Theorizing race and cultural autonomy in education: An extension of differentiation and integration in Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour

While Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977) has been widely used and cited in the four decades since its publication, not all applications engage with the text in equal depth. Within the American sociology of education, the text has often been cited for its empirical findings rather than its theoretical approach (Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey, 1998; Carbonaro, 2005; Farkas et al., 2002; Morris, 2005; Ream and Rumberger, 2008; Sohn, 2011; Tyson, 2011). Willis’s complex ethnography is reduced to a singular finding: rejection of education because of participation in an oppositional culture reproduces class position. With this citation, youth opposition to education is reduced to a factor in the reproduction of inequality rather than a collective cultural process. In failing to engage in detail with his theorization, the American sociology of education has often missed Willis’s central theoretical move: the treatment of cultural production as autonomous from social reproduction.

While larger patterns such as the heavily quantitative and theory-light character of much recent empirical work and the dominance of Bourdieu in work on class inequality play a role (Brint, 2013; Jæger, 2011; Lamont, 2012), this paper focuses on how a collective misreading of Willis’s theoretical approach has contributed to the lack of work theorizing culture as autonomous from structure within the American sociology of education. Specifically, Willis (1977) is often identified as a counterpart to a group of American scholars researching the oppositional culture of black, Hispanic/Latino and other ethnic and racial minority youth (Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey, 1998; Farkas et al., 2002; Tyson, 2011). This interpretation locates Willis’s (1977) Learning to Labour as a white working-class example of the oppositional culture argument advanced by the cultural ecological approach of Fordham and Ogbu (1986; see also Ainsworth-Darnell and Downey, 1998; Carbonaro, 2005; Deluca and Rosenbaum, 2001; Farkas et al., 2002; Foley, 2005; Tyson, 2011). Emerging contemporaneously to Learning to Labour, Ogbu’s cultural ecological theory (1974, 1978) began an ongoing empirical debate within the American sociology of education about whether the formation of oppositional countercultures by black and Hispanic/Latino students contributes to the academic achievement gap (Farkas et al., 2002; Tyson, 2011). However, Willis’s theorization of the relationship between culture and structure differs significantly from the theorization of this relationship within both cultural ecological theory and approaches developing out of this theory. By treating culture as autonomous from structure, Willis theorizes the production of oppositional cultures as collective, creative and locally situated while other approaches have treated oppositional cultures as static and structurally determined.

Responding to this collective misreading, this paper argues that Willis’s theoretical approach has the potential to challenge and extend current cultural approaches to racial inequality within the American sociology of education. In making this argument, I first consider three dominant cultural approaches to racial inequality in schools, namely cultural ecological theory (Fordham and Ogbu, 1986; Ogbu, 1974), segmented assimilation theory (Portes and Zhou, 1993) and the modified-Bourdieusian analysis of Carter (2005). I focus on segmented assimilation theory and the modified-Bourdieusian approach of Carter (2005) both because these two approaches developed in response to cultural ecological theory but also because these approaches jump-started a recent cultural turn within the American sociology of education more broadly (Brint, 2013; Warikoo and Carter, 2009). I argue both cultural ecological theory and segmented assimilation theory treat culture as predetermined and unitary and opposition as an outcome rather than a process. While the modified-Bourdieusian approach of Carter (2005) moves away from a deterministic and static treatment of culture, this approach leaves underdeveloped the relationship between minority youth’s peer cultures and the cultural logic of schools.

Turning to Learning to Labour, I trace how Willis offers a solution to these weaknesses in existing approaches through theorizing an autonomous cultural level on which both institutional cultural logics are articulated and countercultures are formed. Willis (1977) offers a conceptual starting-point for theorizing the relationship between the cultural logic of schools and the emergence of student countercultures: the concepts of differentiation and integration. In forming oppositional countercultures, youth differentiate themselves from schools through the collective reinterpretation of institutional logics drawing upon working-class culture. In response to differentiation, teachers, administrators, and policymakers engage in integration, looking to re-establish an imperilled educational exchange.

