Abstract
Wealth, often referred to as capital by economists, has many dimensions when applied to race and education even in a rural tidewater community in North Carolina. This book, in addition to weighing financial capital, looks at the important roles of social and cultural capital. The narratives of both Hughes and Leary provide insights into this expanded meaning of capital.1
Why do the refrains of progressive educational movements seem lacking in the diverse harmonies, the variegated rhythms, and the shades of tone expected in a truly heterogeneous chorus?
—Lisa Delpit
School desegregation … is hardly an educational issue. Rather, school desegregation is better understood as an issue of the political economy of this country …
—George Noblit and Thomas Collins
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Notes
The first epigraph has been taken from Lisa Delpit, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (New York: The New Press, 1995): 11
George W. Noblit and Thomas W. Collins, “Patience and Prudence in a Southern High School: Managing the Political Economy of Desegregated Education,” in Particularities: Collected Essays on Ethnography and Education, ed. G.W. Noblit (New York: Peter Lang, 1999): 157–8.
Some scholars have criticized the use of capital in these two sociological concepts for good reason; the use of capital normalizes capitalism and its attendant values—competition, individualism, and wealth; these terms serve to legitimize the role of economic capital in social and political relationships; using economic discourse to explain political participation undermines democratic action; and such terms serve to privatize public communication. See, e.g., Stephen Samuel Smith and Jessica Kulynych, “It May be Social, But Why is it Capital? The Social Construction of Social Capital and the Politics of Language,” Politics Society 30 (2002): 149.
Erin McNamara Horvat, Elliot B. Weininger, and Annette Lareau, “From Social Ties to Social Capital: Class Differences in the Relations Between Schools and Parent Networks,” American Educational Research Journal 40 (2003): 323.
V.P. Franklin, “Introduction,” in Cultural Capital and Black Education: African American Communities and the Funding of Black Schooling, 1865 to the Present, ed. V.P. Franklin and Carter Julian Savage (Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2002): xi–xx
See, e.g., Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005).
Katherine S. Newman, A Different Shade of Gray: Midlife and Beyond in the Inner City (New York: The New Press, 2003): 44.
Prudence L. Carter, Keeping it Real: School Success Beyond Black and White (New York: Oxford Press, 2005): 10.
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster: 2000).
Barbara Arneil, Diverse Communities: The Problem with Social Capital (New York: Cambridge University Press: 2006): 181.
Tara J. Yosso, “Whose Culture Has Capital?: A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth,” Race Ethnicity and Education 8 (2005): 75.
Jean Ann Madsen and Etta R. Hollins, “African American Teachers’ Roles in School Desegregation: At the Dawn of a New Millennium,” Urban Education 35 (2000): 6.
W.H. Watkins, “Can Institutions Care? Evidence from Segregated Schooling of African American Children,” in Beyond Desegregation: The Politics of Quality in African American Schooling, ed. M.J. Shujaa (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 1996): 5–27.
The idea of ‘ancestral wisdom’ as a valuable aspect of cultural capital comes from Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, I’ve Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation (New York: Penguin Books, 1994).
Shernaz B. Garcia and Patricia L. Guerra, “Deconstructing Deficit Thinking: Working with Educators to Create More Equitable Learning Environments,” Education and Urban Society 36 (2004): 150–68.
Etta R. Hollins, Culture in School Learning: Revealing the Deep Meaning (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1996).
Wendell Berry, “The Work of Local Culture,” What Are People For? (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990): 154.
Della Pollock, “Telling the Told, Performing like a Family,” The Oral History Review 18 (1990): 69.
See, e.g., Delpit, Other People’s Children; Ruben Donato, The Other Struggle for Equal Schools: Mexican Americans during the Civil Rights Era (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997)
Theresa McCarty, A Place to be Navajo: Rough Rock and the Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, 2002)
Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina 1996).
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© 2009 Kate Willink
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Willink, K. (2009). From Social and Cultural Capital to Social Change. In: Bringing Desegregation Home. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100572_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100572_4
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