Sociology is an applied science,and the application is social change: a contribution to the discussion of Aldon Morris’ The Scholar Denied

I argue that W.E.B. Du Bois’ expulsion from academic sociology at the beginning of the twentieth century was not only animated by the gatekeepers’ desire to maintain academe as a whites-only domain. It also constituted an active effort to defend Social Darwinist dogma, which dominated (white) social science at that time, from the formidable challenge of a resourceful and scientifically superior perspective. The successful exclusion of Du Bois (and his growing legion of colleagues) allowed sociology to drift into functionalist dogma, with its immutable hierarchy and denial of sociology’s role in facilitating social change. The exclusion of Du Boisean analysis, which placed human agency – and especially subaltern groups – at the centre of social change – rendered sociological analysis irrelevant to addressing social problems and social justice, until the Civil Rights Movement in America broke down the walls of the sociological ghetto, allowing it to access the rich Du Boisean perspective.     

The (dis)similarities of white racial identities: the conceptual framework of ‘hegemonic whiteness’

This article examines the processes of white racial identity formation in the United States via an examination of a white nationalist organization and a white antiracist organization. Findings indicate that the construction of white racial identity in both groups is based on the reproduction of various racist and essentialist ideologies. The realization that there is a shared ‘groupness’ to outwardly different white identities has the potential to destabilize the recent trend that over-emphasizes white heterogeneity at the expense of discussion of power, racism and discrimination. As a resolution to this analytic dilemma, this article advances a conceptual framework entitled ‘hegemonic whiteness’. White identity formation is thereby understood as a cultural process in which (1) racist, reactionary and essentialist ideologies are used to demarcate inter-racial boundaries, and (2) performances of white racial identity that fail to meet those ideals are marginalized and stigmatized, thereby creating intra-racial distinctions within the category ‘white’.     

The intersectional,structuralist, and anti-geneticism centres of Black Lives Matter

The paradoxes, ironies, and juxtapositions of Black Lives Matter (BLM) have not been lost on those in, around, and outside of the movement: Using a philosophical and historical lens of black political thought informing the movement, Christopher J. Lebron gives voice to the tensions that arise because of the hypocrisy of devaluing black lives in a civil society that holds the equality of diverse people central to its foundation. The culmination of Lebron’s effort provides an opportunity to enhance current thinking on our contemporary social movements since he does a responsible job of handling the chorus of exigent voices that have contributed to a black radical tradition from which the Movement for Black Lives, the policy component of BLM, is branded. Lebron’s approach, however, would have benefitted from a more careful consideration of critical intersectionality, structuralist theories, and biological racism.     

From bi-racial to tri-racial: Towards a new system of racial stratification in the USA

In this article I argue that the bi-racial order (white vs non-white) typical of the United States is undergoing a profound transformation. Because of drastic changes in the demography of the nation as well as changes in the racial structure of the world-system, the United States is developing a complex, Latin America-like racial order. Specifically, I suggest that the new order will have two central features: three loosely organized racial strata (white, honorary white, and the collective black) and a pigmentocratic logic. I examine some objective, subjective, and social interaction indicators to assess if the Latin Americanization thesis holds some water. Although more refined data are needed to conclusively make my case, the available indicators support my thesis. I conclude this article by outlining some of the potential implications of Latin Americanization for the future of race relations in the United States.     

Is there a post-racism? On David Theo Goldberg’s conjunctural analysis of the post-racial

ABSTRACT

I comment on David Theo Goldberg’s Are We all Postracial Yet? by interpreting it as a programmatic essay towards a new conjunctural analysis of a globalizing racism, and as an emerging globalizing dialogue against racism. In the spirit of Goldberg’s book I relate these two modes of critical engagement in order to open a global perspective through which a relational understanding of racism can be formulated with respect to two neoliberal contexts, continental Europe and the United States. To this end I draw on the work of Étienne Balibar and in particular his early consideration of ‘neo-racism’.     

The British Sociological Association Race and Ethnicity Study Group Conference ‘Mapping the Field: Contemporary Theories of Race,Racism and Ethnicity’

This is a report on the British Sociological Association Race and Ethnicity Study Group Conference ‘Mapping the Field: Contemporary Theories of Race, Racism and Ethnicity’, which took place at Newman University on Friday 31 January 2014.     

White privilege in the lives of Muslim converts in Britain

This paper explores how the whiteness of converts to Islam affects their post-conversion experiences. It shows how white converts are privileged because their whiteness functions as a marker of dominance and respectability. In attempting to go beyond well-established observations about the existence of white privilege, the limits of white privilege are also considered. It is argued that upon converting to Islam, white converts' whiteness is jeopardized, thus showing the precariousness of whiteness. The paper also considers how converts' whiteness can cause them difficulties rather than benefits due to the unique context that they find themselves in. Unlike white supremacists who portray white people as always a victim however, this paper seeks a more balanced understanding of the complexity of whiteness as often-but-not-always privileging. This paper is based on thirty-seven in-depth interviews that were conducted between 2008 and 2009 with Muslim converts in Greater Manchester.     