To demonstrate the utility of these concepts, this paper closes by applying Willis’s theorization to the case of working-class black boys in American schools, taking an intersectional approach to the reproduction of the racial order and class structure. To treat the relationship between culture and structure as autonomous and dynamic rather than predetermined requires that we consider how cultural processes play out ‘at different strengths in different situations at different times’ (Willis, 1977: 85). Willis’s concepts are best treated as starting-points for theorizing processes that are historically and spatially contingent. I argue that Willis’s discussion of the counterculture formed by West Indian boys in Learning to Labour suggests that we should view these processes as shaped by the intersection of a group’s race, class and gender positionality. Within the American context, I suggest that race alters the temporality of differentiation, with working-class black boys perceived as noncompliant and disruptive by teachers prior to participating in high school oppositional countercultures. In response, some working-class black boys develop strategies of integration, managing their cultural performances to re-establish the terms of the educational exchange. These strategies of integration may help facilitate class mobility for black youth.

Cultural approaches to race and ethnic inequality in education

The theoretical approach Willis developed in Learning to Labour emerged through a critique of (then) dominant theories explaining how schools reproduce class inequality. Willis viewed correspondence theories as overly deterministic in their treatment of culture (Willis, 1977, 1981). Per Willis, correspondence theories treated culture as either a set of ‘transferred internal structures’ or as ‘the passive result’ of dominant ideology (Willis, 1977: 4). Culture is theorized as static and secondary to structure and nondominant youth are constructed as passive receptacles of adult education and culture (Willis, 1977). Within the American sociology of education, theories explaining racial inequalities in schools using culture as a mechanism have often been the target of similar critiques (Nasir and Hand, 2006; Warikoo and Carter, 2009). Central to the development of a cultural approach to racial inequalities in schools has been a debate over the role of oppositional cultures of nondominant youth. Placing Willis’s theorization in conversation with this debate challenges and expands this cultural approach.

Cultural ecological theory

Cultural ecological theory positions cultural orientations towards education as the result of a group’s historical trajectory and macrostructural location (Ogbu, 1974, 1983; Ogbu and Simons, 1998). As minority groups face instrumental, relational and symbolic discrimination based on their position in the racial order, they develop cultural models to navigate that discrimination characterized by frames of reference, folk theories of success, degree of trust in white people and institutions and beliefs about the effect of adopting white language and behaviour on minority identity (Ogbu, 1974; Ogbu and Simons, 1998). Ogbu’s theorization distinguishes between the cultural models developed by involuntary minorities and voluntary or immigrant minorities. The former are descendants of groups incorporated into the United States via slavery, conquest or colonization, namely American Indians, African Americans, early Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans, while voluntary minorities are the children of immigrants who arrived voluntarily to the United States in search of opportunity, such as post-1965 Chinese, Indians or Japanese (Ogbu and Simons, 1998).

Ogbu argued these two groups have different sociocultural responses to discrimination and cultural invisibility. Voluntary migrant groups maintain faith in dominant American ideologies of success by using conditions in their home country as a frame of reference, perceiving they are more fortunate in the United States and will eventually achieve success (Ogbu, 1974; Ogbu and Simons, 1998). In response to the contradiction between American ideologies and concrete experiences of discrimination and exclusion, involuntary minorities culturally invert American values and embrace an oppositional culture. A key facet of this difference is how groups symbolically respond to demands that they adopt white culture and language to succeed in dominant institutions. For voluntary migrant groups, acquiring white culture and language is viewed as additive. Learning English or adopting white behaviours is viewed as a strategy for enabling success that does not threaten minority culture or identity. Involuntary minorities view the adoption of white culture and language as subtractive, leading to the loss of minority identity.

