Exploring the racial habitus through John’s story: On race, class and adaptation

Abstract

This article puts Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual tool habitus to work alongside Sara Ahmed’s theory of racialization to conceptualize a racial habitus that is durable but not totally determining. The racial habitus is applied to the narrative account of John, a Black-Caribbean man from North East London, who finds himself a ‘fish out of water’ within a racist society, which confronts him with the reality that he must actively acquire new dispositions, sensibilities and cultural capital, in order to survive. This article explores the cost of this adaptation for people such as John and the uneven processes that enabled his constrained adaptation. It is argued that people such as John are forced to ‘carve’ themselves out against the backdrop of dominant racist discourse in complex and creative ways that highlight the constrained but non-essential nature of racial subjectivities. In doing so, this article argues against perceptions that Pierre Bourdieu is a structural determinist through offering empirically-driven insights that highlight his oft-ignored complex positions on agency.