ABSTRACT
This chapter examines cultural capital, the social and economic factors that contribute to the cultural capital young people receive from their families and communities and how gender, race, and ethnicity affect cultural capital. A cultural capital emerged of racial superiority because there must be "natural" reasons diat people of one color labored and those of another color profited from that labor. Leo R. Ward in 1955 published an influential essay on the American rural value pattern, as what he viewed as the essence of America that rural once embodied seemed to be slipping away in it, he conflated rural with farmers. Individual and social problems arise when cultural capital is given up or stamped out. Indeed, it is impossible to completely appropriate the cultural capital of the dominant group. Cultural capital is a filter through which people regard the world around them, defining what is problematic and, therefore, can be changed.
