Black Sociologists Research Articles

A Dialogue on Black Sociology: Its Past, Present, and Future

A Dialogue on Black Sociology: Its Past, Present, and Future

Of the Meaning of Pedagogy: W. E. B. Du Bois, Racial Progress, and Positive Propaganda

A silence in the resurgence of scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois has been his work as an instructor. This article uses Du Bois’s early teaching experiences and reflections on the “ugly” progress of schooling to ask: What should guide the pedagogy of sociology instructors when racial progress is so ugly? I sketch here a pedagogy inspired by Du Bois—who was the teacher denied—which is motivated by a positive notion of propaganda. Du Bois was a radical pedagogue whose mixed-methods instructional agenda informed a critical Black Sociology and bridges recent calls by American Sociological Association leadership for a discipline that is more emancipatory and educative. Embracing the right to propaganda gives pedagogical teeth to honest appraisals on racial progress. Triangulating art, science, and agitation in our pedagogy offers a general compass, and my article concludes with one direction that compass might lead: a classroom assignment where my undergraduate students became “print propagandists.”

Black Sociology: Toward a Theoretical Analysis of Systems of Oppression and Social Power

Black Sociology: Toward a Theoretical Analysis of Systems of Oppression and Social Power

The State of Black Sociology: A Critical Reflection of Joyce Ladner’s The Death of white Sociology

On the fiftieth anniversary of Joyce Ladner’s The Death of white Sociology, we write this critical reflection to explore the discipline’s historical, often explicit oversight and investment in Whiteness. The historical roots of “mainstream”, white sociology are inundated with pathologization, dehumanization, and exclusion of Black people, the Black community, and Black scholarship. From graduate program training and conferencing to peer-review processes and the academic job market, Black sociologists are expected to center white hegemonic ideals of professionalism and academic rigor. We write this critical reflection exploring the edited volume’s implications for discussing anti-Blackness as well as the methodological and theoretical significance of Black sociology past and present. As Black sociologists and doctoral scholars, this reflection serves as a call to the discipline to grapple with texts such as The Death of white Sociology, the discomfort it may cause, and how the exclusion of such work directly harms the training and careers of Black graduate students.

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

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.

We’ll see things they’ll never see: Sociological reflections on race, neurodiversity and higher education

This article offers sociological reflections on race and neurodiversity in UK higher education (UKHE). Using dialogical knowledge production and collaborative autoethnography, the authors discuss their lived experiences of navigating the politics of neurodiversity and neurotypical hegemony in UKHE as Black sociologists. The central argument explores how race and neurotypical hegemony overexposes Black neurodiverse scholars to a particular and pervasive form of double jeopardy. The authors’ reflexive accounts show how, as Black scholars, they must often negotiate the operation of race alongside the hegemonic practices of the white western academy. In this way, they grapple with racism and ableism in the context of value, meritocracy and elitism. The authors contend that drawing on the politics of neurodiversity in conjunction with Black subjectivities can generate routes into exposing and dismantling neurotypical hegemony. A key motive for discussing their own experiences as neurodivergent scholars in UKHE is that existing research and anecdotal reflections point to a pattern of general whitening of how we understand neurodiversity in academia. The authors indulge their personal, political and academic commitment to this subject as they contend that as Black neurodivergent sociologists, we’ll see things they’ll never see.

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Beyond the Positivism/Non-Positivism Binary as a Step Toward Inclusive Sociology

This article contributes to a movement to interrogate the history and foundation of sociology. The current hegemonic narrative credits a few European men for establishing sociology as a mechanism for using science to understand social conditions amid the rise of industrialization and modern capitalism. This hegemonic story defines positivism as a central concern in the foundation of the discipline, justifying its continued dominance in U.S. sociology and using binary logic to position non-positivist approaches as subordinate and unscientific. In this article, we explore the ways early Black sociologists integrated positivist and non-positivist approaches in their work to arrive at truth and discuss ways that transcending binary distinctions facilitated rich developments in their understanding of social relations and institutions. We draw on existing scholarship to argue that privileging binary logic helped justify these scholars’ marginalization in the sociological canon and conclude with recommendations to move the discipline beyond the positivism/non-positivism binary as an important mechanism for transformation. In so doing, we contribute to the growing body of scholarship aimed at correcting the history of sociology and reimagining the foundational works and epistemological approaches to foster liberation within the discipline.

Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life

This book provides an important addition to the African American saga by offering an oral history of Black youth in segregated Washington, DC. The coverage is for the interwar years.Through skillful use of previous interviews and community studies, the author reveals what poor and working-class Blacks in their formative years were thinking, doing, and feeling. It's a revealing story that clearly notes the variety of sensibilities in a population that from the outside seemed homogenous.Paula C. Austin essentially revisits the work of Black sociologists who studied the nation's capital through extensive interviews within the Black community. She fills in aspects of Black life that earlier researchers missed or misinterpreted. For example, an interview with Susie Morgan reveals the relationship of poor teens with the police and the use of forbidden spaces allowable to whites. How these children dealt with the use of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and the Southwest Settlement House tells the reader much about their spatial relationship to Jim Crow DC and their efforts to live with what was available. The need for recreational space resulted in a defiance that, as Susie Morgan said about the Pool, “Course we know we ain't got no business there, but that's why we go in” (p. 79).Expanding on the earlier studies, Austin also delves into attitudes of these poor and working-class youth toward class, sexual relations, political activity, and general engagement with their plight in a segregated city. Rather than apathy, acceptance of their subordinate place, and an absence of community connection, the author writes of residents engaged, aware, politically active, and desiring change in their neighborhood and in their future.The author also provides important insight into these adolescents’ sense of racial identity, gender, and, as with James Albert Gray, their leadership skills. Approved or unapproved outside activities are also examined in relation to clubs and gangs. Within this discussion, Austin offers a trenchant analysis of a burgeoning sense of masculinity. Nathaniel Smith's interview is informative in this sense in regard to his membership in the Society Gents Club and his views of what it meant to be a man.Likewise, the discussion of Black girls and women indicates their role in gangs, attitudes toward femininity, the future, marriage, and violence. Austin's use of interviews with the same person over several chapters and issues provides effective transitions and deeper probing. This is the case with Susie Morgan, whose views and stories, along with others such as Myron Ross, Jr., fill the chapters and shape the book's analysis.With both girls and boys, their inner thoughts show a more nuanced process than earlier studies reveal. Interviewers did not always present their questions in a way to elicit honest answers or ignored some of the information they received. And here Austin brings the reader into fresh territory. More is learned about these individuals than in the initial interviewer's interpretations. The rereading and reassessment of 1930s oral histories can provide clues to present behaviors among the adolescent Black poor and working class. The study also makes a good case for condemning past or present-day racial profiling and, as the author states, recognizing the humanity of a maligned and misunderstood group. To outsiders, and even to some of the interviewers, these neighborhoods and youths appeared to be degraded and hopeless elements within the city's poorest areas. Yet a hopefulness existed among the Black adolescents studied and re-analyzed that is a useful aid to present-day community workers and future scholars.

Black Ethnographic Activists: Exploring Robert Park, Scientific Racism, The Chicago School, and FBI Files Through the Black Sociological Experience of Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier

Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier were successful Black sociologists from the 1920s to 1960s, working in an age of scientific racism and eugenics, who battled racial oppression, racist discrimination, and surveillance under the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Both struggled within and against the assimilationist paradigm, yet their ethnographic and critical insights speak out today with continuing relevance in the fight against practical and institutional racial injustice. This study selectively examines Johnson and Frazier's academic careers as forgotten ethnographer activists who have been largely excluded from the dominant narrative of the Chicago School of Sociology. This article argues Robert Park offered opportunities to these Black scholars although the white university system exclusively directed their work towards race studies. Furthermore, the white discipline of sociology failed to recognize Johnson and Frazier's critical ethnographic studies as part of interactionism.

