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Current Sociology Monograph
2014, Vol. 62(4) 472 –492
© The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0011392114524506
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A sociological dilemma:
Race, segregation and US
sociology
Gurminder K Bhambra
University of Warwick, UK
Abstract
US sociology has been historically segregated in that, at least until the 1960s, there were
two distinct institutionally organized traditions of sociological thought – one black and
one white. For the most part, however, dominant historiographies have been silent on
that segregation and, at best, reproduce it when addressing the US sociological tradition.
This is evident in the rarity with which scholars such as WEB Du Bois, E Franklin
Frazier, Oliver Cromwell Cox, or other ‘African American Pioneers of Sociology’, as
Saint-Arnaud calls them, are presented as core sociological voices within histories of
the discipline. This article addresses the absence of African American sociologists from
the US sociological canon and, further, discusses the implications of this absence for
our understanding of core sociological concepts. With regard to the latter, the article
focuses in particular on the debates around equality and emancipation and discusses the
ways in which our understanding of these concepts could be extended by taking into
account the work of African American sociologists and their different interpretations
of core themes.
Keywords
Booker T Washington, WEB Du Bois, epistemology, racism, segregation, settler
colonialism, US sociology
I
Postcolonial analysis and critique has usually been directed at an examination of the rela-
tions between nations and societies following the dismantling of formal systems of colo-
nialism and empire. Its remit has included not only the need for a proper understanding
Corresponding author:
Gurminder K Bhambra, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: g.k.bhambra@warwick.ac.uk
524506
CSI0010.1177/0011392114524506Current SociologyBhambra
research-article2014
Article
Bhambra 473
of formerly colonized societies, but also a need to rethink the historical narratives associ-
ated with the colonial period, especially in their continuing impact on framing the way in
which we think about the world today. In this context of examining relations of hierar-
chy, domination and the inclusions and exclusions that they create, postcolonial analysis
is further directed towards the complex social stratifications created through colonial
rule. This has usually involved a focus on the relations between the historically colonial
metropole and periphery or the relations between newly established elites and long-
standing subaltern populations within formerly colonized countries.
It has been less common for postcolonial analysis to be directed back at the former
national metropoles to examine the impact of colonization on what is more usually rep-
resented as internal and endogenous forms of social stratification in the dominant coun-
try. This is so despite the fact that colonialism was also a feature of the very rise of
nation-states that typically provide the focus for dominant national sociologies. Indeed,
the nation-state form itself can be regarded as a product of colonialism and not just a
product of nationalism (including national oppositions to colonialism). This is as true of
those countries that became purely national states through the loss of their colonies and
thus imperial status, as it is of those that secured their independence through decoloniza-
tion struggles. In the former case, the lack of attention given to alternative traditions of
thought within the metropole has tended to elide the colonial past and drown out other
voices, with the consequence that those who were subject to colonial domination are
rendered absent or insignificant to what are presented as national traditions (see Bhambra,
2009). These issues are exacerbated in settler colonies where colonial modes of govern-
ance are domesticated and indigenous voices and histories displaced and silenced.
The United States, which is the focus of this article, occupies a somewhat peculiar
position within these debates (see Cook-Lynn, 1997; King, 2000; Singh and Schmidt,
2000). This is, in part, a consequence of its self-conception as the first ‘new nation’; that
is, a nation that itself had seceded from a colonial power and was forging its own destiny
free of the encumbrances of history and tradition. In particular, it sought to distinguish
itself from the historical weight of Europe’s past, including the forms of colonialism and
empire that characterized European powers and, as such, defined its territorial expansion
westwards in terms of an understanding of ‘manifest destiny’ and the creation of an
‘empire of liberty’ (see Roediger, 2008). Such an understanding is only possible to the
extent that the internal forms of stratification created through the transformation of the
landmass into the United States of America – that is, through the historical processes of
violent dispossession, displacement, enslavement and domination – are effaced, and con-
tinue to be effaced, from dominant accounts. The US may be a ‘new’ nation, but its new-
ness does not reside in its distance from colonialism. Rather, this is based on the
large-scale dispossession, displacement and genocide of native peoples and the enslave-
ment of Africans who were transported there to work on plantations. As such, ‘European’
coloniality is inscribed at the very heart of the United States and it cannot be understood
adequately without taking this into account.
1
A key concern of this article, then, is the relationship between race, segregation and
the epistemology of social science, in particular of sociology within the United States.
My interest is in examining how the long-standing tradition of Black sociology with its
substantial challenge to commonly accepted norms of sociological knowledge has been
474 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)
effectively displaced from standard histories of the discipline such that even the chal-
lenge mounted in the 1960s has been largely forgotten. The focus on the African American
tradition here is not to suggest that there have not also been other significant contesta-
tions of the hegemonic forms I am addressing. There have. Not least, there has been the
challenge by Native Americans, as Cook-Lynn argues, to ‘almost everything that America
has to offer in education and society’ (1997: 25). The truth is, she suggests, that the mar-
ginalization of Native Americans and Native American studies has much to do with the
continuing existence of colonial structures and practices that deny the principles of being
indigenous and of indigenous sovereignty to such an extent that there is no possibility of
rapprochement without a fundamental transformation of (ideas of) society and nation-
hood. Understandings of equality and desegregation within social science epistemolo-
gies, with which this article is concerned, can be seen to be of less significance to Native
American scholarship which has understandings of pre-existing sovereignty, nationhood,
treaty and indigenous rights as more central.
2
These issues will be taken up in future
work.
In making my argument in this article, I examine the politics of canon formation gen-
erally, before looking more specifically at the way in which this plays out in the context
of the history, and historiography, of US sociology. The second half of the article consid-
ers the place of African American sociology in the canon and the way in which it enables
us to reconsider key conceptual debates within sociology, with a particular focus on
debates around emancipation and equality.
3
The central argument of this article is as fol-
lows: to the extent that disempowerment is constituted, at least in part, through mecha-
nisms of exclusion from the sites of institutional knowledge formation and dissemination,
exclusion from the canon and, more importantly, from the processes of canon building is
key to understanding the dominant politics of knowledge production current within the
academy.
