Conditional Rewarding: Unequal Racialized Returns to Cultural Capital

Cultural capital theory has long proposed that class location determines teachers’ responses to students, with less, although increasing, attention to race. Drawing on Calarco’s definition of cultural capital, this ethnographic study examines whether and how first-grade teachers in two schools unequally reward socioeconomically and racially diverse students’ attempts to secure academic advantages. Whether students behave in ways teachers say they expect or attempt to negotiate extra academic advantages, I find that teachers more frequently and effusively reward White and Asian students and more frequently and reproachfully punish Black and Latinx students for similar behaviors. I introduce the term “conditionally rewarding” to describe how cultural capital is unequally rewarded by a salient hierarchical status characteristic other than social class (race). Results support the need to adopt more color-conscious approaches to cultural capital theory and have implications for processes by which educational (dis)advantage is reproduced across student status intersections.