Black Assimilationism in Neoliberal Globalization

Abstract

This article, using Mocombeian phenomenological structural theory, argues that since their arrival on North American soil, the constitution of black American identity has been the product of their relations to the means and mode of production within the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. As such, black Americans, and this includes the so-called black radical tradition, have never been agents in the constitution of their own identities. They have always been and remain (reactionary) pawns of capital seeking, dialectically or negative dialectically, to assimilate in the American social structure. Their assimilation takes place within the social practices of two social class language games (the black bourgeoisie and the underclass) that were historically constituted by different ideological apparatuses, the church and education on the one hand and the streets, prisons, and the athletic and entertainment industries on the other, respectively, of the global capitalist racial-class structure of inequality under American hegemony, which replaced African ideological apparatuses as found in Haiti, for example. Contemporarily, given both groups’ overrepresentation in the ideological superstructures of the American empire, they, antagonistically, have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for all black youth the world-over, especially in the United Kingdom, which have tremendous consequences for their assimilation process. Under the assimilationist imperatives of the black bourgeoisie, the aim is integration and assimilation along the lines of traditional white Protestant agents of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism with an emphasis on bourgeois prosperity, the black nuclear family, entrepreneurialism, and individualism. Conversely, the black underclass seeks integration and assimilation through the pathologies of their structural differentiation within the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism with an emphasis on identity politics, glorification of the self, wealth via sports and entertainment, and the communal thinking of the street life as the basis of black identity and culture.

The Queerification and Effeminization of Haitian Society

“…Hence, contemporary globalization represents a Durkheimian mechanicalization of the world via the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism under American (neoliberal) hegemony. The power elites, the upper-class of owners and high-level executives, rentier oligarchs, of the latter (American hegemon) serves as an imperial agent seeking to interpellate and embourgeois (via NGOs, education, media, Vodou, etc., serving as ideological apparatuses) the masses or multitudes of the world to the juridical framework of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism, and in the age of (neoliberal) capitalist globalization and climate change this is done within the dialectical processes of two forms of fascism or system/social integration: 1) right-wing neoliberalism; and 2) (neo) liberal identity politics masquerading as cosmopolitanism or hybridization "enframed" by a cashlessness pegged to the US dollar backed by Saudi Arabian oil (Mocombe, 2023). Both forms of system and social integration represent two sides of the same fascistic coin in the age of (neoliberal) globalization and climate change even though proponents of the latter position view the former antagonistically.…”