Is Sociology Racist? - Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Auguste Comte

This query might well sound pretty absurd, and in a sense, it is. Thus, I would bet that within the academy, fewer sociologists per capita are racist than are members of any other discipline. Indeed, sociologists have been in the forefront when it comes to researching the various causes and consequences of racism, and have been among the loudest when it comes to proclaiming (erroneously, I believe ? but that is a topic for another post) that race is ?socially constructed? from the ground up, and thus altogether independent of biology. Right here in this selfsame Brainstorm venue, moreover, I have learned quite a lot from Laurie Essig?s posts concerning the often-hidden racist assumptions behind much of modern American life. And Laurie is a sociologist.

From whence, therefore, cometh my intentionally provocative question: Is sociology racist?

From, in a sense, my own ignorance: From the fact that I do not understand how the discipline of sociology justifies its existence as the study of complex social processes in modern Western societies. In short, what is the justification for organizing a discipline around the complex social activities of modern Western societies, as distinct from the rest of human beings? There is, after all, another acknowledged discipline that concerns itself with the entire range of Homo sapiens? social phenomena: namely, anthropology.

When sociology was first defined and established, by August Comte and then Emile Durkheim (not to mention Karl Marx, and later, Max Weber, as well as others), the expressed concern was with ?social facts? as somehow irreducible phenomena, deserving of study in their own right. I think this itself is debatable, at least the claim of irreducibility. But largely unspoken, and far less defensible, was the idea that these social facts as they pertain to Western (white-skinned) participants in ?high civilization? (i.e., Europe and to a lesser extent, North America) warranted a distinct science and approach, separate from anthropology, which became the study of social facts among dark-skinned colonials, who were to be studied by representatives of those societies studied, in turn, by sociologists.

What, pray tell, is the justification?ethical, practical, scientific, humanistic, conceptual?for this distinction? Why, for example, should anthropologists have cornered the market in researching kinship ? as though kinship categories aren?t important among upper-class London socialites, or inhabitants of South Central LA? And why should sociologists lay special claim, for example, to the role of conflict, in group/out group phenomena, and so forth? Anthropologists, not sociologists, deal with hunter-gatherer societies, pastoralists, the use of medicinal herbs, etc., whereas sociologists, not anthropologists, deal with ?ethnicity,? for example, and the niceties of Gemeinschaft vs Gesellschaft. Why?

In the past, I?ve looked on indulgently as certain colleges (invariably small ones), combine anthropology and sociology into one department, a consolidation that presumably has been due to fiscal limitations and constraints. But I?m beginning to wonder if they know something that their colleagues choose to ignore: That the distinction between sociology and anthropology is rooted purely in history and the misconception that to understand the modern, ?advanced? West somehow requires different methods and distinct theoretical constructs from what is needed to study ?primitive? people with mostly dark skins, and who often partake of exotic?if not to say, downright bizarre?ways of living.

So, I ask again: Is sociology racist?

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