What Is Ethnic Capital? A Theoretical Proposal About Identity, Cultural Practice, and Social Reproduction

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: Identity and Difference

Abstract

In this theoretical proposal, I advance a concept of ethnic capital for the sociology of education and ethnicity/race. Ethnic capital, drawing on Bourdieusian concepts of social and cultural capital, refers to the set of social resources particular to an ethnic-minority community. In this paper, I review the explicit concepts of ethnic capital articulated recently in sociological literature, and then argue for general common features of ethnic capital by drawing on scholarship of Asian Americans in school. From this literature, I propose a reframing of “ethnic capital” not as a set of static resources accessible chiefly to a coethnic minority group, but as local-level cultural projects that produce tandem, partnered meanings about ethnicity/race and anticipated class and socioeconomic trajectories.

Author

• David Shuang Song, University of Oklahoma