Race and class distinctions within black communities in the United States and United Kingdom: a reading in phenomenological structuralism

This article examines the constitution of black consciousness within the United States and Great Britain via structuration theory and phenomenological structuralism. Against the postmodern and poststructural logic of intersectionality and Du Boisian double consciousness as articulated contemporarily in the discourses of postsegregation black scholars in the likes of Cornel West and Paul Gilroy to explain the constitution of black consciousness, we argue that the aforementioned are postindustrial bourgeois identity constructions or discourses. Concluding that where they exist, the majority of the divergences of black practical consciousnesses from the social class language game of the upper-class of white owners and high-level executives, in the two societies are, for the most part, class, and not racially or culturally, based.