Subcultural capital: a contentious tool of social mobility among urban Jamaican youth

This paper examines how young Black Jamaicans from urban working-class backgrounds negotiate social mobility within a status quo that has historically undervalued their subcultural capital. Based on a two-year ethnographic study of a low-achieving public secondary school, the study combines participant observation and interviews with 13 boys labelled ‘delinquent’, alongside teachers, administrators, and other staff. Using schooling as a lens, the paper shows how institutional demands for respectability constrain Black urban youth while simultaneously creating conditions through which movement and meaning are sustained. These dynamics elucidate McCallum and Atterberry’s conceptualisation of Black motility – improvisational movement under constraint aimed at securing visibility, value, and social recognition. The paper further traces how reggae and dancehall mediate ‘sufferation’, laying the cultural groundwork through which Black urban motility is operationalised and alternative pathways to social status gain legitimacy. It then theorises boasiness as an emergent mobility mechanism in which wealth and audacity increasingly rival achievement ideology as markers of legitimacy. The paper argues that systemic exclusion does not merely deepen marginalisation but can also catalyze subcultural innovation that recalibrates the substance of social mobility itself.