The Death of White Sociology and the Academic Awakening of a Ghetto Jew

Abstract

Commemorating the 50th anniversary of Joyce Ladner’s ground-breaking text, this essay traverses the border between book review and autobiography. The narrative, written in the first person, begins in Brownsville, Brooklyn in the mid-1960s. The author is a third generation Eastern European Jew who was nurtured by Black activist elders and became a white beneficiary of the educational opportunities created by the civil rights and Black power movements. Her undergraduate path was paved with classics in Black Studies, critical theory and Marxism. But it was Ladner’s seminal text that catapulted her into pursuit of an academic career in sociology. Its opening salvo - that the history of all hitherto American mainstream sociology has been the history of White sociology -held the promise that the color curtain was about to fall and that this profession was about to become an exciting place. The anticipated excitement derived partly from the book’s revelations of the hidden spurious claims underlying the discipline, its scathing criticism of research methods rooted in unproven and racist theories of human nature, and damaging distortions of Black life masquerading as “scientific sociology.” But Ladner’s volume reaches beyond critique: it illuminates the rich history of Black scholarship so long ignored by the discipline’s white gate-keepers; it offers a vision of engaged research conducted by Black scholars and their allies that would begin to remedy the damage, erase the distortions, and fortify the current generation of Black scholars against the tribulations they face in the profession. In doing so the text gives life to the project of creating a distinctive Black sociology.