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.