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow

Sociology of Law in the Perspective of Roscoe Pound and Donald Black and its Relevance in the Indonesian Context

This article aims to identify and analyze Roscoe Pound's thoughts on sociological jurisprudence, besides that this article also aims to identify and analyze Donald Black's legal sociology thoughts, as well as the actualization of Pound and Black's thoughts in the Indonesian context. The approach method used in this article is a literature study with a qualitative descriptive approach, while the results in this article show that Pound's sociological jurisprudence and Black's sociology of law both approach law through the discipline of sociology, even though the legal concepts they produce are different. . Pound with the concept of interest, social engineering while Black with the concept of law as a quantitative variable in his magnum opus The behavior of law. They both also think that the law is a tool of social control and seems to want to perceive that the law does not always talk about articles, but there are other important aspects that must be considered.

Black Sociology in the Era of Black Lives Matter

In 1973, on the heels of the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights Movement, sociologist and civil rights activist Joyce A. Ladner edited a collection titled The Death of White Sociology: Essays on Race and Culture. Bringing together an impressive set of Black writers and academics, the essays sought to make “an early statement on the development of Black sociology […and] to examine some of the historical forces which have acted upon Black sociologists, and to explicate some of the issues which are central to this new discipline” (Ladner [1973] 1998, p. xxvii). For Ladner, as she wrote in her introduction, Black sociology must be distinct from mainstream (White) sociology in its expressly normative commitment to using social science to “eliminat[e] racism and systematic class oppression from the society [and…to] promot[e] the interests of the Black masses” (Ladner [1973] 1998, p. xxvii). Whereas mainstream sociological theories had long been used to justify the subordination of Black people, Black sociology was an emergent discipline that sought Black liberation.

Disaster racism: using Black sociology, critical race theory and history to understand racial disparity to disaster in the United States

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to provide a call to action to use a new theoretical framework for disaster researchers that focuses on using a critical approach to understanding differential disaster impacts due to systemic racism.Design/methodology/approachUsing critical race theory (CRT) and Black Sociology, theoretical and disciplinary frameworks that center Black people and NBPOC as well as a focus in dismantling systemic racism and other oppressive systems, this article calls for a new approach – “disaster racism” – that builds on past discussions for a more nuanced theoretical approach to disaster studies.FindingsAlongside CRT and Black Sociology, this study identifies two examples of the oppressive systems that create disparate impacts to disaster including slavery and the legacy of slavery and mass incarceration.Originality/value“Disaster racism” – a critically focused approach – should be used in the future rather than social vulnerability to further dismantle oppressive systems and institutions, which not only provides strong theoretical backing to research but also creates an actively anti-racist research agenda in the discipline of sociology of disaster.

“The Blackness That Incriminated Me”: Stigma and Normalization in Brothers and Keepers

This research situates Brothers and Keepers, the memoir of John Edgar Wideman (one of the greatest writers of the past hundred years), within the tradition of Black sociology, arguing that it politicizes the theories in Stigma, the foundational study by Erving Goffman (one of the greatest sociologists of the past hundred years), by grounding them in the lived experience of an African American man. In turn, Goffman’s writing facilitates a reading of Wideman’s work as an attempt to surrender the mask of the “exceptional” Black man among elite whites and reconcile his stellar accomplishments with his stigmatized beginnings as well as his brother’s incarceration. With this effort, Wideman begins to shift from tacit complicity with racial stigmatization to active resistance against it. Our goal in this project is to use Goffman’s concepts of “stigma” and “moral career” to explain Wideman’s growth, and in turn, add a degree of depth and breadth to Goffman’s notions of the “own” and the “wise” lacking in their original formulation.

Intersectional Alliances in Soledad Prison: The Exemplary Life of John Brown Childs

ABSTRACT This essay, the first of a triptych published in Jacobin-Italia, focuses on the contribution of scholar-activist and Black Native American sociologist John Brown Childs, who played an important role in producing and developing “trans-communality” theory and practice. His work came out of his experiences in Soledad Prison, where inmates developed their own trans-racial education system, which included promoting gender consciousness and social empowerment. Childs' work sheds light on the possibility of overcoming intra-communal conflicts and creating intersectional alliances among different and oppressed social groups or “nations”.

