Deagriculturalization, industrialization, deindustrialization, postindustrialization, and Black academic underachievement in the United States and United Kingdom
Date
2013-06-24
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Abstract
This article focuses on how the capitalist processes of deindustrialization and postindustrialization in the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK) contributed to and perpetuates the academic underachievement of black American and black British Caribbean youths in the US and UK, respectively. It is concluded that, contemporarily, the academic achievement gap between black Americans and whites in the US, and black British Caribbean youths and whites in the UK, is a result of what Paul C. Mocombe (2010) refers to as "a mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function," grounded in the relational processes of the capitalist social structure of class inequality of the two societies. In other words, the reason that 1) blacks have more limited skills in processing information from articles, books, tables, charts, and graphs compared with their white counterparts; and 2) the students who lose the most ground are the higher-achieving black children is due to the linguistic structure and social class functions of the black underclasses in the US and UK , which, with the help of corporate finance capital, have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for young black folks around the world. The article offers Mocombe's "mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function" as an heuristic tool for guiding future research on the black/white achievement gap in the US, UK, and globally
Description
Paper presented at the Biennial Conference of The University of the West Indies Schools of Education, 23-25 April, 2013, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago
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Academic achievement, Underachievement, Black students, Capitalism, Economic factors, Political factors, Social factors, Conference papers, UK, USA