What’s Race Got to Do With It? Disrupting Whiteness in Cultural Capital Research

Abstract

In this essay, we argue that Whiteness is intrinsic to Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, yet it remains unmarked within U.S.-based sociology of education research. As a result, these studies treat race as a tangential issue as opposed to a structure that is foundational to how society is organized and functions. We disrupt this unmarked relationship between Whiteness and cultural capital by (1) reviewing Bourdieu’s work on race, class, and cultural capital, and the application of these concepts in U.S.-based research; (2) examining the educational field as White institutional space and the concerning consequences of conflating cultural capital with Whiteness; (3) discussing the implications for a research framework embedded in a class-based master narrative; and (4) offering suggestions about how to disrupt Whiteness in cultural capital research, including emphasizing the racialized dimension of the habitus, taking an institutional approach and by taking a race-conscious approach to knowledge production in sociology.