Against Critical Race Theory

Critical Race Theory (CRT) seeks to apply the negative dialectics of critical theory to the intersection of race, law, and power in the pursuit of racial and ethnic equality in Western society. That is to say, critical race theorists seek to convict Western society for not identifying with their values due to the prevalence of racial and ethnic oppression and subordination in the society. I argue here that this pursuit of racial emancipation and anti-subordination through the negative dialectics of critical theory by critical race theorists offers a false sense of racial difference which is convicting the values of the West for an alternative ontology and epistemology upon which to re-constitute its ideals in particular and society in general. I conclude that the postmodern/ poststructural emphasis on the politics of the racial and ethnic physical bodies as offering an ontological and epistemological difference from the episteme of the West is baseless. The tenets of critical race theory are a reflection or inversion of the values and ideals of the West against themselves for their non-identification, and do not offer an oppositional alternative discourse from which to replace Western ontology and epistemology for its oppression and subordination against humanity and the earth. As such, I conclude that critical race theory is a conservative discourse that offers no real substantive solution to the crisis facing humanity and the earth in the face of the Protestant Ethic and spirit of capitalism’s exploitation and oppression. In fact, I want to go so far as to suggest that CRT prevents social change amidst the social and ecological devastation Western episteme has unleashed unto the world

Teaching Reading Strategically to Black Academic Underachievers

In response to the academic achievement gap of black American students’ vis-à-vis whites and Asians, Paul C. Mocombe developed his Mocombeian Strategy and Reading Room Curriculum, which posit a comprehensive mentoring program of educated black professionals and the restructuring of the linguistic structure of black American inner-city students via phonetic and language arts instructions, as the solutions to resolving the gap. The two approaches are based on Mocombe’s hypothesis that the academic underachievement of black American students, vis-à-vis their white and Asian counterparts, on standardized tests is grounded in what he refers to as “a mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function.” This work explores the theoretical, practical, and pedagogical relationships between Mocombe’s “mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function hypothesis,” The Mocombeian Strategy, and Reading Room Curriculum (published as Mocombe’s Reading Room Series)

Por qué Haití es visto como maligno en el mundo occidental: La importancia contemporánea de Bois Caïman y la Revolución Haitiana

En este artículo de la reflexión, Paul C. Mocombe, el autor yuxtapone los eventos históricos de Bois Caïman sobre la Revolución Haitiana a la afirmación de Pat Robertson—proferida después del terremoto del 12 de enero del 2010, el cual destrozó a Haití—quien considera que las circunstancias naturales y sociales de la República de Haití son el resultado de un pacto con el diablo hecho por el pueblo para ganar su independencia de Francia. Se argumenta que la afirmación de Robertson captura la razón “subyacente” del anatema del mundo occidental sobre la isla de Haití y los haitianos: la negativa de Haití a aceptar completamente la metafísica cristiana de sus anteriores colonizadores blancos.Abstract: In this article, Paul C. Mocombe, the author, juxtaposes the historical events of Bois Caïman of the Haitian Revolution against Pat Robertson’s statement, following the January 12, 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, that the Republic of Haiti’s natural and social circumstances are a result of a pact that the people made with the devil to gain their independence from France, to argue that Robertson’s statement captures the “underlying” reason for the West’s anathema for the island of Haiti and the Haitian people: Haiti’s reluctance to completely accept the Christian metaphysics of their former white colonizers

The Nature of Death in Mocombe’s Consciousness Field Theory

This article explores the nature of death within Mocombe’s consciousness field theory, which highlights the origins and nature of consciousness in the multiverse. Within the theory, Mocombe posits death to be of three instances, 1) quantum resonance collapse; 2) reincarnation; and 3) absorption into the absolute vacuum of the multiverse

The Queerification and Effeminization of Haitian Society

This article applies Mocombe’s concepts of queerification and effeminization to Haitian society, contemporarily. For Mocombe, the shift from industrial capitalism to postindustrial capitalism in the West has led to emasculated and feminine patriarchy, the assumption of patriarchal norms by the state, its ideological apparatuses, queers, and women (given the feminization and queerification of the postindustrial – financialized – workplace) from individual men whose masculinity is no longer associated with being producer and provider as it was under industrial capitalism; instead, they have been interpellated and embourgeoised, like their female counterparts, to define their masculinity as sensitive entrepreneurs, consumers, and or service workers for finance capital, i.e., rentier oligarchs. In the Black diaspora, this process has led to the queerification and effeminization of society as global capital under American hegemony queerify and effeminize the diaspora by promoting queers and women into the labor force at the expense of men and young boys who are either gangsterized or trained for the athletic and entertainment industries