II
While celebratory narratives of the emergence of the US dominate standard historiogra-
phy, they have not gone unchallenged. The 1960s, in particular, saw the theory of internal
colonialism applied to the United States with regard both to the condition of race rela-
tions there as well as the ways in which race was understood epistemologically, that is,
in terms of thinking through the racialized politics of knowledge production of the US
academy. These debates, which had begun much earlier, brought together the structural
analyses of, largely, African American sociologists and activists within the Black Power
movement. The tradition of sociology inaugurated by WEB Du Bois in the first half of
the 20th century provided a significant challenge to dominant understandings of race,
and of race relations, in the United States (see Ladner, 1973; Rabaka, 2010; Saint-
Arnaud, 2009; Wilson, 2006). In particular, Du Bois (1909) contested sociological argu-
ments that sought to explain the unequal conditions within which African Americans
found themselves in terms of a postulated biological differentiation of races. Instead, he
argued for race to be understood as a social issue. That is, as a problem located in the
configuration of relationships between people; in issues of poverty, degradation, system-
atic oppression and segregation, including also the institutional segregation of
Bhambra 475
educational establishments.
4
He was followed in this line of reasoning by scholars such
as Charles S Johnson (1934) and E Franklin Frazier (1947, 1968 [1955]), who argued
that it was impossible to understand the contemporary position of African Americans in
the US without locating this within an historical analysis beginning with dispossession,
enslavement and the plantation system.
This historicization of racial oppression within the US was further located within a
theoretical paradigm of ‘internal colonialism’ as articulated by scholar-activists such as
Huey Newton, Stokely Carmichael and Charles V Hamilton. Carmichael and Hamilton
(1969) argued that, while the analogy of ‘internal colonialism’ was not perfect, it did
nonetheless describe the objective position of Black people in the United States. Further,
it pointed to and clarified the need for both political and epistemological decolonization
and self-determination. White sociologists such as Robert Blauner and David Wellman
concurred and argued themselves for the decolonization of social science research such
that it could ‘contribute to the larger anticolonial dynamic’ (1973: 330) necessary for the
eradication of institutional racism within the United States (see also Bloom and Martin,
2013: 269–287; Jeffries, 2002). Blauner and Wellman, however, were in a minority
among white sociologists. The majority failed adequately to address issues of race in the
US or to make space for discussion of such themes within sociology departments in his-
torically white universities (see Steinberg, 2007).
This failure led to demands by groups such as the Black Panther Party and the Third
World Liberation Front for the creation of Black and ethnic studies programmes to
address the condition of African Americans and others (see Bloom and Martin, 2013;
Patil, 2014). While the creation of these programmes and departments established aca-
demic space within historically white universities for the discussion and investigation of
issues of race, at the same time, however, it also had the consequence of isolating the
study of race from more general consideration. This meant, for example, that the disci-
pline of sociology within these same institutions did not necessarily have to engage with
arguments made by Black sociologists or from the traditions of Black sociology which
were located in these other departments.
5
This was not a necessary consequence, but
rather stemmed from the continued failure of (mostly white) sociology to engage with
the scholarship on race by other (mostly Black) scholars. In this way, the broader critique
identifying the racialized epistemology of the dominant version of the social sciences
was again displaced. Such epistemological exclusions continue to be of issue and are, in
part, a consequence of processes of canonization which are continually reproduced.
6
As Kermode (1985) argues, canons have never been wholly impermeable or immune
to change, but contestations in the late 20th century over the integrity of ‘the canon’,
particularly in the humanities, have been highly charged. Discussions regarding the for-
mation or constitution of the canon rarely revolve simply around the reputation of indi-
vidual authors and the case, or not, for their inclusion. Rather, for some (Bennett, 1984;
Bloom, 1987), the canon is seen to be the ground upon which the value(s) of ‘western
civilisation’ is/are to be defended against the questioning, by others (Morrison, 1989:
1–2), of its ‘whitemale’ origins and definitions. The self-appointed custodians of the
humanities (and, thus, Western civilization) centre their arguments around issues of qual-
ity, the maintenance of standards and the inculcation of shared values, arguing further for
aesthetic objectivity and universality in the face of potential politicization. This expressed
476 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)
fear of the politicization of cultural values and aesthetics occurs, however, with little
recognition of canon formation as something that has always been political. The objec-
tivity that people such as Bennett and Bloom call for is an objectivity grounded in the
decontextualization of the high canon of Western literature from the social and political
conditions of its emergence and subsequent perpetuation; the conditions, for example, of
colonialism, dispossession and enslavement. While the debate around the canon has been
somewhat different in the social sciences, the establishment of particular disciplinary
histories, I will go on to argue, performs a similar function.
A canon, in contrast to a classic, is a collective noun denominating a plural but deter-
minate group of works or authors which necessitates a clear demarcation between privi-
leged insiders and neglected outsiders (Weinsheimer, 1991). The formation of a canon is
generally regarded as the outcome of a collective (cultural) process where, as Kermode
suggests, it is possible to make additions and exclude simply by appearing to follow a
conversation (1985: 75). The predictable furore around any suggested changes to the
canon, however, should alert us to the fact that determining canonicity is not simply a
matter of persuading others of the merits of particular authors or texts. The collective
processes of intellectual engagement and contestation through which canonical status
comes to be ascribed is simultaneously complemented by, and could be argued to be
constituted through, the historical configurations of social relations that enable and
obstruct the participation of particular others at any given time (Guillory, 1987).
Following Hartsock’s (1987) general criticism, that we are not all in a position to partici-
pate as equals in a conversation, it is particularly important also to acknowledge the
consequences of such historical inequalities. Absence from the canon, as Toni Morrison
notes, does not imply an absence of processes associated with exclusion; rather, it should
cause us to interrogate the intellectual manoeuvres that are required to erase peoples
from histories and societies ‘seething’ with their presence (1989: 12). The silence of the
Black experience within canonical literary texts is amplified by the absence of Black
authored texts within the canon. Through a discussion of these absences, Morrison illu-
minates her proposition that whereas the literary canon appears ‘naturally’ or ‘inevitably’
white, in fact, it is ‘studiously’ so (1989: 14). The canonization of a particular discipli-
nary history for sociology demonstrates a similar commitment.
