Youth, Race and Language in Contemporary Britain: Deconstructing Ethnicity?

It was not, of course, that these migrants were not written about by sociologists-naturally they werebut that they did not constitute part of the definition of ‘youth’. They were part of other definitions-of ‘race’, of ‘ethnicity’, of ‘migrant labour’—where they became established within what Paul Gilroy has called the ‘victim/problem’ discursive couplet (Gilroy, 1987), and it was only later that the connections were made between the second generation of black British people of Caribbean and Asian origin as ‘problem’ and youth as ‘problem’.