For Ogbu, schools become one specific site where minorities’ cultural models are used. Youth are socialized by their parents and communities to adopt attitudes and behaviours consistent with the group’s cultural model of society (Ogbu, 1983; Ogbu and Simons, 1998). Voluntary migrant students see school success as a path to upward mobility and willingly adopt the behaviours and strategies of middle-class whites. Involuntary minorities hold ambivalent attitudes towards education, believing in the value of education abstractly but rejecting schooling in practice through recreating their group’s oppositional culture within the school. Fordham and Ogbu (1986) contend that black students come to reject behaviours such as embracing school curriculum, speaking standard English and receiving good grades to avoid the label of ‘acting white’. Through seeking to maintain racial and ethnic distinctiveness by avoiding school-sanctioned behaviours, involuntary minority children set themselves on a path to lower achievement in school and thus reproduce their parents’ structural position (Fordham and Ogbu, 1986).

Segmented assimilation theory

The segmented assimilation theory developed by Portes and Zhou (1993) builds upon Ogbu’s cultural ecological model by introducing the possibility that youth’s cultural models can divert from those of their parents. Segmented assimilation theory uses an integrated cultural and structural model to explain the outcomes of post-1965 immigrant groups. Portes and Zhou (1993) view neighbourhood, racial status, labour market opportunities, and parental education as key structural factors predicting whether the second generation achieves upward or downward mobility. Culture enters the model with respect to the attitudes and behaviours racial and ethnic minority immigrant children adopt in schools.

Portes and Zhou (1993) adopt the basic premise of cultural ecological theory that immigrant and racial minority communities hold diverging cultural orientations towards education. However, whereas Ogbu views the cultural model of voluntary immigrant youth as determined by their parents and community, Portes and Zhou (1993) argue that the cultural orientation towards education immigrant youth adopt is also influenced by their school peers. For immigrant youth attending school in white middle-class neighbourhoods or immigrant ethnic enclaves, immigrant parents’ socialization of youth into a cultural model advocating for the adoption of white behaviours aligns with the cultural attitudes towards white behaviours held by school peers. However, in inner-city schools populated by black youth, the home culture of immigrant children conflicts with the youth culture. Immigrant youth come to reject parental socialization and adopt the ‘negative cultural orientation’ of their school peers (Portes and Zhou, 1993: 81). Like their black peers, immigrant youth reject the adoption of white behaviours and attitudes, resulting in lower educational achievement and a path of downward mobility.

Both cultural ecological theory and segmented assimilation theory seek to integrate cultural and structural explanations for racial and ethnic inequalities in achievement. Ogbu’s cultural ecological approach positions cultural models as emerging from communities’ response to contradictions between their lived experiences and American dominant ideology. However, his use of a master narrative results in the treatment of structural forces as determinative of cultural responses. Community’s cultural models are theorized as unitary outcomes rather than as emerging from a dynamic process. Segmented assimilation theory reduces the determinism of Ogbu’s model through introducing the possibility of youth’s cultural models diverging from those of their parents. However, Ogbu’s theorization of oppositional countercultures as unitary is unchallenged. Oppositional countercultures remain treated as an outcome of structural location rather than as emerging through a process of contestation.

A modified-Bourdieusian approach

A third cultural approach to racial inequalities in education challenges the treatment of culture as determined by structure. The modified-Bourdieusian approach developed by Carter (2005) separates cultural production from social reproduction, arguing that culture in general and peer cultures specifically have a ‘social structure and underlying logic of [their] own’ (2005: 9). Whereas Ogbu’s analysis treats both dominant and nondominant cultures as unitary models socialized into the individual, Carter (2005) adopts a view of individuals as cultural actors who utilize multiple and contradictory cultural repertories in pursuit of a variety of projects. Rather than the result of parental and community socialization, youth’s cultural performances are driven by practices of distinction between and within different racial peer groups.

