Prudence Carter's Theory Of Cultural Capital

Within any culture, there is a set of rules that must be followed to maintain legitimacy among the social consortium; a cultural rubric designed to establish authenticity and worthiness for those seeking entry. In order for one to gain access, they must have a significant amount of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu deemed as cultural capital.
For many African Americans, cultural capital has become a way to assert class, race, and identity, in addition to acting as a conduit for social and economic mobility. In two distinctive ethnographies, sociologists Patricia Banks and Prudence Carter confirm this ideology by examining the way that black middle class and low-income African American youth apply cultural capital respectively. Despite economic,

Carter references the lack of research that explains how individuals within lower class neighborhoods use their cultural means beyond the context of the dominant cultural ideology, which frames her study. The dominant cultural ideology has predominantly been established through the lens of middle class whites and applied as a way to understand how blacks, particularly, assimilate in order to improve their socioeconomic position within the conventional social hierarchy. However, according to Carter, this limited viewpoint disregards the significance of social stratification amongst cultural and social groups within the lower class specifically. She also asserts the importance of upwards mobility within the context of culture itself and how youth create new forms of capital to signify their rank amongst their age group while acknowledging the importance of individual worth and identity. Carter ultimately proves the limits of applying a cultural relativist approach to understanding subcultures and how they use their unique capital for status

To elaborate, Carter details how for some of the youth she studied, certain cultural offerings: music, attire, and language function as a way to establish blackness (Carter). Marcus, one of the youths that took part in the study shared, “Like you know how the White people usually talk like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s cool’ and all that stuff. If a Black person goes, ‘Oh that’s butter’ or ‘that’s phat,’ that’s like acting black. That’s what that means.” Also, Pashan, another youth revealed when asked about the ramifications of someone entering her community space listening to Beethoven [which is not normally connected to black musical interests,] “I’d be like get out of here especially if they came….with a big radio listening to Beethoven. That is not ‘flavors’.” For these youth, cultural capital in the form of collective shared self-expression through clothing, musical tastes and language are a means to establish a cultural lexicon that they connect to blackness. Consequently, these youth do not use their cultural capital as a means to exclude those who are not black, but a means to reaffirm and redefine blackness in terms that they understand as a racially marginalized group. It can also be seen as a way to understand a more contemporary definition of blackness in contrast to older, middle class blacks. Ultimately, both economic groups