Leaving Europe, Aspiring Access: Racial Capital and Its Spatial Discontents among the Euro-Maghrebi Minority

Abstract

This article explores the emigration of tertiary-educated EU citizens with North African heritage to Dubai. Longitudinal ethnographic data suggests that leaving Europe was a mobility strategy for dealing with a sense of ‘racial stuckedness’ at home, a status concern undergirding their stagnant socio-economic position. By ‘transnationalizing’ Bourdieu’s seminal conceptual tool kit of the ‘forms of capital’, it contrasts the conversion yields of timely achieved educational credentials, marked by racial friction at home but significantly higher returns after transgressing into more favorable status zones overseas. This differently structured outcome suggests the analytical productivity of an altogether distinct value form, ‘racial capital.’

Keywords:

• Europe
• Maghrebi minority
• second-generation
• migration
• Dubai
• racial capital
• social mobility

Notes

Notes

1 All but one respondent held two parents with North African heritage.

2 I take these ‘online’ data to be integral fragments of social life. Explicit permission was granted for all of the social media postings used in this article.

3 In terms of Islamic sartorial visibility Noura, Latifa and Salwa all went about unveiled, and had never worn the veil in Europe.