The hundredth anniversary of the American Sociological Association (ASA), the pro-
fessional association for sociologists in the United States, fell in 2005 and was the occa-
sion for the organization of an edited volume on its history. While the volume, in the
words of its editor Craig Calhoun, does not aim ‘to cover everything’ or to offer ‘exhaus-
tive documentation or narrative integration’, it does seek to provide a sociological his-
tory of the discipline through ‘a broad and diverse range of contributions’ (2007: xiii). In
producing a book that was not simply the history of the Association, but presented as ‘the
centennial history of sociology in America’ (Calhoun, 2007: xi), it can be regarded as a
canonical statement of the history of US sociology. As such, it offers a valuable insight
into how the discipline presents and represents its history. What is immediately striking
is the limited address of the broader historical context within which this disciplinary his-
tory is itself located. Apart from the three chapters that focus explicitly on race, hardly
any of the other chapters address the racially segregated context – including segregated
educational institutions – within which US sociology emerged and developed, either in
Bhambra 477
its own terms, or as significant for the telling of the history of US sociology.
7
Instead, the
majority of chapters focus on the historical traditions of white sociology and devolve
these, in their representations, to the historical traditions of sociology generally. By
refusing to acknowledge the racially segregated nature of the history that they are narrat-
ing, these scholars rearticulate that segregation for contemporary times with the only
chapters making the broader historical point also being chapters that address issues of
race. This is in contrast to the way in which ‘gender’ figures within the volume. While I
would not suggest that the volume presents a feminist history of US sociology, it does,
nonetheless, more extensively address issues of gender across the various chapters and
discusses the gender exclusions that were existent at the time of sociology’s beginnings
as an important aspect of how we think about the history of US sociology. In this way,
race continues to be segregated as a ‘topic’ within sociology and there is little discussion
of the way in which race has structured and continues to structure the sociological
enterprise.
The exclusions of race and the history of racial segregation, and the failure to analyse
the history of US sociology in this context, come in a variety of forms. For example, Neil
Gross in his chapter on pragmatism and 20th-century sociology mentions that Robert
Park worked for Booker T Washington and the Tuskegee Institute. He then goes on to
suggest that Park’s deep interest in issues of race and immigration were manifest in his
social theory which was ‘one part Simmel, one part Spencer, and one part American
pragmatism’ (2007: 195). Washington and the Tuskegee Institute, it seems, had no part to
play in the development of Park’s interest in issues of race and immigration. These minor
genealogies of inclusion and exclusion, when located within broader genealogies, rein-
force and amplify the silences and absences under consideration here. Lengermann and
Niebrugge (2007) in their chapter discussing sociology’s relation to social work identify
Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro as an example of settlement sociology research, but
do not include any instance of Black sociology within their table charting the key events
in the development and relation of sociology and social work in the US. In this way,
while they mention Du Bois, they fail to acknowledge as significant the broader tradition
of Black sociology and its contribution to the emergence and development of US sociol-
ogy. As a consequence, they erroneously – indeed, studiously – suggest that the history
of sociology in the US was only white.
The chapter by Calhoun and VanAntwerpen suggests that it was in the 1960s and
1970s that ‘women and people of colour entered the discipline in greater numbers …
[and] began to challenge dominant sociological paradigms regarding race and gender’
(2007: 377–378). This formulation effaces the long-standing tradition of Black sociol-
ogy in challenging such dominant paradigms since at least the time of Du Bois and
locates the challenge primarily in the entry of African Americans to historically white
institutions without reflecting on the history of racial segregation that preceded this and
necessitated the separation of historical black and historically white institutions.
Similarly, Doug McAdam points to the dramatic changes to traditional disciplinary top-
ics in the 1960s and suggests that this was a consequence of ‘the distinctive life experi-
ences of sociologists born immediately before and during the baby boom’ (2007: 425).
While desegregation may be implicit in such a statement, it is not explicitly addressed as
part of the significant historical context within which he locates his discussion. There is
478 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)
also a disregard of the fact that many of these ‘new’ topics that he identifies were long-
standing ‘core’ concerns within Black sociology; the ‘newness’ is only in relation to their
significance now within the institutional settings of white sociology. While Wallerstein
is more sympathetic to the issues of race within the US, he too, nonetheless, presents a
history of white sociology’s discovery of its neglect of race as a phenomenon of the
1960s and 1970s. In the process he also elides white sociology with sociology generally
and obliterates the long-standing scholarship of Black sociologists from the 19th century
onwards as part of the sanctioned history of US sociology.
The chapters by Morris, Winant and Collins narrate a starkly different history of US
sociology; a history that acknowledges the importance of race as a political issue and
which, if taken seriously, would require a radical revision of most others within the vol-
ume. As Patricia Hill Collins argues, ‘different versions of a logic of segregation shaped
all aspects of American society, including American sociology’ and it is necessary to
examine the impact of these logics on the practices of sociology from the outset (2007:
576). While, she suggests, sociology was uniquely placed to address directly such logics
of segregation – given that ‘its very reason for being was to uncover and study the rules
of social structure that were invisible in everyday social interaction’ (2007: 577) – its
embeddedness within those very same structures of segregation also mitigated against
this. As Howard Winant writes, race was not viewed as politically important ‘except by
opponents of the disciplinary consensus, such as WEB DuBois’ (2007: 535). Another
way of stating this would be to say that race was viewed as politically important except
by those who benefitted from its contemporary organization and who, in the process of
being professional sociologists and ignoring the reality of the political conditions of their
time, ‘legitimated the existing social inequalities of class, race, and gender within
American society’ (Collins, 2007: 581).
