'Racialised facilitative capital' and the paving of differential paths to achievement of Afro-Trinidadian boys

Interrogating the achievement of Afro-Trinidadian boys requires a theoretical approach which appreciates both structures of race and their embodiment in daily discourse, and the postcolonial non-white majority context of Trinidad.  As such, this paper employs a symbiotic theoretical platform which combines and augments Bourdieu’s Sociology and Critical Race Theory (CRT).  Adjusting for the context of Trinidad a concept of ‘racialised facilitative capital’ is fashioned.  While Bourdieu describes capital as the political building blocks of social order that give meaning to social accumulation and consumption, it is argued that in relation to Trinidad, it is also inherently raced.  This is premised on an understanding of Trinidadian society as pigmentocratically structured, where lighter skin is rewarded with a myriad of social advantages, and darkness denigrated as illegitimate and ‘other’.  Arguably, the premium placed on lighter skin is manifested interdependently in the forms of social, economic and cultural capital.  The operation of capital as politic, not only reflects societal structures of power and domination, but importantly also contributes in the maintenance of said structures.  This thereby presents capital as inseparably both facilitator of social status and as racialised process, giving birth to the term ‘racialised facilitative capital’.