This article extends Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital in relation to 'race' and ethnicity by exploring the significance of black cultural capital among middle class black Caribbean young people in a large state school in south London. Black cultural capital is here defined as the appropriation of middle class values by black ethnics. Based on a 14-month-long ethnography, with specific attention to three focus group and 13 in-depth interviews with middle class black Caribbean young people, this piece outlines the benefits of and backlash to black cultural capital that students encounter from white middle class teachers for deploying black middle class tastes and styles in the classroom. The findings suggest that while black middle class pupils draw on black cultural capital to access advantages in formal school settings, they are also invested in challenging the terms of class privilege that marginalise the black working classes.
In this article, Derron Wallace examines how Black Caribbean youth perceive and experience stop-and-frisk and stop-and-search practices in New York City and London, respectively, while on their way to and from public schools. Despite a growing body of scholarship on the relationship between policing and schooling in the United States and United Kingdom, comparative research on how students experience stop-and-frisk/search remains sparse. Drawing on the BlackCrit tradition of critical race theory and in-depth interviews with sixty Black Caribbean secondary school students in London and New York City, Wallace explores how adolescents experience adult-like policing to and from schools. His findings indicate that participants develop a strained sense of belonging in British and American societies due to a security paradox: a policing formula that, in principle, promises safety for all but in practice does so at the expense of some Black youth. Participants in the ethnographic study learned that irrespective of ethnicity, Black youth are regularly rendered suspicious subjects worthy of scrutiny, even during the school commute.
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