Remind me why do we want (cultural) capital, again? As I read both Yosso (2005) and Rodela & Rodriguez-Mojica (2019) I keep thinking about Audre Lorde’s words: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. She also talks about how doing so only narrows the parameters of change that are possible and allowable and does not enable genuine change. The concern I have in reading this weeks’ texts is the danger of language and how powerful language can be through discourse in the use and implications of words for the realities of people. There are limits that are placed by using the framework of capitalism to discuss something inherently anti-capitalistic– community and indigenous cultural knowledges. The semantics of framing “Outsider”, mestiza, an transgressive knowledges as (cultural) “capital” is dangerous. As capital in a system of capitalism is capitalized—and that is exactly what is happening and what ends up happening from using a framework of oppression to make sense of indigenous knowledges, that persist in opposition to intersectional, colonial oppressions. August, I hear you– to then go on and discuss SIX forms of capital and call it community cultural “wealth” (again a capitalistic term) is entirely counter intuitive. I am new to this theory but have often heard “cultural capital” thrown around by educators as a justification for why ELL, predominantly non-white immigrant students from primarily working class families struggle in public school. And ultimately is used to promote assimilationist pedagogies and goals for those who do not fit the white-middle to upper class-english speaking-american student typology. At the same time, my concerns may be reduced to a disdain to semantics (although I see it as much more nuanced than simply semantics). I do want to recognize the insight that Yosso (2005) and Rodela & Rodriguez (2010) (through counternarratives) provide. Maintaining hope and dreams (aspirational), strengths as a multilingual (Linguistic) , cultural knowledge that hold communal history, memory, and intuition (familial), strength in relationships  (social), navigating spaces with resilience (navigational), and inherent resistance towards oppressions (resistant) among communities of color all still contribute to how we are theorizing about radical care. Radical care draws on these six areas that Yosso (2005) identifies and Rodela & Rodriguez (2019) extend in the counterstories of Latinx School Administrators, however to view them as “capital” and not integral components to the critical, radical care we imagine defeats the purpose. I am sure there are people out there in the world talking about what I am trying to say here much more articulately but I hope you get what I’m tryna say.

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