As Morris, Winant and Collins discuss, US sociology was forged in a period of racial
segregation and scientific racism in which ideas about the inferiority and inferior capaci-
ties of African Americans predominated, but which did not go uncontested. Alongside
the dominant narratives and paradigms there was a vibrant tradition of sociological
thought ‘based on carefully collected empirical data and measurement’ which, in turn,
was contextualized within a history of racial oppression and inequality (Morris, 2007:
510). This tradition, inaugurated by Du Bois and continued by scholars such as E Franklin
Frazier, Oliver Cromwell Cox and others, provided a powerful, alternative locus for
scholarship on race and inequality. It was a tradition that, as Morris (2007) argues, began
with a rejection of the racial inferiority thesis and paid greater attention to the social
environment in accounting for contemporary patterns of inequality. It provided an alter-
native sociology of race and, in so doing, also provided the possibility for an analysis of
the way in which sociology itself was embedded within a racial logic of segregation.
Contesting canonical histories of the discipline requires not only highlighting the
alternative traditions that were also present at the time in question, but also, as these
scholars remind us, using the intellectual resources of these alternative histories to think
differently about sociology today. The one other chapter in the volume that does present
a desegregated history is the chapter by Michael D Kennedy and Miguel A Centeno dis-
cussing global transformations in US sociology. They start their chapter by discussing
the ways in which the ‘international’ has figured, culturally and historically, within US
Bhambra 479
sociology and further contextualize this within ‘the power and privilege of American
sociology in the world’ (2007: 668). They then go on to discuss both the modes of inter-
nationalism within the hegemonic form of US sociology and the way in which this has
been represented. Where they differ from most other contributors, however, is that they
go further to examine the absences from the dominant representations and then discuss
the import of what has previously been missed by those accounts. They note, for exam-
ple, that while ‘the Sumner/Giddings debate about imperialism’ largely reflected
European concerns, ‘W. E. B. DuBois clearly signalled a tendency in American sociol-
ogy to challenge not only white but also Western presumptions’ (2007: 675). With this,
they also point to the exclusion of Du Bois from earlier representations of US sociology’s
internationalism, address his specific contributions to this in terms of his commitments
to pan-Africanism, situate this in the context of broader discussions of US sociology, and
rethink what internationalism within US sociology means once we take into account
previous absences.
As I will also go on to argue in the next section of this article, the silenced traditions
within hegemonic accounts of US sociology provide us with greater resources to begin
to rethink otherwise dominant sociological conceptualizations. Here, I examine under-
standings of emancipation and equality as articulated through one aspect of the African
American tradition – the dialogue between Booker T Washington and WEB Du Bois –
and discuss how attention to this debate enables us to develop more complex and richer
conceptualizations.
III
Emancipation emerges as a key theme within European Enlightenment thought in the
Old World at precisely the time that slavery is being instituted in the New. While the
intellectual content of emancipation was contrasted to the condition of slavery, the con-
comitant practice of enslavement by Europeans did not render suspect their political and
intellectual pronouncements on the topic (see Kohn, 2005). Both France and the United
States, commonly said to be the first modern nations, inscribed a commitment to free-
dom and liberty in their declarations of independence and documents of rights. Articulated
notions of freedom in these societies, however, existed alongside continued practices of
colonial domination, enslavement of populations, trade in human beings, and a belief
that some had a greater right to be free than others. Freedom, in their terms, while
espoused abstractly as a universal freedom was, in practice, more circumscribed – its full
enjoyment restricted to white, propertied men of some distinction. Subsequent renditions
of ‘universal freedom’ as embodied in the Western tradition of freedom similarly main-
tain a limited, racialized understanding of the concept. Alongside this tradition, however,
there has been another tradition which developed a more expansive understanding of the
concept. As Nikhil Pal Singh argues, ‘the modern black freedom struggle is as old as the
Atlantic slave trade and encompasses a history of resistance, refusal, revolts, and runa-
ways’ (2004: 49). It is to that tradition that I now turn.
The cultural expressions of enslaved peoples in the Americas developed, Foner argues,
‘as a synthesis of African traditions, European elements, and conditions in America’
(2005: 16). Thus, when the Declaration of Independence proclaimed mankind’s
480 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)
inalienable right to freedom in 1776, this particular rhetoric of liberty was absorbed into
the struggles of enslaved peoples against the institution of slavery alongside the instances
of revolution and insurrection as embodied in the events in Haiti and the acts of those such
as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner (Davis, 1989; Fordham, 1975). Frederick Douglass, a
self-emancipated African American, and leader of the abolitionist movement in the north,
was a key spokesperson in the struggle against slavery in the mid-19th century. He, along
with others, argued strongly that the abolition of slavery would require both a redefinition
of the nation and that social and political freedom must be accompanied by economic
opportunity to redress the poverty of African Americans created through two centuries of
slavery (see Buccola, 2012; Foner, 2005).
The US Civil War, which began in 1861, did not have emancipation as one of its aims.
However, emancipation of enslaved African Americans was one of its outcomes. Not
least, as many African Americans seized ‘the opportunity presented by the war to escape
slavery’ (Foner, 2005: 44). Mass, collective self-emancipation forced the hand of the
legislators into legalizing the de facto actions of African Americans. Legal emancipation
was followed by a decade of ‘Reconstruction’ when attempts were made at ‘remaking’
the nation along more egalitarian lines, but these attempts foundered as the white
Democrats regained power in the southern states and reinstituted forms of disenfran-
chisement and segregation along racial lines. The broader social context was also one of
widespread and systematic violence against African Americans, including lynchings and
the establishment of the Ku Klux Klan (see Johnson, 2008). The Jim Crow years of insti-
tutionalized violence against African Americans lasted close on a century, from 1876 till
1965, and only came to a formal end with the passing of the Civil Rights Act (1964) and
the Voting Rights Act (1965) in the 1960s (King, 1995).
