Abstract
The Culture Trap by Derron Wallace is an impressive account of how essentialist readings of culture produce ‘ethnic expectations’ resulting in the unequal schooling of Black young people in Britain and America. My contribution to this symposium focuses on what we can learn from The Culture Trap in terms of how we go about doing ethnographic cultural sociology. This focus stems from the following comment made by Michael Burawoy in Ethnography Unbounded, which has stayed with me since I first encountered it more than decade ago: In the social sciences the lore of objectivity relies on the separation of the intellectual product from its process of production. The false paths, the endless labors, the turns now this way and now that, the theories abandoned, and the data collected but never presented – all lie concealed behind the finished product. (Burawoy, 1991: 8)
In addition to these observations, The Culture Trap reminds ethnographers of another important aspect of the knowledge production process which is too often absent in the presentation of the final text: the unexpected, but powerful, role played by ethnographic conversations and encounters in shaping the direction of our research.
When reading The Culture Trap, I was immediately struck by Wallace’s ability to narrate ethnographic interactions with such richness and thick description. These accounts are more than just mere scene setting. While they transport the reader to the localities and, more specifically, the schools in London or New York where Wallace’s comparative research on race, culture, immigration and education was conducted, they also serve an important purpose. Which is to say, they skilfully show the reader the significance ethnographic conversations had in shaping The Culture Trap. This, for example, is evident in Wallace’s narration of a conversation with Pastor Williams, ‘who first urged [Wallace’s] serious consideration of the social and educational history of the Caribbean diaspora’ (p. 53). Perhaps more striking are Wallace’s conversations with Ms. Bell, a Black school teacher at the school in London where for almost a year Wallace was a ‘community organizer’. As Wallace explains, conversations with Ms. Bell, could be moments of ‘deep intellectual awakening’ (p. xx is the page number in the books preface).
It is exactly such unplanned, but profoundly respectful, forms of dialogue and encounter with the people, both inside and outside of the university, that can significantly shape the direction of our research. Alas, such wonderfully inspiring encounters and relationships are too often omitted from the final text that is presented to the reader in favour of neat theoretically informed accounts depicting an objective, critical engagement with academic literature which is then used to chart well-planned, smooth journeys from project inception through to project completion. This is not to say that Wallace’s approach is not theoretically informed. Neither are the ethnographic encounters and conversations offered to us in The Culture Trap a matter of mere happenstance.
As Andrew Smith (2023) has already pointed out, The Culture Trap draws heavily on sociology’s storytelling tradition and, in particular, the work of Stuart Hall and Pierre Bourdieu. Wallace also draws theoretical insights from Caribbean anthropologists such as David Scott and Deborah Thomas. More specifically, The Culture Trap applies learnings from Scott’s practice of ‘discerning and engaged thinking-with-others’, and Thomas’ approach to the ‘co-construction of meaning in social situations’ (p. 20). Documenting the influence of Ms. Bell and others is also evidence of a strong commitment to deep listening that is intended to capture the ‘substance and style, voices and viewpoints, arguments and accents in the analytical and sonic registers’ (p. 19) of those with whom Wallace interacted. This brings me onto another important aspect of the practice of doing ethnographic cultural sociology worth discussing: The Culture Trap reminds us that how we ‘handle’ and present people’s stories, lived experiences, voices and accents, thoughts, understandings and analyses really does matter.
When reading The Culture Trap, I was reminded of Simon Charlesworth’s (2000) A Phenomenology of Working Class Experience, and specifically Charlesworth’s commitment to authentically presenting the voices of his research participants without subjecting their words to forms of academic violence that erases accents and dialects. Indeed, as Wallace explains, The Culture Trap strategically retain[s] the original linguistic, attitudinal and behavioral expressions of participants – without doctoring them to conform to formal academic conventions for rendering speaking as it if were writing – in order to invite readers into the participants’ ways of being and knowing across cultural, institutional and diasporic settings (p. 20).
Indeed, Wallace has not succumbed to the pressures of dominant white, Anglocentric and classed forms of syntax which are too often imposed on scholarly knowledge production. Thus, we must commend, the painstaking work Wallace has undertaken to protect, present and, at times, ‘translate’ the words of participants. Herein lies one of the key strengths of The Culture Trap – its ability to do justice to the thoughts and lived experiences of participants and those who might be thought of as ‘co-theorists’ by ‘hearing, sensing, and feeling what participants experience in their daily lives’ (p. 20).
In listening so attentively, Wallace captures what Du Bois (2015 [1903]) might have referred to as the ‘double consciousness’ of the young Black people who participated in this research and provided the raw ethnographic data which inform Wallace’s analysis of the connected, but spatially contingent, nature of The Culture Trap on both sides of the Atlantic. To borrow a concept from Stuart Hall (1973), Wallace shows that the young people who informed his research were acutely aware of how their bodies, voices, behaviours and perceived intellectual abilities might be ‘decoded’ in raced, gendered and classed ways. When reading The Culture Trap, I found myself reflecting on autoethnographic encounters and conversations with students that I have worked with over the last few years who have similarly developed a real sense of the ways in which they are evaluated through the intersectional construction of ‘aesthetic’, ‘performative’ and ‘moral’ boundaries (Sayer, 2005) which both shape their experiences of classrooms and how they produce knowledge through their coursework. These boundaries serve as the basis for what Wallace refers to as ‘cultural expectations’: that is, the ‘casual, sometimes calculated, and at other times unconscious assumptions’ which rely on the intersection of ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexuality and disability to predict, if not justify, inequities in treatment, opportunity and educational outcomes. As Wallace demonstrates, those whom we teach arrive at such dual self-perceptions from the learnings drawn (often painfully) from lived experiences of education systems, as well as how students react and resist the oppressive nature of schools by expressing agency through everyday forms of ‘deference’ and ‘defiance’.
