The culture question: a view from the UK

Abstract

Patterson and Fosse's 2015 collection The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth represents a significant provocation to our understanding of persistent racial inequalities amongst African American youth, raising important questions around the relationship between culture, identities and racialized structures. This short article takes a comparative perspective, exploring race, culture and identity from a British standpoint, and highlights some of the dangers of privileging an overly cultural account of racialized inequality. It argues for the inextricability of structure and culture, and for the necessity of a deeper engagement with the historical, political and social dynamics through which culture comes to matter. He wasn't sure he liked everything that was happening, but a lot of it was 'cultural' apparently, and you couldn't object to that, so he didn't. 'Cultural' sort of solved problems by explaining that they weren't really there. (Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time, 2008, 114)

The trouble with culture: A speculative account of the role of gypsy/traveller cultures in ‘doorstep fraud’

“…Cultures are also inherently structured through economic, political, and social 50 relations rather than autonomous of historical context, power relations, and institutional influences (Alexander, 2016). Gypsy/Travellers have been subject to some of the most egregious abuses by the state for centuries.…”

“…Understanding Black Youth similarly points up the dangers of a 'kinder, gentler pathologizing' (Fleming, 2016) where unemployment and offending are regarded as the result of individual volition (Alexander, 2016). Certainly, the negative cultural traits of aggression, hyper-sexuality, paternal abandonment, parenting deficiencies, and a disinclination to work, come to the fore in analysis of black 'disconnected street people', 'working class', and the 'ghetto middle class' over extreme joblessness and infrastructural inadequacies in housing, schools, policing, and the environment.…”

“…A socio-political history of Gypsy/Traveller experience in England reveals a leitmotif of state-sponsored exclusion and criminalization for more than five centuries. As Alexander (2016Alexander ( : 1433 maintains, this is also cultural and we must therefore 'turn our gaze upwards and out at the cultures of those in power -whose cultures comprise the norm, constitute the structures, and therefore whose lives, discourses and actions barely register as 'cultural' at all'.…”

“…It is precisely these institutional restraints, and a pariah status, according to Richardson and Ryder (2012), that have been a constitutive element of Gypsy and Traveller identities, highlighting the integral way in which cultural practices are far from autonomous of racialized structural contexts (Alexander, 2016).…”

“…Certainly, the negative cultural traits of aggression, hyper-sexuality, paternal abandonment, parenting deficiencies, and a disinclination to work, come to the fore in analysis of black 'disconnected street people', 'working class', and the 'ghetto middle class' over extreme joblessness and infrastructural inadequacies in housing, schools, policing, and the environment. Rather less attention is paid to how cultural practices are conditioned by insidious racism and institutional discrimination in welfare and criminal justice (Wilson, 2010) which undermine a 10 meaningful sense of belonging to society, cause pain and degradation to the self, whilst also constituting a means of subaltern resistance to unjust power (Rios, 2009;Alexander, 2016). (Taylor, 2008: vii).…”