “adaptive-vitality” school, which ties it to the “pathological-pathogenic” school: assessing the impact that the structural ideology of American society, which created blackness, within the class division of Protestant capitalist relations of production, as a social category for identity construction, but prevented blacks from recursively organizing or reproducing the structural or cultural terms (norms, values, proscriptions, and prescriptions) associated with their heterogeneous “Africanness” or “blackness, ” has had on black Americans and the development of their consciousness. For by assuming the divergences of black American consciousness to be a result of their innate sense of blackness which was somehow shielded from the institutional arrangements of slavery, proponents of the adaptive-vitality school negate and mystify the sociocultural impact slavery had on the development of black consciousness, which in their theorizing is an element of being that is solely contingent, irrespective of the social environment, on racial type. Just the same, by assuming the divergences in black American consciousness to be nothing more than pathological reactions to American capitalist institutional arrangements, the pathological-pathogenic school denies the agency of black social actors.

These same problems arise in the UK when it comes to understanding black identities and practical consciousnesses in black British Caribbean and African communities. The two main opposing schools of thought on understanding black British practical consciousnesses parallel the adaptive-vitality and pathological-pathogenic positions of the American context. In the UK, the two positions are referred to as the anti-essentialist and the anti-anti-essentialist schools. Like proponents of the pathological-pathogenic position, the anti-essentialists argue against any ideas of a black cultural or racial phenomenon that unites all black people. Mercer (1994: 3), who subscribes to this position, contends that black diasporic identities and cultures cannot place African origin at the center stage of trying to understand black practical consciousnesses. He contends that we should recognize the influence of local and global networks that affect, challenge, and change black cultures and views of the past so that black culture is viewed as a journey through history. As in the case of the adaptive-vitality school in the US, the anti-anti-essentialists posit the idea that African memory retention exists in diasporic cultures to some degree. Clifford (1997: 267–268), for instance, claims that it is possible to reconcile the tensions between historical rupture, experienced by African heritage people, and how they maintained their African origins in the midst of this rupture.

In both the US and UK contexts, the four positions point to a serious dilemma of theorizing consciousness or identity formation, however; that is, how does one demonstrate agency in identity or consciousness formation without overstating the case, diluting criticism of the system or social structure or culture for a sort of biological determinism, as in the case of the adaptive-vitality and anti-anti-essentialist schools? Likewise, the parallel dilemma involves the question of how one can emphasize the system or social structure without contributing to the subjugation of the social actor, as in the case of the pathological-pathogenic and anti-essentialist positions.

In directly or indirectly refuting these four positions for their structural and racial determinism, contemporary post-sixties and post-segregation era black scholars in the UK and US attempt to understand black consciousnesses and communities by using post-structural and postmodern theory to either reinterpret W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1903) double consciousness construct as an epistemological mode of critical inquiry, along the lines of the Frankfurt School’s negative dialectics, which characterizes the nature or essence of black consciousness, a la Cornel West (1993) and Paul Gilroy (1993), or offer an intersectional approach to the constitution of black consciousnesses and communities, which emphasizes the diverse and different levels of domination, class, race, gender, global location, age, and sexual identity, by which black consciousnesses and communities get alienated, marginalized, and constituted, a la bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins (1990). In spite of their efforts, these two 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, and evade the structural determinism of their own identities and theoretical positions.

The former understanding, Du Boisian double consciousness, put forth by Paul Gilroy and Cornel West is problematic not only because it reiterates Du Bois’s racial essentialism in constituting his notion of double consciousness (Mocombe, 2008). The scholars are also mistaken because they assume their Cartesian transcendental intellectual activity, the epis-temological mode of critical inquiry in the academy, has ontological and epistemological status among black people in general in constituting their identity within and by the dialectical class structure of global capitalist relations of production. In other words, instead of viewing 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 afforded to them by their academic training and bourgeois class positions as black professors seeking to dialectically define black consciousness along the lines of the white bourgeois lifestyles of the upper-class of owners and high-level executives against the material conditions, bodies, and language of the black underclass of the inner-cities, Gilroy and West assume their interpretation of double consciousness as an epistemological mode of critical inquiry to be how ontologically and epistemologically so-called black people in general came, and come, to constitute their practical consciousnesses within and by the dialectic of the capitalist social structure of class and racial inequality and differentiation of the West. They fail to realize that their assumptions and conclusions are a result of class division and social relations of production, which juxtaposes their professional bourgeois status and activities against the bodies, language, practices, and ideology of a black underclass living in the Northern ghettoes of cities where work has disappeared to Third World countries.

Just the same, the latter feminist position, conversely, 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 intersec-tional approach to the constitution of black consciousnesses, which emphasizes the different levels of domination, class, race, gender, global location, age, and sexual identity by which black communities and consciousnesses get constituted. This post-structural and black feminist theorizing, especially of bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, 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 assumption of the indeterminacy of meaning and decentered subject of post-structural and postmodern theorizing. Epistemologically, they commit the fallacy of anachronism; 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 and differentiation the indeterminacy of meaning and decentered subject of post-structural and postmodern theorizing of postindustrial capitalism to highlight the variety of ways, having to do with race, class, age, sexual identity, etc., blacks were and are marginalized and dominated. As such they commit the same bourgeois Cartesian transcendental intellectual fallacy that Gilroy and West do. Both hooks and Collins put the ontological status of the 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 postmodern and post-structural theorizing as though their bourgeois epistemological and ontological assumptions within a contemporary postindustrial capitalist social structure that attempts to commodify individual identities for capital accumulation, is how all blacks, historically, initially encountered the matrix of domination and came to constitute their being-in-the-world within and by the global capitalist social structure of racial-class inequality. Both positions, because of their bourgeois Cartesian ontological and epistemological (transcendental) activities and vantage points, inadequately address the issue of how their intellectual assumptions and the practical consciousnesses in black communities within the global capitalist matrix of domination of the West historically and ontologically became constituted. They fail to synthesize their transcendental bourgeois academic rhetoric with Marxist dialectics, which captures the dialectical economic social structure or social relations of production within which these academic theories and the identities of the theorists emerged.