While standard histories of Reconstruction laid the blame for its failure to remake the
nation on the variously attributed insufficiencies of those who had been freed, Du Bois
(1935), in Black Reconstruction, argued that its failure, rather, resided in problems asso-
ciated with the very system of the US itself (see Lemert, 2000). He argued strongly for
recognition of the contribution made by African Americans to reconstruct democracy
during this period and gave voice to this silenced history. The volume was both a contri-
bution to a more adequate history of the period – an attempt ‘to establish Truth, on which
Right in the future may be built’ (1935: 725) – and a challenge to the racist historiogra-
phy of earlier accounts; that is, it was an argument for scholars to ‘regard the truth as
more important than the defence of the white race’ (1935: 725). By writing the chief
witness of Reconstruction – ‘the emancipated slave’ – back into the history of the period,
Du Bois (1935) did not simply wish to add another narrative to the general history of
Reconstruction. He sought to point to this studied absence and, in reconstructing history,
also work to reconstruct the nation and democracy (see Singh, 2004). It was against this
background of Reconstruction and Jim Crow that the development of African American
thought around ideas of emancipation and equality took place. While any starting point
can be arbitrary, Booker T Washington and WEB Du Bois provide one of the first
instances of recorded public exchange on these issues and serve as founding figures to
the subsequent debates.
8
Booker T Washington was born under slavery in 1856, heard the Emancipation
Proclamation read out in 1865, lived through Reconstruction and the violent backlash to
Bhambra 481
it as embodied in the Jim Crow laws of 1876 and died in 1915 (see Washington, 1945
[1901]). On gaining his freedom, he worked his way through school and, in 1881, became
the first head of the Tuskegee Institute. He rose to prominence as a leader of the African
American community raising funds for the Tuskegee Institute and for the building of
schools in rural African American communities. He was feted for his ability to garner
those funds from wealthy white philanthropists and endorsed by those philanthropists for
advocating black accommodation to the social realities of segregation (Harlan, 1988).
Having lived through the hope of Reconstruction and its systematic dismantling, it is
perhaps not surprising that Washington would advocate a gradualist programme for
social reform. He believed that as African Americans were greatly outnumbered by
whites, the best they could hope for was to build up support among sympathetic whites
and to prove themselves worthy of a deferred equality (see Washington, 2007 [1909]). As
expressed in what came to be known as his ‘Atlanta Compromise’ speech of 1895,
Washington urged African Americans to improve their current economic conditions
through hard work and industry and by acquiring the education necessary for this. He felt
that they should sacrifice their desire for immediate social and political equality and that
instead of seeking ‘a seat in Congress or the state legislature’ or being able ‘to spend a
dollar in the opera house’, should look rather to preparing themselves for the eventual
exercise of such privileges. ‘The wisest among my race’, he suggested, ‘understand that
the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the
enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and con-
stant struggle rather than of artificial forcing’ (Washington, 1895).
Booker T Washington was perhaps the most renowned of African American leaders in
the period after emancipation and probably the last great African American born under
slavery. Du Bois himself lauded Washington ‘as the one recognised spokesman of his ten
million fellows, and one of the most notable figures in a nation of seventy millions’
(1997 [1903]: 63). He suggested that while previous leaders from the African American
community were likely only to have been known within the community, save Frederick
Douglass, Washington ‘arose as essentially the leader not of one race but of two – a com-
promiser between the South, the North, and the Negro’ (Du Bois, 1997 [1903]: 67). It
was the nature of the compromise, however, that led to criticism coalescing around the
alternative figure of Du Bois in the early 20th century and giving renewed impetus to the
debates around the meaning of emancipation within African American thought.
While Washington had initially enjoyed a period of leadership largely uncontested by
others, this began to change in the early 20th century. The period on from legal emanci-
pation had made it easier for African Americans to gain an education and to organize
collectively in the continued struggles for justice and for social, political and economic
freedoms. WEB Du Bois’s life, for example, had quite a different trajectory to that of
Washington and it was in his publicly voiced opposition to Washington that Du Bois
himself came to national prominence. Whereas Washington had been born under slavery
in the south, Du Bois was born a freeman in the northern state of Massachusetts (see
Lewis, 1993). He obtained a classical, liberal arts education at Fisk University, in con-
trast to Washington’s technical education in the south, and then studied at Harvard,
becoming the first African American to gain a PhD from that institution. He also spent
two years at the University of Berlin, Germany, working on his doctorate. After
482 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)
graduating, Du Bois initially worked within Black universities and, at the same time,
undertook research work for white institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania
(Anderson, 1996; Lewis, 1993). His research was focused on the objective barriers to
black economic advancement and, initially at least, appeared to converge with the aims
of Booker T Washington in this area. However, Du Bois broke with Washington’s more
accommodationist approach in 1903 with the publication of The Souls of Black Folk.
This book contained a chapter arguing that despite all the good that Washington had
undoubtedly done on behalf of African Americans, he had not adequately dealt with the
most crucial issues facing them: the continuing injustices emanating from slavery, the
lack of voting and other political privileges, and the psychosocial effects of segregation
and the maintenance of racial hierarchies upon African Americans.
Du Bois argues that there are three main implications of Washington’s pronounce-
ments: ‘first, that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because
of the Negro’s degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro’s failure to rise
more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his future rise depends
primarily on his own efforts’ (1997 [1903]: 71). Du Bois suggests that each of these ‘is a
dangerous half-truth’ and that the supplementary truths ought not to be lost sight of. First,
that slavery and racial prejudice are significant factors in the current position of Negros;
second, that educational institutions for African Americans had to be literally built up
from scratch as very few had existed prior to emancipation; and third that while, of
course, African Americans had to strive for their positions themselves, the environing
group needed to encourage and support such striving, and not be an obstacle to it (1997
[1903]: 71). Du Bois further argues that Washington’s doctrine had allowed whites to
‘shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro’s shoulders’ and enabled them to
‘stand aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs
to the nation’ (1997 [1903]: 72). ‘The Negro problem’, he argues strongly, is neither the
problem of African Americans, nor that of white Americans, rather, the problem of race
is correctly located as a problem of the nation, that is, in the social relations between citi-
zens and the problematic construction of a hierarchy of citizenship.