The imagination of ‘society’ in measurements of immigrant integration

Abstract

My aim in this contribution is to clarify in which way social scientific measurements of immigrant integration operate as a form of ‘social imagination’, that is, of the routinized and professionalized visualization of social life. Through such measurements, images of ‘society’ are produced that feed into larger social imaginaries. My discussion takes as an example Dutch discourse and research on integration. Crucial to the constitution of society in the Netherlands and many other Western European countries is what I call a culturist discourse that has many similarities to racism. This discourse demarcates the boundaries of society by rendering objectively observable the non-integrated who are considered to reside ‘outside society’. The image of society thereby produced is that of a morally cleansed realm: social problems are relegated to the domain ‘outside society’, consisting of persons in need of integration.     

Genes,symptoms, and the “asymptomatic ill”: toward a broader understanding of genetic discrimination

Since the early 1990s, the term “genetic discrimination” has been used to designate adverse treatment on the grounds of genetic makeup. However, the full spectrum of possible disadvantage associated with genetic information has not been addressed by either the international scientific debate or statutory arrangements on genetic discrimination. Informed by legal contexts, they almost all focus on one specific group: the “asymptomatic ill.” On the basis of the sociological study, “Genetic Discrimination in Germany,” this article proposes to revise the terms of the debate and discusses some limitations of the concept. Drawing on the experiences reported by affected individuals, it advocates a more expansive social understanding which does not require that a person has to be healthy to be at risk of genetic discrimination.     

Second‐generation decline: Scenarios for the economic and ethnic futures of the post‐1965 American immigrants

‘Second‐generation decline’ questions the current American faith in the myth of nearly automatic immigrant success. In discussing economic scenarios, positive and negative, for the future of the children of the post‐1965 immigrants, the possibility is proposed that a significant number of the children of poor immigrants, especially dark‐skinned ones, might not obtain jobs in the mainstream economy. Neither will they be willing ‐ or even able ‐ to take low‐wage, long‐hour ‘immigrant’ jobs, as their parents did. As a result, they (and young males among them particularly) may join blacks and Hispanics among those already excluded, apparently permanently, from the mainstream economy. The article also deals with the relations between ethnicity and economic conditions in the USA and with the continued relevance of the assimilation and acculturation processes described by ‘straight‐line theory’. This issue, as well as most others discussed, may also be salient for European countries experiencing immigration, especially those countries with troubled economies.     

Oh,you're racist? I've got a cure for that!

It has recently been discovered that the beta blocker drug, propranolol, can potentially reduce implicit racial bias among its users. By acting upon the affective conditions associated with implicit racial bias functioning at the non-conscious and pre-conscious levels, researchers have expressed excitement about the potential of propranolol and similar drugs to decrease implicit racial attitudes, and, thus, potentially decrease racism. This study and others like it not only provide indications of an affective component to modern-day racism, but, more importantly, an epistemological shift in the meaning of racism within academia from a social and cultural problem to a medical problem. In this article, we examine this shift in academic discourse towards a pathologization of racism and the implications of this on the sociological study of race and racism.     

Visual sociology approaches in migration,ethnic and racial studies

The aim of the article is to discuss the advantages of using visual sociology approaches and methods in migration, ethnic and racial studies. It first briefly presents the history of visual sociology and what it consists of. It then moves to immigration, ethnic and racial studies by presenting some examples of visual approaches in a few selected research projects dealing with immigrant electoral politics, the history of migration and music and ethnic politics.     

Including exclusion: the enduring problematic gap between the race and ethnicity paradigms

In the article, “U.S. Racial and Ethnic Relations in the Twenty-first Century”, Zulema Valdez and Tanya Golash-Boza present a compelling argument, suggesting the existence of a gap in race theoretical paradigms and ethnicity theoretical paradigms. They suggest that these two theoretical frames focus on both different social processes and levels of analysis, and argue for a merging of the central tenets of these paradigms in order to facilitate more complete theoretical analyses of racial and ethnic processes in the U.S. While we see great value in this project, we suggest that the authors miss an enduring and problematic gap between these theoretical frames because they do not fully explicate how race/racism theory articulates the fundamentally interconnected relationships between the racial social structure, group-level processes, and individual-level racial dynamics in a manner that ethnicity theory fails to capture.     

Four thoughts on Charles Mills – Black rights/white wrongs: the critique of racial liberalism

In what follows I provide a review of Charles Mills’ text, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism. In four points I critique and build upon Mills’ contributions on (1) the multidimensional character of race, (2) the faith in liberalism to alleviate racial injustices, (3) the place of patriarchal tendencies in philosophy, and (4) the “white space” of sociology.     

