Cultural capital could override color in Caribbean racial hierarchy placement

Evidence

Coloreds became the quintessential symbol of Creole society. In combination, gradations of color and the acquisition of cultural capital, particularly education and training, determined location in the social hierarchy of Creole society. As a bridging category, the boundaries between the coloreds, on the one hand, and white Creoles and Afro-Creoles on the other, were ill defined. Africans with cultural capital were able to move up in the hierarchy, while coloreds without were propelled downward. There was a similar blurring of distinctions between the coloreds and Creole whites. Coloreds with cultural and economic capital became absorbed into the social category of the latter. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3224

Categorization

• XREF: Strongly parallels Bourdieu’s cultural capital framework applied to race; also connects to the ‘money whitens’ trope common in Latin American and Caribbean colorism studies.
• SEED: Angle: the historical Caribbean case where education and wealth did (and did not) buy racial reclassification offers a sharp contrast to rigid US hypodescent rules — an essay on how racial boundary permeability varied by economy.