Du Bois urged African Americans to stand with Booker T Washington when he
preaches ‘Thrift, Patience, and Industrial Training for the masses’ (1997 [1903]: 72); but
to oppose him unceasingly when he ‘apologizes for injustice, … does not rightly value
the privilege and duty of voting, belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions,
and opposes the higher training and ambition of our brighter minds’ (1997 [1903]: 72).
He concludes his short chapter by arguing that ‘we must strive for the rights which the
world accords to men’ and then quotes the Founding Fathers’ statement: ‘That all men
are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights’
(1997 [1903]: 72). With this, Du Bois inextricably links the struggle for African American
emancipation with the impetus behind the founding of the nation itself and in a wider
conception of emancipation which includes the realization of substantive equality at its
core. Significantly, this also included a commitment to intellectual desegregation and the
opening up of classical and liberal arts education to African Americans. Where
Washington promoted only vocational education and skills training, Du Bois argued for
the importance of African Americans being involved in philosophical and social scien-
tific conversations as part of the project of social regeneration. The piece as a whole sees
Bhambra 483
Du Bois assert his right, following Douglass, to assimilate to the nation through self-
assertion, to become a citizen as a Negro and to expand the meaning of citizenship (and
democracy) through such endeavours.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of African American conceptions of emanci-
pation, then, was its expanded definition: from the narrow sense of being a counterfoil to
slavery in terms of simple liberation from enslavement, to being regarded as the neces-
sary condition for the fulfilment of one’s capacities as a human being. Where emancipa-
tion has usually been understood in terms of formal equality (whereby the Jim Crow laws
enacting a state of ‘separate and equal’ were regarded as not incompatible with emanci-
pation), African American conceptions of emancipation emphasized the necessity of
broader understandings of equality underpinning the possibilities of emancipation.
IV
The rarity with which scholars such as WEB Du Bois, Charles S Johnson, E Franklin
Frazier, or other ‘African American Pioneers of Sociology’, as Saint-Arnaud (2009) calls
them, are presented as core sociological voices within university curricula is a matter of
great significance from the point of view of histories of our discipline. However, it is not
simply an issue of the presence of African American sociologists, but how sociological
concepts have been structured by the absence of an address of African American sociol-
ogy and its different interpretation of canonical themes. As Katznelson argues, the US
academy’s failure to incorporate Du Bois as more than an emblem of diversity ‘has cost
it – that is, us – quite a lot’; in particular, the exclusion of other voices has ‘evacuated the
substantive gains that distinctive experiences and perspectives can bring’ (1999: 469–
470; see also Carter and Virdee, 2008). For example, contemporary accounts of inequal-
ity tend to assign ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ to ‘ascriptive’ identities that remain resistant to
the otherwise impersonal processes of modernity. In the current language, they are prod-
ucts of the ‘lifeworld’ not the ‘system’. Yet for much of the period during which these
sociological constructions were being formed the European ‘system’ of modernity was
one organized within a wider system of colonial domination, while in the United States,
the system was one of slavery, followed by divided labour markets and segregated insti-
tutions – including segregated educational institutions. In the standard accounts of the
history of sociology, the subject moves from being a ‘European’ invention to being
regarded as an expression of ‘American’ pragmatic optimism. It is little remarked, how-
ever, as noted in the earlier section, that the developing university system in the US was
itself a segregated system, with separate institutions for African Americans and whites.
Just as early developments of sociology in the white institutions of the United States
were associated with the ‘settlement movement’ and problems of the urban poor, so soci-
ology developed within the Black colleges as a particularly relevant subject within a
curriculum directed at understanding the conditions within which African Americans
lived (see Lengermann and Niebrugge, 2007; Reed, 1997). Given the conditions of the
time, the research capacity of Black sociology was at least as great as that of its white
counterparts – albeit less well resourced and supported. Indeed, Du Bois’s study, The
Philadelphia Negro, can be seen as the first major empirical study within the US using a
distinctively sociological approach (Anderson, 1996). That this accolade is more usually
484 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)
given to Thomas and Znaniecki’s The Polish Peasant, which was published nearly 20
years after The Philadelphia Negro, is symptomatic of a wider problem in accounts of
the birth of US sociology discussed in the earlier section. As Anderson and Massey
(2001: 3) put it, US sociology did not begin in the University of Chicago in the 1920s,
but at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1890s. Du Bois’s Philadelphia Negro, they
continue, ‘anticipated in every way the program of theory and research that later became
known as the Chicago School’ (2001: 4). As Bracey, Meier and Rudwick had earlier
argued, it is ironic that while Du Bois ‘was part of the mainstream of American sociology
as the discipline was emerging at the turn of the century’, he should then find himself
‘relegated to the periphery of the profession’ (1973: 9).
The development of a Black sociology separate from what came to be considered the
mainstream is significant in the light of Gunnar Myrdal’s (1944) commissioned study,
An American Dilemma. Myrdal, a Swede, was asked to look at the unequal position of
African Americans in the USA. Evidently, it was too problematic to ask local scholars
to conduct the study, but it was, in all crucial respects, a co-production of Myrdal and
the team of largely Black investigators – including Ralph Bunche and Kenneth B Clark,
among others. In An American Dilemma, Myrdal treated the problem of inequality in
the US as a problem of values and argued that ‘the American creed’ would ultimately
require and sanction the assimilation of African Americans. In this way, Myrdal posited
the gradual dissolution of ‘the Negro Problem’ through the institutionalization of the
democratic values of the American creed, that is, the values of liberty, justice and fair
treatment. However, as Ellison argued at the time, ‘aside from implying that Negro
culture is not also American’, Myrdal assumed that African Americans ‘should desire
nothing better than what whites consider highest’ (1973 [1944]: 94). In addition, there
was little discussion of the fact that this creed had been defined independently of the
African American experience and in direct contrast to that experience. What was
needed, instead, Ellison argued, was ‘not an exchange of pathologies, but a change of
the basis of society’ and that this was a job that needed to be performed together (1973
[1944]: 95).
For the most part, however, the traditions of white sociology continued to treat the
issue of inequality in terms of racially constituted difference within the hierarchies of
scientific racism (see Frazier, 1947; Turner, 1978). These sociological theories were, as
Frazier suggests, ‘merely rationalisations of the existing racial situation’ (1947: 268).