Introduction to the Special Issue: The Status of Black Sociologists in the 21st Century

Introduction to the Special Issue: The Status of Black Sociologists in the 21st Century

The Great Migration in Myth and Reality

The founders of professional sociology in the United States constructed a system of racial segregation that paralleled the Jim Crow system in the American South. Recent research has analyzed both the structure and dynamics of this systemic racism, as well as the resourceful resistance to this discrimination by African-American scholars housed in historically Black universities and colleges (HBCUs). This essay extends that work by discussing the ways in which the Jim Crow structure was enacted and sustained over many decades, how this exclusionary project limited and distorted the research, analysis, and theory developed within the white universities; and how the work of Black sociologists – ignored and dismissed by the white establishment – constitutes a precious heritage of important and still valuable scholarship. This contrast between sterile white establishment scholarship and the still-valuable work of HSBCs scholars is documented by comparing the white and Black scholarship on the first decades of the Great Migration. This comparison demonstrates that even iconic texts by white establishment scholars presented an already disconfirmed portrait of the migration process and dynamics of Black migration from the U.S. rural South to Northern cities; and that distorted portrait of immigration was perpetuated through decades of subsequent establishment scholarship. In contrast the work of Black scholars provided indelible on-the-ground evidence that disproved the theories articulated and perpetuated by their white contemporaries, while documenting a broad theoretical perspective that remains valuable in understanding contemporary migration issues.

The Leak in the Academic Pipeline: on Black Women Sociologists

There exists a “leak” in the academic pipeline centered on Black women sociologists. This leak exists in large part due to gatekeepers, who have attempted to protect the hidden curricula used to preserve predominantly male, White, old, conservative spaces (Romero 2017). Victim blaming, stigmatizing, exclusion, and tracking begin during the professionalization process in graduate school for many women of color and continue into their academic career (Margolis and Romero 1998). Mentoring in academia has been cited as a major contributing factor to professional success and career advancement; yet, access and quality of mentoring remain an issue for women of color (Pitt 2016). After moving from graduate school, salary differentials are cited as another contributor, leading to job dissatisfaction, decreased retention, higher rates of battle fatigue, and workplace stress (Pitt 2016). The state of Black women sociologists in the twenty-first century oddly has not changed much over the past century (Wilson 2012). This piece identifies structures of oppression that act as barriers to the incorporation of Black women sociologists in academic spaces, causing the leak. We then mitigate these entities by offering strategies to develop spaces of equity to combat the multiple jeopardies faced by Black women sociologists (Collins 2000).

Black on Black: The Vilification of “Me-Search,” Tenure, and the Economic Position of Black Sociologists

In 2019, Black sociologists are still less likely to get published in discipline-specific peer-reviewed journals, less likely to hold tenured or tenure-track positions at predominately white institutions, and less likely to be awarded tenure than white sociologists. This is, in part, because the traditional positivist approach to sociology favors an epistemology rooted in world building from a white perspective and subsequently prefers white sociologists to do that work. Overvaluing empirical research emphasizing objectivity through marked distance between researcher and participants, in the tradition of the natural sciences, also undervalues the importance of investigators’ perceived connections to marginalized communities in the reliability of collected data, and the use of qualitative methods to scientific study. This conceptual paper connects public discourse on the devaluing of “me-search” done by Black sociologists, research studying communities of which the principal investigator is also a member, to professional advancement data to explore the economic penalties for Black sociologists whose “me-search” expands the limits of what is useful and noteworthy in the production of sociological knowledge while simultaneously impacting their professional advancement in the discipline. Patricia Hill Collins’ (Soc Probl. 33: S14–32, 1986) epistemological stance laments the positivist approach and attempts to move sociological research of the oppressed away from the gaze of the oppressors. The academy’s colonial focus on “objectivity,” and subsequent third person research writing, maintains a white normative framework for the entire discipline. But in the twenty-first century, a disciplinary focus on research about marginalized identities by white sociologists inherently devalues the scientific validity of research on Black communities by Black researchers, aiding in racialized gatekeeping in sociology. Low numbers of tenured Black faculty, promotion policies focused on the number of peer-reviewed publications, and low journal publication rates for Black researchers highlight the negative impact on professional outcomes for Black sociologists and illustrates a perpetual devaluation of the perspectives of Black researchers.