Carter utilizes a modified-Bourdieusian approach to school and youth cultures. For Bourdieu, schools reinforce a hierarchy of cultural meanings that privileges dominant culture over others. Social reproduction occurs as educators reward those students who possess cultural capital, or knowledge of the cultural codes of dominant and mainstream society. Carter diverges from Bourdieu in introducing the concept of nondominant cultural capital, which she defines as ‘sets of tastes, appreciations, and understandings… used by lower status group members to gain “authentic” cultural status position in their respective communities’ (2005: 49). Nondominant cultural capital emerges from the process that social groups use to create and police internal cultural boundaries separating ‘real’ and ‘not real’ members and facilitates social belonging and respect within low status groups (Carter, 2005: 49). Within schools, students possessing dominant cultural capital are rewarded by teachers and administrators while students possessing nondominant cultural capital are subject to profiling and labelling by teachers due to cultural mismatch (Carter, 2005).

Emphasizing the heterogeneity within racial groups, Carter identifies three forms of response to this cultural mismatch as black and Hispanic performances and styles coded as racially authentic by youth are read as incompatible with school success by teachers. Noncompliant believers embrace educational achievement abstractly but reject teachers’ behavioural expectations as being incompatible with their own racial and ethnic identities and performances (Carter, 2005). Cultural mainstreamers take the opposite stance; accepting the dominant cultural repertoire, they embrace normative behaviour and language coded as white (Carter, 2005). Cultural straddlers negotiate schooling by holding onto nondominant cultural styles while also enacting dominant cultural codes. Through code-switching based on context, cultural straddlers meet both peers’ expectations for racial authenticity and the school’s dominant culture-informed expectations for student behaviour (Carter, 2005). For Carter, straddling the expectations of peers and teachers is a cultural skill set that can enable class mobility for minority youth, giving them the opportunity to acquire dominant cultural capital without the negative cost of social isolation. However, not all youth have equal access to enacting this performance strategy. For one, Carter notes the accomplishment of the ‘cultural straddler’ strategy was easier for girls than boys. The performance expectations of both teachers and peers are not just racialized but gendered. The successful performance of ‘authentic’ black masculinity was particularly difficult to reconcile with the expectations of teachers.

The modified-Bourdieusian analysis of Carter (2005) avoids the structural determinism of cultural ecological approaches by analysing the independent logic of racial and ethnic minority youth’s peer cultures. Carter (2005) introduces the concept of nondominant cultural capital to make a conceptual distinction between the cultural codes needed to access dominant groups and institutions and the cultural codes required to prove authentic membership in minority peer groups. However, while this theorization challenges the determinism of earlier models, Carter’s use of a dual model of cultural capital obscures the relationship between youth peer cultures and the cultural logic of education as an institution. The capital metaphor posits students as engaged in two separate and distinct cultural exchanges: one with their peers in minority communities and one with dominant institutions. Thus, while Carter effectively foregrounds how youth peer cultures engage in collective practices, the relationship between peer cultures and schools as institutions requires deeper theoretical attention. Willis’s theorization of cultural production provides one conceptual starting-point for considering this relationship.

Willis’s theorization of cultural production in schools

In Learning to Labour, Willis makes the key theoretical move of separating cultural production from social reproduction; both class cultures and institutions operate with an independent logic. Proceeding from this theoretical base, Willis argues that the struggle between schools and the countercultures of minorities is one of mediated rather than direct conflict. Oppositional countercultures emerge through the conflict of informal groups of youth with the logic of the education system. The key theoretical terms of differentiation and integration conceptualize the process through which participants in countercultures separate themselves from the educational exchange and how school actors respond.

Willis’s theory is grounded in his treatment of the cultural level as autonomous from structure. He defines three characteristics of this autonomous cultural level. First, culture is comprised of varieties of symbolic systems and articulations, with contradictions and distinctions between the various forms. Second, cultural production is carried out by the informal social group through direct and profane symbolic investigation. Lastly, subjectivities are formed and identities are confirmed within the context of the cultural level.