There is one contemporary social science school which attempts to address these ontological and epistemological questions of agency and practical consciousness within the conception of modern society as a by-product of class division and capitalist relations of production. This is the structurationist or praxis school, commonly associated with Jürgen Habermas (1987 [1981], 1984 [1981]), Pierre Bourdieu (1990 [1980], 1984), and Anthony Giddens (1984) in sociology, and Marshall Sahlins (1976, 1995 [1981]) in anthropology (Crothers, 2003; Ortner, 1984). Elaborated in a series of theoretical works and empirical studies, structurationists or praxis theorists account for agency and consciousness in social structure or system “by clamping action and structure together in a notion of ‘practice’ or ‘practises’” (Crothers, 2003: 3). That is, structures are not only external to social actors, as in the classic structural-functional view, but are also internal rules and resources produced and reproduced by actors “unconsciously” (intuitively) in their practices. That is to say, in structurationist or praxis theory, as Marx suggested one hundred years before, the structure is “not a substantially separable order of reality, ” but “simply the ‘ideal’ form in which the totality of ‘material’ relations … are manifested to consciousness …” (Sayer, 1987: 84). From this perspective, accordingly, structure or, sociologically speaking, social structure, “may set [ideological] conditions to the historical process, but it is dissolved and reformulated in material practice, so that history becomes the realization, in the form of society, of the actual [embodied rules] resources people put into play” (Sahlins, 1995 [1981]: 7): consciousness, as a result, refers to “practical consciousness” or the reproduction, differentiation, dissolution, and reformulation of a social structure’s terms (norms, values, prescriptions, and proscriptions) in material practice.

Although this neo-Marxist “clamping together” of structure, praxis, and consciousness descriptively accounts for “the individual moment of phenomenology” by explaining the unanimity, closure, and “intentional-ity” of a form of human action or sociation as well as the capitalist social (material) relations of production and its class differentiation, which constitutes the integrative actions of modern society, it fails, as pointed out in the epistemological postmodern/post-structural positions of hooks and Collins, to account for the origins and nature of fully visible alternative forms of practices (i.e., “the variability of the individual moments of phenomenology”) within the dominant order that are not class based, but are the product of the deferment of meaning in ego-centered communicative discourse. Structurationists, like the classic structural-functional and structural-Marxist theorizing of the pathological-pathogenic and anti-essentialist schools, fail to see that society and its dominant institutionalized identity is not “one-dimensional” and differentiated by the dialectic of capitalist social relations of production, but is constituted, through power relations, as transition, relation, and difference. This difference, akin to Jacques Derrida’s différance, is not biologically (racially) hardwired in the social actor, as the adaptive-vitality school suggests, but is a result of self-reflective and non-impulsive social actors, upon internalizing the arbitrary structural terms or signifiers of their society via their bodies, language, and linguistic communication, conceiving of and exercising other forms of being-in-the-world from that of the dominant symbolic order and its structural differentiation or relational logic (Habermas, 1987 [1981], 1984 [1981]; Giddens, 1984).

By “clamping” action, structure, and consciousness together, i.e., part/ whole totality, however, structurationists, with the exception of Jürgen Habermas’s “communicative action” model, do not account for, nor do they demonstrate, the nature and relation of this non-biologically and non-impulsively determined difference (différance) to that of the dominant practices of the social structure as highlighted in the theorizing of postmodern and post-structural scholars. Instead, they re-introduce the problem in a new form: how do we know or exercise anything at odds with an embodied received view grounded in, and differentiated by, capitalist social relations of production?

Habermas, through his dual notion of “systems and lifeworld, ” attempts to resolve this problem of agency; however, in viewing the system of the political economy as the result of mutually agreed upon rational rules of conduct among the various “interpretive communities” of the lifeworld, his theoretical communicative “consensus” model or “organic solidarity” validates the constituting social conflict that exists between these communities, individual social actors, and those who govern the political economy as a “crisis” and not as the nature of systems integration within a particular historical social formation. It is in building on and against Habermas’s conflict-less and normatively utopic model that we propose to account for this question of agency, which eludes, and is not adequately, i.e., historically, dealt with by the epistemological Carte-sianism of post-structural and postmodern theorists such as Gilroy, West, Collins, and hooks, the structural-functionalism and structural-Marxism of the pathological-pathogenic and anti-essentialist approaches, and is negated (but at the same time also reintroduced through a form of gen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research in Race and Ethnicity
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Theorizing about Black Practical Consciousness in the US and UK
• 2 Industrial Modernity, Du Boisian Double Consciousness: Post-Industrialism, Postmodernity/Post-Structuralism, and Intersectionality
• 3 Phenomenological Structuralism
• 4 A Phenomenological Structural Constitution of Modern Society: "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"
• 5 Subject Constitution within the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of Industrial and Postindustrial Capitalism
• 6 The Constitution of Black America within the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
• 7 The Constitution of Black British Life within the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
• 8 The African-Americanization of the Black Diaspora in Globalization or the Contemporary Capitalist World-System
• 9 Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index