The Soul-less Souls of Black Folk: A Sociological Reconsideration of Black Consciousness as Du Boisian Double Consciousness

Paul C. Mocombe

Des. 2008 · University Press of America

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Since the 1960s, there have been two schools of thought on the origins and nature of black consciousness: the adaptive-vitality school and the pathological-pathogenic school. The latter 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) counter 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. The purpose of this work is to understand black consciousness by working out the theoretical and methodological problems from which these two divergent schools are constructed, in order to arrive at a more sociohistorical, rather than racial, understanding of black consciousness. Using a variant of structuration theory to account for the sociohistorical development of black consciousness formation within the American social structure, author Paul Mocombe concludes that black American life is dual and pathological only in relation to a particular interpretive community, the black bourgeoisie or liberal middle class.

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Paul C. Mocombe is the president/CEO of The Mocombeian Foundation, Inc. A social theorist interested in the application of social theory to contemporary issues such as race, class, and capitalism (globalization), he is the author of, A Labor Approach to the Development of the Self or Modern Personality: The Case of Public Education, Education in Globalization, Mocombe's Reading Room Series, and The Mocombeian Strategy: The Reason for, and Answer to Black Failure in Capitalist Education.