Proceeding from the separation of cultural production from social reproduction, Willis develops theorizations of class cultures and the cultural logic of institutions. Class cultures are not determined by economic structures but emerge specifically and concretely through struggles with other groups, institutions and tendencies. These cultures produce pools of styles, meanings and possibilities with common themes. However, these themes are shared between different local groups when they face common structural problems and confront similar ideologies. Willis also argues that institutions have their own properties manifested at the levels of the official, the pragmatic and the cultural. Institutions provide official accounts of their purpose that are defined in relation to views of society. At the pragmatic level, these formal accounts are mediated by the agents and functionaries who run institutions and are mainly interested in their day-to-day problems and survival. Lastly, the clients of institutions create new cultural forms as they enter conflict with both the formal and pragmatic levels.

Differentiation, integration and the school paradigm

Proceeding from this theoretical base, Willis argues the struggle between the state school in advanced capitalism and oppositional working-class countercultures is one of mediated class conflict. Schools have their own local, institutional logic that is related to but ultimately separate from larger class logics. Oppositional countercultures emerge through the conflict of informal groups of youth with the localized logic of the education system. While countercultures draw upon class cultures in this conflict, they develop their own independent qualities. Willis uses the terms differentiation and integration to conceptualize the processes through which these countercultures emerge in opposition to the paradigm of the school and through which school actors respond to the threat presented by countercultures.

Willis views the exchange as the central logic establishing the paradigm of the school. The idea of the teacher, not the personality of the individual teacher, is what commands authority from students. The teacher provides knowledge and guidance in exchange for the student’s respect and submission to control. The rarer status of knowledge as a commodity is what endows the teacher with moral authority. This exchange is further legitimated via its key place in a series of successive exchanges. Students exchange ‘knowledge for qualifications, qualified activity for higher pay, and pay for goods and services’ (Willis, 1977: 64). This exchange, open to view as fair, operates as the basis for consent.

The exchange itself is located within a larger framework establishing the main axis of power within the school, namely the superiority of the teacher. This framework provides the concrete referents, external signs and visible supports to reinforce the exchange when it is successful and to enforce definitions when the exchange itself fails. The education framework is upheld in part through the suppression of other or private meanings that might tilt the axis of power by devaluing teachers’ knowledge or by justifying responses other than politeness or respect (Willis, 1977). In the suppression of these meanings, the privacy of students becomes a threat. As the role of the student in the classroom exchange is to be engaged and free of reservation, the private must be exposed and destroyed. But as Willis (1977) emphasizes, the private is not just individual but social. Nondominant forms of experience and identity are defined as informal and outside the educational paradigm. In the normal course of things, the axis of power in a school is maintained through relatively little direct coercion but through ‘enormous constriction of the range of moral possibilities’ (Willis, 1977: 66).

Student countercultures emerge through a process of differentiation from the school as an institution. Through this process, the central exchanges of the educational paradigm are separated and reinterpreted. Differentiation is experienced by those involved as a ‘collective process of learning whereby the self and its future are critically separated from the pre-given institutional definitions’ (Willis, 1977: 63). For questioning of the educational paradigm to occur, the previously suppressed private areas of the self are opened and shared. As this occurs, other ways of viewing the self and other exchanges become visible as possibilities. The paradigm is destabilized as the equivalency of the exchanges of submission for knowledge and knowledge for qualifications are rejected. The knowledge the teacher offers is questioned and found lacking. As it is no longer viewed as an equivalent in the exchange, the authority of the teacher is no longer viewed as legitimate.

While experienced by those involved as a process of self-discovery, the emergence of a counterculture through differentiation is a collective process. The informal group, specifically the peer group, is the ‘basic unit’ of the counterculture and the ‘fundamental and elemental source of its resistance’ (Willis, 1977: 23). As the private self is rediscovered, identification with the institution is replaced with the social identity of being part of the group. Through countercultural participation, a double interpretive capacity develops as ‘public descriptions and objectives’ are registered but looked beyond to be interpreted instead via the countercultural logic of the group (Willis, 1977: 25). Countercultures also produce practices and styles through ‘struggle with the constrictions of available forms’ (Willis, 1977: 124). In opposition to the logic of the school, they produce antagonistic behavioural, visual, and stylistic forms of expression.

