Journal Article

A Racial Caste in Class: Race and Class Distinctions within Black Communities in the United States and United Kingdom

Tomlin, Carol, Wright, Cecile, Mocombe, Paul C.

2014

Overview

Since the 1960s, there have been four similar schools of thought on the origins and nature of black practical consciousness in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK): the adaptive-vitality school and the pathologicalpathogenic school in the US; and the anti-essentialist and anti-anti-essentialist schools in the UK. In the US, the pathological-pathogenic position argues that in its divergences from white American norms and values black American 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\" (the term is Gayatri Spivak's) to the American one. Proponents of the adaptive-vitality school argue that the divergences are not pathologies but African \"institutional transformations\" preserved on the American landscape. Just the same in the UK, the two main opposing schools of thought are the anti-essentialist and the anti-anti-essentialist. Anti-essentialists argue against any ideas of a black 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. The anti-anti-essentialist position posits the idea that African memory retentions exist in diasporic cultures to some degree. The purpose of the present work is to understand black practical consciousnesses in the US and UK by working out the theoretical and methodological problems from which these four divergent positions are constructed in order to arrive at a more sociohistorical, rather than racial, understanding of black practical consciousnesses in the US and UK.

• Publisher: Race, Gender & Class,Race, Gender and Class
• Subject: African American literature / African Americans / American literature / Black communities / Bourgeois / Capitalism / Caste / Consciousness / Consciousness theory / Cultural identity / Determinism / Dialectic / Dialectics / Diaspora / Disorders / Du Bois, W E B (1868-1963) / Epistemology / Equality / Ethnic identity / Gays & lesbians / Hegemony / Identity / Inequality / Memory / Methodological problems / Middle class / Postmodernism / Race / Schools / Social classes / Social interaction / Social structure / Social structures / Structuralism / Subatomic particles / Values / West, Cornel