ABSTRACT
The concept of white capital corresponds to embodied and institutionalized forms of cultural capital, possible to convert across social space. The value of such white capital depends on context, history, and power. Bodies that qualify as white can usually move and cross borders with ease. This includes white, Western migrants who tend to arrive with a set of privileges in terms of class, nationality, citizenship, and profession that open up new ways of producing and re-producing cultural and other forms of capital. Privileges of whiteness connected to institutions, passports, or bodies are, accordingly, contingent forms of capital for migrants who are socially classified as white. In the wake of a globalized history of race and European colonialism, however, white groups are positioned differently. Thus, not all whitenesses are recognized as transnational white capital. Whereas white Western migrants have access to mobility rights, orientations, and opportunities, Argentinian, Japanese, or Iranian whitenesses are not necessarily identified and/or convertible as capital transnationally. In this logic, whiteness as cultural capital is intertwined with histories of postcolonial racial structures and contemporary neoliberal forms of globalization, meaning that some kinds of white capital are local or intersect with ideas about national belonging, while others are transnational and transferable forms of capital outside their national contexts.
