Postindustrial capitalism and the problems with Bourdieu’s social and cultural capital in understanding the Black/White achievement gap in the United States and United Kingdom

Abstract

This hermeneutical essay demonstrates why and how Pierre Bourdieu’s social reproduction theory is neither an adequate explanation for understanding praxis nor the Black/White academic achievement gap in contemporary postindustrial economies like that of the United States and the United Kingdom. The underlining hypothesis of the work is that the origins of Black academic underachievement vis-à-vis Whites in the United States and United Kingdom is structural and grounded in what Paul C. Mocombe refers to as “a mismatch of linguistic structure and social class functions” in postindustrial economies, which renders Bourdieu’s theory problematic. In other words, the structurally differentiated divergent identities created by the lack of (social and cultural) capital among Blacks vis-à-vis the capital of the upper-class of owners and high-level executives are no longer marginalized, but are celebrated and commodified in postindustrial economies to produce surplus value for capital, status, and upward economic social mobility. Hence, underclass cultural capital is reified along with bourgeois cultural capital as appropriate praxes for consumption in postindustrial societies, which makes the need for Blacks to succeed academically null and void.