In response to differentiation and the fear of differentiation, teachers, administrators and policymakers engage in processes of integration. Whereas differentiation is the intrusion of the informal group into the formal logic of the institution, integration is ‘the progressive constitution of the informal into the formal or official paradigm’ (Willis, 1977: 63). Through integration, school actors attempt to re-establish the paradigm of the school on broader grounds. Integration takes the form of both modifications that emerge from below, developed by teachers themselves, and of modifications that emerge from above, such as within policy conversations. From below, Willis points to how teachers attempt to reintegrate the threatened paradigm through the redefinition of what is expected from students and what knowledge is to be provided, with lower standards of respect and only that knowledge judged as useful to students offered. From above, Willis notes the progressive push for the inclusion of material relevant to students’ lives. However, in both variations of integration, the axis of power between student and teacher is stabilized rather than challenged. The teacher is still positioned as the conduit of knowledge to a submissive student.

Applying differentiation and integration

In Learning to Labour, Willis lays the groundwork for his theorization to be applied to different contexts. In his analysis of West Indian students in Learning to Labour, Willis suggests the source of countercultural material in the process of differentiation changes when the minority group is a racial group rather than a class group. Reading into his analysis of West Indian students in Learning to Labour suggests another difference, namely that of how teachers perceive and treat group members. The cultural logic of the educational exchange is racialized, with non-white students perceived as less compliant than white students.

Willis lays the groundwork for the theoretical application of his work to other minority groups, arguing the processes described will ‘play at different strengths in different situations at different times’ (Willis, 1977: 85). One of those factors is the race of the students and the contextual racial order. Friendship groups within the school were organized by race, with white, Asian, and West Indian students self-segregating. Describing the counterculture of West Indian students, Willis suggests West Indian boys have a different source of cultural material drawn upon during the process of differentiation than the ‘lads’, resulting in a differently expressed counterculture. Second generation West Indian youth draw upon the culture of the West Indies, ‘re-work[ing] old themes in the specific context’ of the school (p. 85).

Creating a second starting-point for applying his theoretical framework in the context of race, Willis details how Asian and West Indian students were subject to differential treatment and perception by teachers. Willis argues there were ‘clear informal patterns of racial culture beneath… the official structures of the school’ (1977: 47). There was ‘much less sympathy and rapport’ between the largely white teaching staff and minority students than between the staff and white students (p. 48). Asian and West Indian students were seen by the staff as ‘strange and uncivilized’ intruders who disrupted the order and quietness of the previously successful (white) schools of the 1950s (p. 48). The racism of the lads’ informal culture was backed up by the formal culture of the school.

Willis’s description of the teaching staff’s perceptions of West Indian and Asian students suggests the cultural framework of the school was racialized. In the cultural logic of the exchange, fairness operates as a basis for consent: all students who are respectful and compliant receive knowledge from the teacher. However, the coding of Asian and West Indian students and their practices as uncivilized and disruptive reveals how the cultural framework by which students’ compliance is evaluated is racialized, with students of colour perceived differently from the start. In an example, Willis details how one teacher described white students as calmly making tea during lunchtime while the Asian students were ‘jabbering to each other’ and West Indian students were ‘stamping around’ (Willis, 1977: 48). The cultural framework of the school thus establishes a racial hierarchy of practices, with the practices of non-white students marked as strange and inferior.

The racialization of cultural frameworks within the school becomes important in adapting Willis’s theorization to the context of non-white students due to the role teacher perceptions play in the temporality of differentiation. For Willis, differentiation is a temporal process. In their first years, the lads were conformist in their orientation towards the school and were thus accepted and treated with respect by the teachers. It was only post-differentiation that they became viewed as troublemakers and their interactions with teachers took on a harsh character. This distinction is contingent on the teachers’ perception of the lads as conforming to the role of student prior to differentiation: they were perceived as previously good boys who got into trouble. Willis’s description of the treatment of Asian and West Indian boys suggests that they did not receive the same recognition from the teachers as white students did. Carter (2005) argues that as schools create a cultural hierarchy of practices, non-white students face a higher burden to prove their compliance with school culture. For racial and ethnic minority students, the processes of differentiation and integration will play out differently because they are read as less compliant with the educational exchange from the start of their schooling.