Even Myrdal, for example, identified the problems of inequality faced by African
Americans as ‘the Negro Problem’, not as the problem of inequality, or the problem of
the way in which white Americans treated African Americans. The pathologization of the
victims of inequality continued with the Moynihan Report published two decades later
and can still be seen in sociological work today where the ‘war on poverty’ has turned
into the ‘war on the poor’. In opposition to such a framing, the ‘segregated scholars’, as
Francille Rusan Wilson (2006) calls them, of the Black colleges and universities had
sought a structural account of inequality in terms of socioeconomic position and the
uneven development of US capitalism. The white approach, then, sought to universalize
racial difference, while the Black approach sought to deconstruct racial difference in
terms of a different universalizing tendency, that of class analysis (see Harris, 1989;
Robinson, 1983).
Bhambra 485
If subsequent developments within white sociology came to repudiate the scientific
racism of the early years, one dominant strand was then to argue that race did not matter
at all. In this argument, the inequalities assigned to race are ‘reduced’ to the operation of
‘class’ processes (whether of the standard form in occupational status attainment
approaches or in the neo-Marxist challenge to those processes by writers such as Erik
Olin Wright). According to this approach, when class (or socioeconomic) differences are
properly understood, what appears to be the outcome of discriminatory racial processes
is the operation of more significant class processes (Roediger, 1999). This shift in under-
standing within mainstream sociology took place at a time when the Black scholars –
who had initially conceived the problem of racialized difference in terms of inequalities
in the labour market – were moving from class analysis to Black consciousness. While
they had argued consistently that ‘class’ could transcend the particularism of ‘race’,
white workers had preferred their racialized, or ‘caste’, advantages in the workplace and
these advantages were then institutionalized through New Deal enactments and the dual
labour markets of the emerging Fordist regime (Cox, 1970 [1948]; Roediger, 1999).
Black consciousness was, in part, but not only, a response to this failure in solidarity
(Carmichael and Hamilton, 1969).
The distinctiveness of class and race was upheld by white sociology just at the time
that Black sociology was arguing that their integration could be part of a broader-based
claim for social justice. When Black sociology and the wider current of Black thought
and activism moved to the distinctiveness of racial processes and the need for specific
agitation to address the injustices emanating from such processes, white sociology
argued for an integrated approach based on class. However, the echo of the earlier posi-
tion remained in the lament that, with the new emphasis on race within Black sociology
and the attention given to other forms of ethnic discrimination, the white working class
had been neglected. Here, the ‘lost privileges’ of whiteness appear to dominate over a
unified class approach. The two sociologies thus remained at odds with each other.
V
Neglected in their day, the African American pioneers of sociology rightfully belong in
the canon, but simply being brought into the canon would not address the problems I
have identified in this article. As such, I want to conclude by suggesting something dif-
ferent. Historical issues of enslavement and colonial domination continue to structure
contemporary sociological discourse in ways acknowledged by those pioneers, such that
their being brought into the canon should be the occasion for us to reconsider present
sociological understandings and not just the scale and scope of past contributions. The
usual response to such exclusions – a response to which sociology is peculiarly prone – is
to argue for plural approaches and multiple traditions. In this way, it is suggested, sociol-
ogy can accommodate different voices through an expanded and expansive canon. It can
never be an adequate response, however, simply to include alternative voices, which
continue to be ordered around dominant voices, without questioning why these new
additions were initially excluded or what is the basis of their continued subordination.
Simple inclusion without reconstruction based on an acknowledgement of the differ-
ence that inclusion makes is an inadequate response to the problems outlined above. It is
486 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)
inadequate precisely because, as I argued at the start of the article, that is how the contri-
butions of Black sociology come to be defined as being about race, rather than about
sociology and the broader politics of knowledge production. Just as feminists have
argued that the ‘objectivity’ of sociological knowledge can disguise a male subjectivity,
so other claims to ‘objectivity’ or ‘recognition in diversity’ of ‘strong objectivity’ (or
however current epistemologies are framed, see Harding, 1991) can also embody racial-
ized epistemologies.
Instead, the central issue is the need to understand the mutual entailment of what are
presented as separate histories and the disciplinary inadequacies that are consequent to
their presentation as separate. While there may be two traditions of sociology (of course,
there are more), it is not correct to suggest that they developed in parallel and without
connection. Their very separation is based on mutually constituting histories of enslave-
ment and segregation. A desegregated history of US sociology needs to take seriously the
processes by way of which these traditions both came to be separate and to be presented
as separate. It needs to recognize the connections of enslavement, dispossession and
segregation as constitutive of the very formation of two traditions and of the hierarchical
ordering of the relations between those traditions. It further needs to acknowledge that
the Black tradition always engaged with and responded to developments in what was
understood as the mainstream. It was engagement in the other direction that was much
less frequent and that gave substance to the later claim suggesting two separate tradi-
tions. This is precisely the functioning of the veil about which Du Bois (1997 [1903])
wrote at the turn of the 20th century and, it seems, rests between us still. This double
subordination of the achievements of Black sociology and of the connections between
the traditions is what is missing in ideal-typical depictions of US sociology as presented
in standard histories of the discipline. Not to recognize the ways in which the legacies of
histories of racism continue to determine contemporary sociological endeavours is
potentially to perpetuate those histories in the present and to undermine the more exten-
sive contributions that have been made by sociologists to inclusive projects of social
justice. The challenge of reconstruction, then, is to think a common project of sociology,
and social justice, differently.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Elijah Anderson, Ipek Demir, Desmond King, Alice Mah, Vrushali Patil,
Satnam Virdee and, in particular, John Holmwood and Robbie Shilliam for helpful comments on
this article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. It is worth noting here that while de Tocqueville’s (2000 [1835]) classic study, Democracy in
America, is seen by many as providing a comparative sociology of the institutions of democ-
racy and freedom in the United States and Europe, it also points to issues of coloniality within
the US that require consideration. For example, de Tocqueville interrogates the institution of
Bhambra 487
US democracy from the perspective of the two races usually excluded from its functioning:
‘the Indians and the Negroes’. He clearly states that the land of the US is occupied by three
races and that his account of democracy is about only one of them because the history of the
other two is of their subjugation by the very institutions and practices that are otherwise being
praised. While scholars and others usually remember de Tocqueville’s capturing of the essen-
tial spirit of US democracy, they very often neglect his powerful critique of its contradiction
in refusing its own universalization and thus perpetuating colonial modes of governance (see
Bhambra and Margree, 2010).