Ethnicity and factionalism in Zimbabwe nationalist politics 1957–79

Four explanations of xenophobia and racism will be reviewed by confronting them with the results of empirical studies. I try to show that xenophobic and racist views of the social world are not instrumental to a fight for scarce jobs or housing. Neither is it appropriate to interpret them as a result of a culture clash that is caused by migratory movements across countries and continents. They are not mere radicalizations of the discourse of exclusion and devaluation which political and administrative elites generate and institutionalize, for example, in immigration policies. Starting from the insights of this critical review, I shall develop the hypothesis that xenophobia and racism should be seen as appeals to the pact of solidarity into which state and society have entered in modern nation‐states and which in times of intensified social conflicts seems fragile in the eyes of downwardly mobile groups. The xenophobic discourse serves not only to reassure identity when nationalistic self‐images run into crisis but is an element of a political struggle about who has the right to be cared for by the state and society: a fight for the collective goods of the modern state.     

Rethinking The Empire Strikes Back: a response

This rejoinder is a response by one of the authors of The Empire Strikes Back to the commentaries provided by Alexander, Meer, Bhattacharyya, Bojadzijev, Keith and Virdee. It responds to their key critiques as well as situating the impact of the book within the academy and the wider society. Drawing on key themes in the commentaries, it seeks to explore the relevance of the book both at the time of its publication as well as in the present environment.     

Association between disparities in intergenerational economic mobility and cause-specific mortality among Black and White persons in the United States

BackgroundEvidence about the association between structural racism and mortality in the United States is limited. We examined the association between ongoing structural racism, measured as inequalities in adulthood income between White and Black children with similar parental household income (economic mobility gap) in a recent birth cohort, and Black-White disparities in death rates (mortality gap) overall and for major causes.MethodsSex-, race/ethnicity-, and county-specific data were used to examine sex-specific associations between economic mobility and mortality gaps for all causes combined, heart diseases, cerebrovascular diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), injury/violence, all malignant cancers, and 14 cancer types. Economic mobility data for 1978–1983 birth cohorts and death rates during 2011–2018 were obtained from the Opportunity Atlas and National Center for Health Statistics, respectively. Data from 471 counties were included in analyses of all-cause mortality at ages 30−39 years during 2011–2018 (corresponding to partially overlapping 1978–1983 birth cohorts); and from 1,572 and 1,248 counties in analyses of all-cause and cause-specific mortality in all ages combined, respectively.ResultsIn ages 30−39 years, a one percentile increase in the economic mobility gap was associated with a 6.8 % (95 % confidence interval 1.8 %–11.8 %) increase in the Black-White mortality gap among males and a 13.5 % (8.9 %–18.1 %) increase among females, based on data from 471 counties. In all ages combined, the corresponding percentages based on data from 1,572 counties were 10.2 % (7.2 %–13.2 %) among males and 14.8 % (11.4 %–18.2 %) among females, equivalent to an increase of 18.4 and 14.0 deaths per 100,000 in the mortality gap, respectively. Similarly, strong associations between economic mobility gap and mortality gap in all ages were found for major causes of death, notably for potentially preventable conditions, including COPD, injury/violence, and cancers of the lung, liver, and cervix.ConclusionsEconomic mobility gap conditional on parental income in a recent birth cohort as a marker of ongoing structural racism is strongly associated with Black-White disparities in all-cause mortality and mortality from several causes.     

Can there be a truly systematic and comprehensive theory of race?

ABSTRACT

In this ambitious new book, Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond contend that there has never been a truly comprehensive and systematic theory of race. They go on to argue that ‘Much of our best work no longer tells us how to understand or reconstruct racial dynamics but simply gives us concrete proof of their continuing significance’ (3). To what extent does The Racial Order theoretically advance existing theorizing of race? An important contribution – and a central plank in the book – is the way in which a wide variety of cultural and social phenomena is discussed and interwoven into the analysis. The authors draw most heavily on Bourdieu, Dewey, and Durkheim, in their elaboration of the racial order.     

‘Islamophobia never stands still’: race,religion, and culture

Abstract

Islamophobia bundles religious, ethnic and cultural prejudices together even though a narrow definition of the term flags religion as playing the central part. Calls for decoupling religion from ethnicity and culture appear justifiable: religions are increasingly disconnected from the cultures in which they have been embedded. But established political discourse infrequently makes such distinctions and may go further to racialize cultural and religious attributes of non-Europeans through essentialist framing. Islamophobia becomes a cryptic articulation of race and racism even if overtly it appears as religiously-based prejudice. Islam has been culturalized and racialized by its adherents and antagonists alike. Survey data on attitudes towards Muslims confirm such framing: the most common grounds given for experiencing discrimination was race or ethnic origin; religion and belief system were cited less often. Racialization, race and differential racism have become more endemic to Islamophobesã stigmatizing of Muslims, but to categorize Islamophobes as racists is bad politics.