Caribbean nationalism inverted racial hierarchy by making cultural capital outrank whiteness.

Evidence

In the Caribbean, purity has emerged as a boundary defining and maintaining principles separating Creole society from the external world. It was fashioned historically out of the discourse of difference that authenticated colonial society. Eventually, notions of purity became the basis for separating the “local” Creole white grouping from the foreign presence of the “pure” European. This distinction became quite important in assertions of cultural paramountcy made by the national elite. It allowed the accommodation of the white local elite in the nationalist construct. More importantly, it catapulted blacks and coloreds with cultural capital into a position of social ascendance over the local white descendents of the merchant plantocracy. This was symbolically important for nationalist and postcolonial contestation of white supremacy. Having demonstrated the supremacy of culture, the nationalist elite could make claims to inclusion in a new global order of North Atlantic universalism based pre-eminently on cultural grounds. By such a demonstration, they were able to reject claims to racial supremacy that historically privileged whites. Manifest demonstration of acquired European cultural forms as both symbolic capital and cultural capital (acquired knowledge, skill, and capabilities) has become the sole basis of claims to power and privilege in nationalist formation. These cultural acquisitions are at the root of the European aspirations of the contemporary nationalist elite. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3229

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory and the concept of cultural capital via Bourdieu — a mechanism for how colonized elites re-legitimize power after decolonization.
• SEED: Essay angle: how nationalist movements in the Caribbean weaponized ‘purity of culture’ to displace white plantocracy, an inversion of European racial logic that paradoxically kept European cultural forms supreme.
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox is dense: the anti-racial-supremacy move re-installs European cultural supremacy — a double inversion worth sitting with.