Abstract
How can Black English-speaking Caribbean students be viewed as chronic underachievers in the United Kingdom and simultaneously outstanding Black pupils in the United States? Moreover, how can British and US teachers use similar cultural arguments, although in a reverse sense, to assess the supposed extraordinary or limited academic abilities of Black Caribbean students? This is the sociological puzzle that Derron Wallace addresses in The Culture Trap. This ethnography presents an outstanding analysis of why Black Caribbean students and their culture are read in opposing ways in New York and London. In a highly sophisticated manner, this book does not simply offer a critical assessment of how teachers and students view cultural, ethnic, and racial relations. Instead, the author eloquently demonstrates how cultural practices and perceptions cannot be separated from class and gender forces and how these two are closely tied to racialized dynamics informed by colonial and (post)colonial trajectories. The Culture Trap explains how White teachers use culture as an all-encompassing answer to cover their poor understanding of class, ethnic, and gender complexities regarding their students while hiding racist arguments behind apparently cultural comments. In doing so, teachers can claim that the positive or negative treatment of Black Caribbean students is not based on racist views but on cultural judgments. The book is an impressive example of both the promise of the sociological imagination as an intellectual tool, allowing us to understand the confluence of structural forces and individual strategies, and ethnography, a method that offers profound insights into the roots of social problems.
In a classical ethnographic manner, the book starts by offering contrasting vivid memories of the meaning of the ‘culture trap’. First, a White teacher reprimands a second-generation Black Caribbean student living in New York for his low grades. After the student expresses contentment with the low marks, the teacher scolds him again, clearly stating that such grades are not standard for a (Black Caribbean) student like him. Afterward, the author describes a scene in London where a different Black Caribbean student shows great frustration with a low exam grade, asking for a meeting with the White teacher to discuss the reasons behind the mark. The teacher politely accepts the request to meet while openly expressing that such a low grade is rather good for a (Black Caribbean) student like her. Wallace explains that the ‘culture trap’ operates as an essentialist interpretation that situates ethnicity and culture as the two elements that predict minoritized groups’ educational abilities, either to generate success or failure, depending on the national context. The author does a great job of demonstrating how the problem of using culture as an essence (or a trap) is not merely one of individual racism or instances of microaggressions. Instead, the ‘culture trap’ has profound implications for how symbolic and material resources, teachers’ guidance, and institutional support are unequally distributed in these two societies.
The book is divided into two sections. The first section – chapters 1, 2, and 3 – explains the institutional practices and historical dynamics that sustain and reproduce the ‘culture trap’ for second-generation English-speaking Black Caribbean students in London and New York. This section takes a macro approach to elaborate on the political contexts, immigration histories, and educational policies that have created underachieving and model minority communities on each side of the Atlantic. The author clarifies that Black Caribbean students in the USA are considered a model minority almost exclusively in relationship to African American pupils. Instead of using race as an analytical tool, Wallace proposes the term ‘ethnic expectations’ as it permits us to examine with more precision why educators and institutions elevate or vilify Black Caribbean students concerning other poorer or wealthier Black kids (being African American in the USA or recent middle-class African immigrants in the UK, the Black ‘others’). The author does a great job of contextualizing the fundamental role these nation-states have played in shaping ‘ethnic expectations.’ The analysis, for example, elaborates on different historical policies and public debates about immigration in each nation. The historical and political background clarifies why the United Kingdom attracted more working-class and poorer Black Caribbean immigrants while slightly more affluent and better-educated ones arrived in the United States. Based on these key class distinctions, it is unsurprising that Black Caribbean culture in the USA is associated with good reputation and other middle-class markers, while in the UK, it is viewed as ‘street culture’ of limited value in (White middle-class-dominated) academic environments.