Wallace also compellingly narrates the way in which everyday cultural racisms undergird notions and perceptions of scholastic ability, competence and propriety, as well as how cultural racism, in the form of ‘ethnic expectations’, are a critical factor in the reproduction and maintenance of inter- and intra-racial divisions, hierarchies and tensions. It might be argued that Wallace skilfully captures the way in which anti-Black racisms, ‘rooted in the history and legacy of two competing Empires’ (p. 57) greases the wheels of systemic racism today. Thus, The Culture Trap is not just a study of contemporary cultural racist discourse. It is a powerful account of how racist discourses become social forces. Put differently, Wallace captures the interaction of the different historically informed components of which systemic racism is composed – that is, racist ideologies, attitudes, emotions, habits and actions, institutional cultural practices and policies – showing the reader how they both fit and work together to perpetuate and maintain patterns of racialized and intersectional inequality in schools.
Concluding Thoughts
The Culture Trap concludes with an account of a conversation between Wallace and Ms. Bell several years after Ms. Bell had asked to be kept informed about research and its findings (p. 189). Reflecting on this conversation, Wallace humbly points out that he ‘didn’t realize it until Ms. Bell questioned me, ethnic perceptions are relevant, implicitly and explicitly, to a host of ethno-racial groups’ (p. 193). Indeed, The Culture Trap draws attention to how ‘ethnic expectations’ shape the schooling of Asian, African American, African and white working-class students. Moreover, Wallace explains that: there is another side of ethnic expectations that is commonly accepted and often unspoken in schools. Consider the surprise expressed when students from Roma, Indigenous, African American, and other historically disadvantaged ethno-racial groups defy long-standing [colonially informed] societal assumptions, or when they rise above expectations. (pp. 192–193)
When reading this passage, I was reminded of Avtar Brah’s reflections on her involvement in ‘Black politics’ in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s in which Brah posed the following question: ‘How do we work through “difference” without creating divisions?’ (see Back and Brah, 2012: 43–44). Like Wallace, Brah also notes the influence that Stuart Hall had on her ‘thinking about difference’ and ‘questions of solidarity’. Interestingly, during one conversation, Ms. Bell ‘leaned forward in her seat and asked, “So Mr. Wallace, tell mi now, wah we ago do ‘bout all dis? [. . .] We need solutions’ (p. 201). In response, Wallace suggests that the biggest problem is ‘not necessarily identifying solutions [. . .] It’s political will [. . .] It’s not like the government and school leaders don’t know what to do’ (p. 201). On this note, The Culture Trap points towards the need to transform teacher education programmes, the importance of abolishing ‘setting’ in Britain and ‘tracking’ in America in favour of implementing and monitoring mixed ‘ability’ classrooms and teaching. Ms. Bell also reminds Wallace of the need for school leaders, teachers, parents and students to institutionally and introspectively ‘examine biases and ultimately eliminate ethic expectations’, further adding that ‘It’s very hard to find teachers and parents who are willing to just admit what they are doing [. . .] the students are willing sometimes (p. 206).
On the question of political will, education systems remain at the forefront of an ongoing culture war on both sides of the Atlantic (see Harris, 2020; Koram, 2020; Lang, 2020; Stubley, 2021), as well as in the white settler colony which today we commonly referred to as Australia (see Wilson, 2021). In the wake of the #BlackLivesMatter protests and cries of ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, we have witnessed politicians, academics and sections of the right-wing media mount a sustained backlash against critical race theory and the decolonization of education systems. The situation already felt bleak before we saw the response to student protests calling for an immediate cease fire in Gaza. In such moments I typically turn to Gramsci who once wrote that: I have become convinced that even when everything is or seems lost, one must quietly go back to work, starting from the beginning (cited in Thomas, 2010: 103).
In conclusion, Wallace draws on Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz’s ‘archaeology of the self’ to argue for: The consistent investment in this work to change ideologies and institutions, beliefs and behaviors, and attitudes and actions is how we eliminate and dismantle the culture trap. (p. 207)
Substantively engaging with The Culture Trap and bringing it into dialogue with some of the literatures discussed here, might just provide the resources which could shape how we, as educators and researchers, go back to doing anti-racist, anti-colonial work. We might start with small steps such as undertaking an unflinching self-review of our own biases. We might reflect on how we do cultural sociology and how we listen and engage with the people we meet on our teaching and research journeys. We might draw on the theoretical and conceptual resources which Wallace offers to us to reflect and spark conversations about the spaces where we work and how different biases and expectations shape the everyday lives of our students and colleagues. Perhaps these small steps, at a moment when things feel bleak, might just help us set an altogether different kind of trap which lays the foundations for a counter-hegemonic education system and society intent on radically overhauling racism and its intersection with other modalities of oppression.