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The Meaning and Relevance of Community Cultural Wealth

Fri, April 28, 4:05 to 6:05pm, Grand Hyatt San Antonio, Floor: Second Floor, Lone Star Ballroom Salon C

Abstract

Too often, the cultures of Students of Color are viewed as deficits to overcome–instead of strengths to cultivate. In their attempt to explain unequal conditions or discriminatory practices, deficit models blame Students of Color and their communities for lacking certain necessary attributes to achieve in an already effective and equitable educational system. García and Guerra’s (2004) research acknowledges that deficit thinking permeates US society, and both schools and those who work in schools mirror these beliefs. They argue that this reality necessitates a challenge of personal and individual race, gender and class prejudices expressed by educators, as well as a “critical examination of systemic factors that perpetuate deficit thinking and reproduce educational inequities for students from nondominant sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds” (p. 155). By identifying, analyzing and challenging distorted notions of People of Color, Critical Race Theory (CRT) can offer such an approach to enhance educators perceptions of students valuable strengths. Looking through a CRT lens, the cultures of Students of Color can nurture and empower them (Delgado-Gaitan, 2001; Delgado Bernal, 2002). Culture, here, refers to behaviors and values that are learned, shared, and exhibited by a group of people. Culture is also evidenced in material and nonmaterial productions of a people. Culture as a set of characteristics is neither fixed nor static (Gómez-Quiñones, 1977). For example, with Students of Color, culture is frequently represented symbolically through language and can encompass identities around immigration status, gender, phenotype, sexuality and region, as well as race and ethnicity. Taken together, the CRT challenge to deficit thinking and understanding of the empowering potential of the cultures of Communities of Color, leads to the following description of cultural wealth. Community cultural wealth is an array of knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed and utilized by Communities of Color to survive and resist macro and micro-forms of oppression. A CRT lens can ‘see’ that Communities of Color nurture cultural wealth through at least 6 forms of capital such as aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial, and resistant capital (Delgado Bernal, 1997, 2001; Auerbach, 2001; Stanton-Salazar, 2001; Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001; Faulstich Orellana, 2003). These various forms of capital are not mutually exclusive or static, but rather are dynamic processes that build on one another. Traditional Bourdieuian cultural capital is too narrowly defined by White, middle class values, and is more limited than wealth (Oliver and Shapiro, 1995)—one’s accumulated assets and resources. CRT expands this view. By centering the research, pedagogy, and policy lens on Communities of Color, CRT calls into question White middle class communities as the standard by which all others are judged. This shifting of the research lens to the experiences of People of Color in critical historical context reveals various indicators of capital that have rarely been acknowledged as cultural and social assets in Communities of Color. In these ways, community cultural wealth involves a commitment to empower People of Color to utilize assets already abundant in their communities and to conduct research, teach and develop schools that serve a larger purpose of struggling toward social and racial justice.

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