Multipolarism and Neoliberal Globalization

In this article, I argue that in the age of neoliberal (postindustrial) globalization identity politics, the reification and commodification of (serial) identity practices, cultures, and “all of the accoutrements of the economy of spectacle and the manufacturing of images and fetish desires,” on the one hand, and the continuous atomization of the human subject in (neo) liberalism on the other are mechanisms for creating surplus-value and continuing capitalism’s domination over the world in the era of climate change. These two dialectical practices are offset by an emerging call for a multipolar world order undergirded by a nationalism grounded in Karl Polanyi’s double movement

The Haitian Educational Problematic

In this work, using a structurationist approach, phenomenological structuralism, to understanding the constitution of society and practical consciousness, I argue that Haiti’s educational model is a colonial one, an ideological apparatus established by a French-speaking minority, the mulatto elites and petit-bourgeois blacks, i.e., Affranchis, in order so that they can participate in the global capitalist world system as descendants of their former colonial administrators, while the African majority are interpellated and subjectified as laborers for sports and the entertainment industries, tourism, and export agriculture and manufacturing jobs provided by America, France, and Canada. Thus, in Haiti the attempt for a long time has been on following the black American bourgeois model of integration into the capitalist world system by integrating the masses into the social class language game of their former colonial slavemasters (the French) at the expense of constituting their own social class language based on the Kreyol language and Vodou metaphysics of the majority of the African inhabitants of the country

The Haitian Neoliberal State

This work attempts to understand the contemporary Haitian state, which is a paragon of the neoliberal state model. Haiti’s neoliberal state is a colonial state impoverished to serve American global capitalist hegemony under the auspices of a Haitian comprador bourgeoisie and oligarchy composed of professionals, managers, intellectuals, and business elites in Haiti and the diaspora. However, unlike Chile, which the West points to as the success of the neoliberal model and process, Haiti’s model is a complete failure, similar to the attempt to neoliberalize Russia post the fall of the Soviet Union. Whereas Russia, under Vladimir Putin, was able to combat the deleterious effects of the neoliberal process, Haiti is unable to do so. The work posits that Haiti’s failures rest on its colonial experiences under mercantilist and liberal capitalism and the embourgeoisement of its population on the island and the diaspora

Black Emasculated Patriarchy

This article posits that the shift from industrial capitalism to postindustrial capitalism in the West has led to what Mocombe deems emasculated and feminine patriarchy, the assumption of patriarchal norms by the state, its ideological apparatuses, queers, and women (given the feminization and queerification of the postindustrial workplace) from individual men whose masculinity is no longer associated with being producer and provider as it was under industrial capitalism; instead, they have been interpellated and embourgeoised, like their female counterparts, to define their masculinity as sensitive entrepreneurs, consumers, and or service workers. Black men in this social structure are, paradoxically, emasculated and hyper-masculinized. The former, given their poverty and under-education in the postindustrial social structure they are unable to assume the service-worker, consumer, and entrepreneur emasculated identity required to recursively organize and reproduce their being-in-the-world; the latter, the entertainment industry and athletic domain have become the spheres they are relegated to where their hyper-masculinity is overemphasized as means to the emasculated identity

Black Assimilationism in Neoliberal Globalization

This article, using Mocombeian phenomenological structural theory, argues that since their arrival on North American soil, the constitution of black American identity has been the product of their relations to the means and mode of production within the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism. As such, black Americans, and this includes the so-called black radical tradition, have never been agents in the constitution of their own identities. They have always been and remain (reactionary) pawns of capital seeking, dialectically or negative dialectically, to assimilate in the American social structure. Their assimilation takes place within the social practices of two social class language games (the black bourgeoisie and the underclass) that were historically constituted by different ideological apparatuses, the church and education on the one hand and the streets, prisons, and the athletic and entertainment industries on the other, respectively, of the global capitalist racial-class structure of inequality under American hegemony, which replaced African ideological apparatuses as found in Haiti, for example. Contemporarily, given both groups’ overrepresentation in the ideological superstructures of the American empire, they, antagonistically, have become the bearers of ideological and linguistic domination for all black youth the world-over, especially in the United Kingdom, which have tremendous consequences for their assimilation process. Under the assimilationist imperatives of the black bourgeoisie, the aim is integration and assimilation along the lines of traditional white Protestant agents of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism with an emphasis on bourgeois prosperity, the black nuclear family, entrepreneurialism, and individualism. Conversely, the black underclass seeks integration and assimilation through the pathologies of their structural differentiation within the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism with an emphasis on identity politics, glorification of the self, wealth via sports and entertainment, and the communal thinking of the street life as the basis of black identity and culture