The Power of the Culture Trap: Highlighting the Importance of Comparative and International Perspectives in Sociology of Education, Derron Wallace, The Culture Trap: Ethnic Expectations & Unequal Schooling for Black Youth: Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2023, 296 pp., £19.99 (paperback), £74.00 (hardback), ISBN 978019753146

This article is part of a series including:

The culture trap: ethnic expectations and unequal schooling for Black youth

The culture trap: ethnic expectations and unequal schooling for Black youth

The culture trap: ethnic expectations and unequal schooling for black youth

The culture trap: ethnic expectations and unequal schooling for black youth

What a treat it has been to read the very thoughtful reviews of The Culture Trap in this symposium. These reviews raise critically important questions that are specific to the book, and also relevant to sociology of education as a field. In this rejoinder, I address several of the salient points critics raised. First, I consider the promise of the comparative case method that undergirds The Culture Trap. Second, I highlight the value of ethnographic observations of subtle and strategic interactions between social actors in schools. Third, I consider the import of relational analyses of ethnic expectations, particularly if Asian, Latinx, Black African, African American and other groups were included in the ethnography. Taken together, I provide details on the analytical and research design decisions that shape The Culture Trap, and point to the implications of the book for comparative and international sociology of education.

Following a conversation with Ms. Bell – a five-foot-one, firebrand Black teacher in South London – that shifted my cultural world on its axis, I could hardly stop thinking about the political factors and social forces that shaped the differing structural positions of Black Caribbeans in Britain and the United States. I soon came to learn that what often seems like casual, commonsense assumptions about Black Caribbean children and young people in each national context are in fact historically situated cultural constructions. As Stuart Hall suggests, ‘commonsense represents itself as the “traditional wisdom or truth of the ages,” but, in fact, it is deeply a product of history’ (Hall, 1986, p. 20). In The Culture Trap, I identify five key historical-structural factors that account for the contrasting representations of Black Caribbean people in Britain and the United States. These include: (1) differing modes of incorporation, (2) immigrant selectivity, (3) the order of group arrival (relative to other Black ethnic groups), (4) the timing of arrival, and (5) continued immigration to replenish ethnicity. I highlight these five not to elevate them as a set of timeless, universal factors applicable to all immigrants – nor to foreclose alternative explanations for immigrant groups. Key models in immigration studies, such as segmented assimilation theory, have long been limited based on their investments in identifying universals – which stereotype groups and wittingly or unwittingly shore up the culture trap (Bashi Treitler, 2015; Clergé, 2019; Imoagene, 2017; Medford, 2019; Wallace, 2023; Warikoo, 2011). To that end, I’m reluctant to think about a set of universal historical-structural factors when groups and group histories vary so significantly in Britain, the United States, and indeed around the world.

The five aforementioned factors highlighted in The Culture Trap were most apposite for the case of Black Caribbeans because they best explain the structural positioning of Black Caribbean immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean in Britain and the United States. In the case of Black Caribbeans from the Francophone or Hispanophone Caribbean moving to Britain and the US, there may be more (or different) historical-structural factors to consider. For Latinx, Asian or even white European immigrants and their progeny, the historical-structural factors would be different, too. This is because colonial histories, and related geo-political factors often differ per group. In sharp contrast to classical immigration studies scholarship, I am of the view that we ought to focus on each group and the time periods in which they emigrate to get at the nuances of their outcomes and experiences.

In The Culture Trap, the promise of the comparative case method is realized not in a set of ‘universal’ historical-structural factors, but in three, widely applicable cultural strategies Black Caribbean youth on both sides of the Atlantic use in pursuit of success. As I note in the final chapter of The Culture Trap, distinctiveness (individual and collective), deference (complementary and compulsory) and defiance (institutional and interpersonal) are not unique to these young people, but are cultural strategies we all deploy, depending on the institutional context, our positions in it, and our relationship to it.

In illuminating the significance of the cultural strategies Black Caribbean young people deployed in pursuit of academic success, it seemed most prudent to prioritize their own perspectives on the value of such strategies. Centering the richness of Black Caribbean young people’s expressed views seemed necessary for puncturing the myth that young people are ill-equipped to fully understand structural and cultural inequalities. But in foregrounding Black youth’s voices and views in The Culture Trap, I decided to be more selective (at least more than I’d originally planned) about my own ethnographic observations in the book. Some of the observations I made of the more subtle interactions between teachers and students, for instance, detailing which individuals and ethno-racial groups teachers paid more attention to than others, and for how long, were relegated to endnotes. Consider endnotes 18 and 19 on page 243, as examples. I worried that without taking this approach, the book would be so long that no one would wish to read it – except Ms. Bell, of course. But there is an all-too-common truth I must also share: as a first-time book author, I naively thought I had to stick to the word count in my book contract, and trimmed dialogue and ethnographic descriptions accordingly. I disclose these details, if only to encourage other early career ethnographers to write the book they want to write – in its entirety.

Finally, I take the point that adding the perspectives of Asian, Latinx, white, Black African and African American pupils about ethnic expectations would have further enriched the study. And, if I could turn back the hands of time, I would pursue an inter-group relational analysis – though it would have complicated an already complex study. What I was committed to revealing through historical and ethnographic analysis in The Culture Trap was the ethnic diversity among Black people – perspectives that US, British and international sociology of education too often ignore. But comparisons within groups can be just as powerful, and are often more urgently needed, than comparisons across groups in order to challenge singular or static representations of any specific group. Accordingly, in The Culture Trap, I point to the relationship between Black Caribbeans, African Americans and Black Africans, and note how solidarity and division among Black people often develop in response to historical political-economic conditions, state policies, and media representations. In addition to The Culture Trap, I marshal an intra-racial relational analysis in articles examining the politics of race, culture, immigration and education – including ones examining the college aspirations of Black Caribbean and Black African youth – as I knew that all the findings that emerged from the study could not be confined in the pages of a single book (Wallace, 2017, 2018a, 2018b, 2019a, 2019b).

I am deeply grateful to the reviewers for their close, careful analysis of The Culture Trap. It is my sincere hope that this book highlights the value of cross-national comparisons, and that future sociological and educational research will prioritize inter-group and intra-group relational analyses to enrich comparative and international sociology of education.

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