The second part of the book – chapters 4, 5, and 6 – is my favorite; it draws on ethnographic data to elaborate on social actors’ concrete mechanisms and strategies to resist, reproduce, and navigate the ‘culture trap’. In doing so, these chapters provide a roadmap for education policy scholars, highlighting the key areas where intervention is necessary to disrupt the reproduction of ethnic, racial, class, and gender inequalities. This section is an outstanding example of the capacity and potential of the ethnographic method to generate rich and complex information, which is a step needed to develop accurate and precise policy recommendations.
Unlike many other studies, this book does not treat social class as a secondary or optional angle to analyze cultural, ethnic, or gender issues. Instead, it demonstrates how the materiality of social class inexorably influences how people view, treat, and express cultural perceptions. To develop a robust and precise interpretation, Wallace coins the concepts of distinctiveness, deference, and defiance to explain the complex interplay between structural forces and individual strategies. For instance, distinctiveness describes how class privilege is frequently conflated with culture. Hence, material resources and formal education, or their lack thereof, are misunderstood as cultural traits defined over ethnic borders (although not the book’s topic, this argument can also be extended to most other ethnic groups in the USA). Students use distinctiveness, collectively or individually, to break free from the ‘culture trap’. Heartbreakingly, however, this freedom only lasts for brief moments. In both national contexts, distinctiveness is a strategic move to gain symbolic forms of power, yet at the cost of solidifying racist and classist perceptions of other minoritized individuals and groups. By introducing this concept, the author aims to highlight the influence of class structures in everyday power dynamics. This perspective allows Wallace to move away from simplistic interpretations that frequently examine culture or race/ethnicity as fields with limited connection with social class and the material conditions of existence that it relentlessly imposes upon us.
Deference captures the commitment to ‘proper behavior’ and ‘good attitude.’ This concept describes the strategic responses that students deploy to gain the rewards associated with good behavior in the context of White middle-class-dominated institutions in two nations. The analysis also examines the punishment related to the lack of deference. In a similar fashion to the previous chapters that interconnect social class with ethnic relations and cultural perceptions, the author doesn’t waste the opportunity to show how the field of education also possesses a strong gender structure. For example, the book explains how the type of attitudes that bring great rewards to male students are viewed as ‘just normal’ expected behavior for female pupils. The latter don’t gain any benefit when displaying these attitudes but provoke an intense backlash when they fail to exhibit them. In the British context, young Black Caribbean women are particularly aware of the double-gendered standard and their further marginalization over these principles. Still, they are equally aware of the high cost they will pay if one of them decides to rebel against this form of gender inequality. In this setting, deference is used to mitigate stigma. In the USA, in contrast, deference helps to not lose the advantages emanating from the valuable confluence of ethnic and class dynamics that fuel teachers’ positive ethnic expectations.
Defiance is the last concept deployed in the ethnographic analysis of the book. It refers to the attitudes that propel individuals to challenge the stereotypes ethnic expectations generate. In the UK, the pervasive nature of negative stereotypes considerably reduces the possibility of individual action. In this setting, Black Caribbean students try to develop communal strategies. Yet, the chance of success is significantly reduced because of people’s limited material and symbolic resources (an argument that reminds us of the power of social class). In opposition, in the United States, students use individual and selective strategies to fight back against racist structures. Tragically, when the stereotypes benefit Black Caribbean students, even at the cost of further alienating other poorer Black communities, the former happily embrace the racist implications of ethnic expectations. Without the class perspective, it would be hard to explain why some Black students celebrate racist tropes. However, the sophistication of the study allows the author to admirably demonstrate the nuances, struggles, and dilemmas of the Black Caribbean community in the two nations.
To sum up, The Culture Trap provides a fascinating and tragic analysis of how 21st-century racism has found subtle and mundane ways to hide behind cultural commentary. This is a timely and needed ethnography that demonstrates how ethnic stereotypes inform teachers’ expectations, producing novel forms of racialized exclusion. In this book, policy-leaning scholars will find a blueprint of the dynamics we need to dismantle to create better school systems.