The racial temporality of differentiation and black youth’s strategies of integration

Using working-class black boys as a comparison point for Willis’s white working-class lads, previous work in the American sociology of education suggests that the racialization of the cultural logic of exchange shifts the temporality of differentiation. As black boys are read as less compliant than their white male peers, they are subject to pre-differentiation by teachers within elementary and middle school (Ferguson, 2001). While some black youth differentiate themselves from the school paradigm further and develop oppositional countercultures, Carter’s (2005) categories of cultural mainstreamers and cultural straddlers demonstrate how other black youth develop strategies of integration relative to the educational exchange. These strategies of integration may serve to facilitate social mobility.

The racialization of schools’ cultural frameworks results in black male students being read as less compliant and respectful than their white male peers. While white working-class students are read as compliant with the educational exchange before differentiation in secondary school, black male students are read as noncompliant with the role of student earlier on in their education. Ferguson (2001) argues that by early middle school black boys are labelled as troublemakers and rule-breakers by teachers. While white boys are viewed as good boys who misbehave due to their masculinity and immaturity, black boys are perceived as wilfully disobedient and disrespectful (Ferguson, 2001). Black boys become ‘adultified’, viewed not as children but in relation to the controlling image of the black adult male as a criminal (Ferguson, 2001). Black boys become subject to additional surveillance and discipline by teachers as they are labelled troublemakers.

Black male students are pre-differentiated from the educational exchange as teachers come to view them outside the role of student. Black boys identified as troublemakers are viewed as unwilling to comply with the demands of the classroom and as unworthy of additional effort by teachers (Ferguson, 2001). Their treatment parallels how working-class white boys are treated post-differentiation: as youth are perceived as non-compliant with the exchange, the teacher’s knowledge is withdrawn. I use the term pre-differentiation to indicate how black male students are viewed as non-compliant and displaced from the role of student within the exchange prior to participation in an oppositional counterculture.

In response to pre-differentiation, minority youth adopt varying strategies. Ferguson (2001) argues that as black boys are increasingly targeted by teachers for punishment, they respond in diverging ways. One group of boys banded together with peers and engaged in an oppositional framing of the school (Ferguson, 2001). Drawing on broader African American culture, they reaffirmed their identities as black and understood the school’s treatment of them as racist (Ferguson, 2001). In response to pre-differentiation, this group further differentiated themselves from the school, reinterpreting the school through the black cultural resources provided by their parents, community members and hip-hop music (Ferguson, 2001). Another group of students responded to punishment by more strongly aligning their identities with the school. Distancing themselves from blackness, they worked at conforming to the school’s white linguistic and relational codes (Ferguson, 2001). Adopting a white performance style serves as a strategy of integration for black male youth. By modifying their behaviour to meet white performance codes, they can re-establish themselves as compliant with the exchange (Ferguson, 2001).

Adopting white styles as a strategy of integration requires black youth to take part in a performative balancing act. While adopting a white performance style results in acceptance by teachers, black boys face pushback and accusations of ‘acting white’ from their black peers (Ferguson, 2001). Returning to Carter (2005), her categories of cultural mainstreamer and cultural straddler can be interpreted as two strategies of integration used by black youth to navigate the balancing of teacher and peer expectations. Cultural mainstreamers increasingly embrace and enact a dominant cultural performance, distancing themselves from peer expectations through defining their behaviours as neutral and understanding their racial identity as an individual matter (Carter, 2005). Cultural straddlers find ways to abide by school cultural codes while also holding on to black cultural styles and performances (Carter, 2005). They switch between different sets of cultural codes based on context and find activities to participate in that are praised by both teachers and peers, such as athletics (Carter, 2005). Both strategies of integration enable black students to modify the cultural framework so that they are read as compliant with the exchange by teachers while the strategy of cultural straddling also enables acceptance by black peers. In response to the racialization of the cultural logic of schools, black youth develop strategies of integration to overcome pre-differentiation by teachers.

