Racial Capital: symbolic power and domination structure

Abstract

The author presents originality in his view concerning the understanding of racism as a structure, its related consequences and the social and cognitive devices that allow its permanence. The result of an instigating and genuine qualitative research, where the focus group technique was applied to black and white youth, in dialogue with a robust theoretical apparatus, the author constructed the concept of racial capital and presents it as a key to understanding the racism in its conception of structuring structure and a symbolic power and its paradigmatic perspectives. In its development, it demonstrates how racial capital inculcated (inculcates) in bodies and minds the depreciated representation of black people, their culture and ways of life and, above all, how these transitions to the universe of material and economic relations, redefining valuations and keeping intact, in the 21st century, the hierarchies observed in colonial society. Under the rhetoric of citizenship, equality of rights and universality, symbolic devaluation continues to define the place of the black population in societies, in opposition to the population considered White.