2. This mirrors a difference noticed by de Tocqueville (2000 [1835]) and largely ignored since
in mainstream social science. The forced transportation and enslavement of Africans placed
them outside the various institutional structures of white settlement otherwise valorized in
accounts of the Constitution, while the dispossession of indigenous peoples left them also
outside those structures and antagonistic to inclusion. As de Tocqueville put it, one group
wished for inclusion but was denied it; the other did not wish inclusion and was subjugated.
3. The African American tradition of sociology is not a homogeneous one and there were, of
course, significant differences among African American sociologists on the particular issues
with which they were concerned (see Saint-Arnaud, 2009; Wilson, 2006).
4. For an examination of the institutional relationship between race, dispossession, enslavement
and the establishment of US universities, see Craig Steven Wilder (2013); see also Allen et al.
(2007).
5. The concern that the establishment of Black studies, separate from Departments of Sociology
and History and so forth, would mean the segregation of understandings of race and of the
considerations of experiences of African Americans and others, was something that CLR
James, already in 1969, was cautioning against (1984 [1969]).
6. See King and Smith (2005) for an earlier, parallel argument in the field of American political
development and Vitalis (2005) discussing similar issues in International Relations.
7. While a couple of chapters mention the work of WEB Du Bois, it is always as an individual
exception. There is little discussion of the tradition of Black sociology of which he was a
part and the relationship of that tradition to the dominant narratives that are otherwise pre-
sented. Further, there is limited acknowledgement of the contribution made by Du Bois to the
politics of his time, for example, through his organization and involvement in the Niagara
Movement, the NAACP and the pan-African Congresses (see Morris, 2007). A more recent
volume, edited by George Steinmetz (2013) and addressing the imperial entanglements of
sociology and empire, similarly neglects to consider the imperial histories of dispossession
and enslavement that constitute conditions within which US sociology itself emerged.
8. This is not to suggest that they were the only ones to have discussed such issues. On the con-
tribution by Marcus Garvey, for example, to discussions of sovereignty, see Shilliam (2006).
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Author biography
Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Social Theory Centre at the
University of Warwick. Her research addresses how, within sociological understandings of moder-
nity, the experiences and claims of non-European ‘others’ have been rendered invisible to the
dominant narratives and analytical frameworks of sociology. While her research interests are pri-
marily in the area of historical sociology, she is also interested in the intersection of the social
sciences with recent work in postcolonial studies. She is the author of Rethinking Modernity:
Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Palgrave, 2007, Winner of the BSA Philip
Abrams Memorial Prize) and Connected Sociologies: Theory for a Global Age (Bloomsbury,
2014).
Résumé
Sur le plan historique, la sociologie étatsunienne est un exemple de ségrégation en
ce que jusque dans les années 60, il existait deux traditions distinctes de pensée
sociologique organisées sur le plan institutionnel – une tradition noire et une tradition
blanche. Dans l’ensemble toutefois, les historiographies dominantes ne font pas mention
de la ségrégation et, au mieux, la reproduisent quand elles traitent de la tradition
sociologique étatsunienne. Ceci est manifeste dans la rareté avec laquelle des érudits
tels que WEB Du Bois, E Franklin Frazier, Oliver Cromwell Cox et d’autres que Saint-
Arnaud désigne sous le nom de « pionniers de la sociologie afro-américaine » sont
présentés en tant que voix sociologiques clés dans les histoires de la discipline. Dans
cet article, j’aborde le problème de l’absence de sociologues afro-américains dans le
canon sociologique étatsunien et j’analyse également les implications de cette absence
sur notre compréhension de concepts sociologiques fondamentaux. À ce dernier égard,
je me concentre en particulier sur les débats sur l’égalité et l’émancipation et examine
les moyens par lesquels notre compréhension de ces concepts pourrait être élargie en
prenant en ligne de compte les travaux de sociologues afro-américains et la manière
différente dont ils interprètent des thèmes centraux.
Mots-clés
Booker T Washington, colonialisme de peuplement, WEB Du Bois, épistémologie,
racisme, ségrégation, sociologie étatsunienne
Resumen
La sociología estadounidense ha sido segregada históricamente porque, al menos
hasta los años 60, había dos tradiciones de pensamiento sociológico organizadas
institucionalmente en forma diferente: una negra y una blanca. En su mayor parte,
sin embargo, las historiografías predominantes han guardado silencio sobre esta
segregación y, a lo sumo, la reproduce cuando se refiere a la tradición sociológica
492 Current Sociology Monograph 2 62(4)
estadounidense. Esto es evidente en la singularidad con la que estudiosos como WEB
Du Bois, E Franklin Frazier, Oliver Cromwell Cox, y otros ‘pioneros afro-americanos
de la sociología’, como Saint-Arnaud los llama, se presentan como voces sociológicas
centrales dentro de las historias de la disciplina. En este artículo, me refiero a la ausencia
de sociólogos afro-americanos del canon sociológico estadounidense y, además, analizo
las implicancias de esta ausencia para nuestra comprensión de conceptos sociológicos
fundamentales. Con respecto a esto último, hago particular hincapié en los debates
sobre igualdad y emancipación y en analizar la manera en que nuestra comprensión
de estos conceptos podría ampliarse al considerar el trabajo de los sociólogos afro-
americanos y sus diferentes interpretaciones de temas centrales.
Palabras clave
Booker T Washington, colonialismo de repoblamiento, WEB Du Bois, epistemología,
racismo, segregación, sociología estadounidense
