Dr. Derron Wallace
Abstract
In The Culture Trap, Derron Wallace argues that the overreliance on culture to explain Black students’ achievement and behavior in schools is a trap that undermines the historical factors and institutional processes that shape how Black students experience schooling. This trap is consequential for a host of racial and ethnic minority youth in schools, including Black Caribbean young people in London and New York City.
Since the 1920s, Black Caribbeans in New York have been considered a high-achieving Black model minority. Conversely, since the 1950s, Black Caribbeans in London have been regarded as a chronically underachieving minority. In both contexts, however, it is often suggested that Caribbean culture informs their status, whether as a celebrated minority in the US or as a demoted minority in Britain.
Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic observations, 184 interviews and archives in London and New York City schools, Wallace suggests that the use of culture to justify Black Caribbean students’ achievement obscures the very real ways that school structures, institutional processes, and colonial conditions influence the racial, gender and class inequalities Black youth experience in schools. Wallace reveals how culture is at times used as an alibi for racism in schools, and points out what educators, parents and students can do to change the beliefs and practices that reinforce racism.
Biography
Derron O. Wallace is the Jacob S. Potofsky Chair in Sociology and an associate professor of sociology and education at Brandeis University. He is a sociologist of race, ethnicity, and education who specializes in comparative analyses of structural and cultural inequalities as experienced by Black youth, nationally and internationally. He is the author of The Culture Trap: Ethnic Expectations and Unequal Schooling for Black Youth (Oxford University Press, 2023), recipient of the 2024 Pierre Bourdieu Award for the Best Book in Sociology of Education and the 2024 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award (for Anti-Racist Scholarship) from the American Sociological Association, among other prizes. Wallace has also received Distinguished Early Career Awards from the American Educational Research Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Comparative and International Education Society.
Wallace holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Marshall Scholar and a Gates Cambridge Scholar. His research has been supported by several grants from the Fulbright Commission, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, the National Academy of Education, the Spencer Foundation, and the Stuart Hall Foundation. Wallace is a former community organizer, and his work on youth safety, immigrant rights, fair housing, and public education has been featured by BBC News, BBC Radio, the Guardian,ITV, and NBC News.