Extending a cultural approach to racial inequality in schools by theorizing the autonomy of peer group and school cultural logics

The concepts of integration and differentiation successfully extend current cultural approaches to racial inequality in schools by drawing attention to the interplay between teacher expectations and youth performance and between school cultural logics and peer cultural formation. The analytical insight granted by these concepts is rooted in Willis’s conceptualization of cultural production as autonomous from social reproduction. Placing Willis’s theoretical approach in conversation with previous cultural approaches to racial inequality in schools demonstrates how treating culture as autonomous is an important analytical move for the American sociology of education.

Applying Willis serves as a challenge to the double determinism of Fordham and Ogbu’s cultural ecological theory, which is only partially corrected by segmented assimilation theory. In cultural ecological theory, the structural position of a minority racial or ethnic group is determinative of its cultural response. This community culture is then socialized into youth by their parents and other community members. Segmented assimilation theory challenges the second assertion but not the first, arguing that youth may assume the culture of their peers while continuing to rely on the conceptualization of a unitary minority oppositional culture. Willis argues that minority group cultures emerge locally and are thus spatially and temporally contingent. Similarity between these local cultures may result from groups facing similar structural conditions across time and place but is not a given. Further, youth cultures are independent from these community cultures and driven by their own concerns. In Willis’s theorization, community cultures are just one (albeit important) source for the raw materials used in peer culture formation.

The utility of treating peer cultures as autonomous from community cultures is demonstrated in Carter’s modified-Bourdieusian approach. Carter shares with Willis an emphasis on the autonomy of youth peer cultural formation. Broader African American and immigrant cultural formations serve as a source of material for youth’s cultural practices and performances but these materials are reworked to meet the concerns of the school context (Carter, 2005; Warikoo, 2011). This autonomous analytical treatment enables Carter’s rejection of Fordham’s ‘acting white’ hypothesis. Minority youth are not passive receivers of a unitary oppositional response to dominant institutions but innovative cultural actors drawing on larger ethnic and racial cultures to navigate a mismatch between the performance expectations of peers and teachers.

Conclusion: Applying integration and differentiation in going forward with Learning to Labour

Proceeding from this theoretical base, Willis’s concepts of integration and differentiation are helpful in illuminating the cultural production and conflict that occurs as teachers and students engage in the educational exchange. At the same time, the application of these concepts to the case of black working-class boys as opposed to white working-class boys shows how Willis’s theoretical framework must be extended to account for race as well as class and gender. Specifically, considering the case of black working-class boys illuminates how the cultural logic of the educational exchange is racialized. The bodies and cultural performances of non-white youth are read as noncompliant and incompatible with the role of student. Acknowledging this pre-differentiation by teachers draws attention to how non-white students engage in strategies of integration, modifying their cultural performances to re-establish the terms of the exchange. To reduce complexity, this analysis has focused on black working-class boys as a case, shifting race but not class or gender position. However, Carter (2005) suggests that her categories of noncompliant believer, cultural straddler and cultural mainstreamer are influenced by both race, class and gender position. Moving forward, integration and differentiation should be understood as processes that play out differently depending on students’ position at the intersections of systems of race, class and gender.

The theoretical framework Willis develops in Learning to Labour (1977) raises questions we have often neglected in the American sociology of education: What are the cultural logics of schools? How do teachers justify and maintain authority in schools? And, when are students read as compliant with the educational exchange and when are they not? Moreover, Willis reminds us that questions of culture, authority and control are central to understanding race, class and gender inequality in schools. As we move into the fifth decade of the text, Learning to Labour’s continued utility will depend on us heeding Willis’s directive for the reader ‘to test reality with the concepts outlined; to contextualize; to see the role different fundamental processes play at different strengths in different solutions at different times’ (1977: 85). The concepts of integration and differentiation represent two important tools to draw upon as we continue to use Willis’s theorization to explore questions of inequality, culture and youth agency.