Author Archives: mike@standardsmichigan.com

Cultural capital of Christian North America is the result of long-term, intergenerational buildup of widely recognized, high-status cultural knowledge, tastes, skills, credentials, behaviors, and social codes that confer advantages in Western democratic societies — the inventors of modernity — that attract internet-connected young people from all over the world.

In Western democracies, centuries of industrialization, mass education, print culture, elite universities, arts institutions, and global cultural dominance have created dense layers of legitimate (“high-status”) cultural capital: familiarity with classical music, modernist literature, specific linguistic registers, art history references, debate styles, bodily hexis (ways of moving/speaking), and credential hierarchies (Oxbridge/Ivy League degrees, etc.). This capital is subtly transmitted through families, schools, and social networks, functioning as an invisible multiplier of economic and political power.

Leaving American large cities aside as a special case, African nations of origin have not yet had the historical time, stable institutional continuity, or global cultural hegemony needed to accumulate equivalent volumes of such internally and internationally valorized cultural capital. Colonial disruption, shorter periods of mass formal education, and the peripheral position in global symbolic production mean that many of the most rewarded cultural codes remain externally imported rather than indigenously accumulated and naturalized across generations.