'... We Got to Get Over Before We Go Under ...'<BR> Fragments for a History of Black Vernacular Neoliberalism

Abstract

Abstract Through a discussion of Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad books, the motivational primers of Robert Greene and other similar material produced in the UK by a legion black nationalists turned consultants, trainers, mentors and motivators, this paper asks some difficult questions about the relationship between black and migrant communities and the neoliberal thematics of uplift, self-responsibility and self-improvement. These topics have a long history that spans the interest of nineteenth-century African Americans in Samuel Smiles and the hustling ethic affirmed in several generations of Hip hop.Keywords self-help, neoliberalism, Robert Kiyosaki, Robert Greene, Black nationalism, Black politics, Hip hop, Samuel Smiles, African American cultureIn a culture where neo-liberal ideas represent a widely-circulating current, the free, ubiquitous and all-encompassing character of 'wealth' is a dominant theme. This is increasingly money in its naked, materialistic 'Americanised' form - shorn of the old, deferential, aristocratic, upper-class connotations and moral liberal reservations which have accompanied - and inflected - it in the British context.Stuart HallThe cultural revolution wrought by neoliberalism is altering the symbolic currency of racial difference. In 2005, Tim Campbell, a young British man of Caribbean heritage, won the first series of the UK version of the US business reality TV show, The Apprentice. The series celebrates business and management by dramatising the intense competition between contending wannabe executives. Predictably, the winner takes all and is rewarded with a chance to operate at a high level in the corporate world under the patronage of the business leader who runs the show. The losers are consigned back to the groaning pit of insecurity. It is not too crude to describe this television franchise as a weekly parable supporting the liturgy of neoliberalism: marketisation and privatisation secured by the liberation of individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills.After his historic triumph, Campbell rapidly became the poster-boy for what was then spoken of as a rising tide of interest in entrepreneurship among Britain's 'minority ethnic' communities - a possibility which dovetailed readily with the ideology of New Labour as well as the broader, timely architecture of what Anthony Barnett has dubbed their 'corporate populism'.1 It was no surprise that Campbell was taken up widely as a wholesome, 'role model' whose winning smile and evident graciousness could, for example, be projected vividly into the imaginations of disoriented young people who were being invited, through innovative, business-friendly, secondary-school curricula, to follow in his footsteps towards the distant, glittering citadel of personal and financial success. It was not so much that wealth would descend upon anyone following that primrose path towards a classless society - though it surely would - but rather that their journey to that elusive, golden goal would be properly organised and overseen along neoliberal lines. Newly-fluent in what Alistair Beaton has described as 'management bollocks',2 Britain's emergent legion of project managers would metaphorically don their hi- viz jackets and steward these excursions, ensuring that they would be done the right way: by harnessing individual self-realisation to the imperatives of a business culture that culminated in the revelatory manifestation of a revised hierarchy. A freshly diversified synod of generic, MBA-ed business-leaders, no longer just a gaggle of old white men, would stand proudly at the summit of achievement and invest the results of this neoliberal revolution with all the force of inevitable nature.That well-tailored image of avowedly meritocratic, corporate diversity corresponds closely to the chapter of neoliberal transformation that has been entitled 'The Age of Obama'. It endows the project of globalisation, conceived as a process of 'Americanisation', with polychromatic, heterocultural vitality. …