The Americanisation of British culture is, sadly, nothing new. But teens are no longer simply finishing sentences with a rising inflection after hours of watching Friends; the importation of America’s culture wars is now having a notable effect on the way social issues are understood and discussed. What Helen Lewis calls the “American rhino problem” affecting our language – saying “garbage” instead of “rubbish”, the excessive use of the word “like” – is these days viscerally political. 

For instance, when George Floyd was killed by American police officers in May 2020, British protesters and commentators claimed that race relations here were equally toxic, and that police racism was the same in Manchester and Minneapolis. Television programmes such as The School That Tried to End Racism attempted to copy-and-paste American political theories about “white privilege” onto south London kids. 

And the American obsession with therapy culture, which The Sopranos was sending up in New Jersey 20 years ago, has since been bought wholesale by the British educational establishment, which encourages pupils and students to embrace the terminology of “wellbeing”. Some problems may be shared; there may be parallels; but we and America are not equivalent, and it’s lazy to assume that we are.

Moreover, to pretend that the American culture wars are universally applicable is likely to prove misleading. To take the Sterling example, Morrison is one of the great American laureates, and a student would be well advised to read her writing for all kinds of reasons, but she won’t tell you much about the specificities of British race relations – not least because class plays a far bigger role in understanding Britain’s modern history. 

Someone such as Dickens or even (ironically) Austen would be more informative – or, if you want a living novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro, whose perspective as a Japanese-British writer allowed him to put insights into British class tensions in novels such as The Remains of the Day (1989).