Racial Theories in Social Science

A Systemic Racism Critique

Sean Elias, Joe R. Feagin

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317240563
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Sociologia

Racial Theories in Social Science: A Systemic Racism Critique provides a critique of the white racial framing and lack of systemic-racism analysis prevalent in past and present mainstream race theory. As this book demonstrates, mainstream racial analysis, and social analysis more generally, remain stunted and uncritical because of this unhealthy white framing of knowledge and evasion or downplaying of institutional, structural, and systemic racism. In response to ineffective social science analyses of racial matters, this book presents a counter-approach---systemic racism theory. The foundation of this theoretical perspective lies in the critical insights and perspectives of African Americans and other people of color who have long challenged biased white-framed perspectives and practices and the racially oppressive and exclusionary institutions and social systems created by whites over several centuries.

PART I Social Sciences' Historic Misframing of “Race”

The Twin Births of Social Science and Race Theory

DOI: 10.4324/9781315628288-1

“Race” is a foundational force in the development of the modern world and continues fundamentally to shape contemporary societies and interrelations among societies. More specifically, racial matters affect the lives of most human beings across the globe.¹ Thus, much is at stake in asking the right questions about contemporary racial meanings, framing, hierarchies, and power—that is, about the social-historical realities of systemic racism. Constructions of racial meanings and associated structures of racial relations, with their great power and privilege imbalances, continue to shape contemporary societal worlds and human beings’ everyday interactions. Numerous contemporary societies are founded and/or grounded in racist systems that greatly and unjustly benefit whites and greatly and unjustly disadvantage people of color. The racially defined processes and structures of contemporary human relations and social worlds that we term systemic racism have generally evolved out of European-imposed slavery systems, historical imperialism and colonialism, and subsequent large-scale subjugations of peoples of color across the globe. As a result, systemic racism exists and persists as a widespread social reality of the modern age and our current societal worlds.

Yet, the mainstream social sciences largely operate as if white-imposed, well-institutionalized racism no longer exists or is a modest or disappearing problem in modern Western societies. This neglect of properly analyzing racially based social inequalities, stratification, and power structures—and the ways they affect the social opportunities and connectedness, life-chances, and life-worlds of differently racialized individuals and groups—is unconscionable and stymies the development and impact of social scientific knowledge as a whole.

Even contemporary mainstream social scientists who study racial matters often approach their analyses with weakly constructed research questions, unreflective theoretical positions, or conventionally limited methodological approaches. They are handicapped by the chains of professionalism and an inability to escape a long history, indeed tradition, of social scientific misframing of racial inequalities and hierarchies. Before we analyze the mainstream struggle to produce insightful scientific knowledge about racial matters and offer a detailed critique of trends in mainstream social science analysis, a review of some origins of social sciences’ misframing of “race” is clearly in order. Many contemporary social scientists’ failure to ask pertinent questions about systemic racism developed by whites, develop constructive theories about and methods for investigating racism, and challenge the pervasive white racial framing operating as a vehicle of misinformation throughout mainstream social science, is best understood by examining the founding of mainstream social sciences and their often problematical examinations of racial matters.

Unlike most mainstream analyses of the sociology of race that begin with Robert Ezra Park and the Chicago School of sociology, we extend our critical assessment back to the founding and early development of the mainstream social sciences, illustrated well in the social thought of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, and their heirs: Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber. Although their racial views have often been overlooked or downplayed, these famous social scientists have had a lasting influence not only on sociology and other social sciences in general, but also on their treatment of racial matters in particular. (Note that in Chapter 9 we also challenge the mainstream narrative that the US sociology of racial matters begins with the white male sociologists of the Chicago School.)

Reassessing Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer

Not coincidentally, the mainstream social sciences were born about the same time that European and US imperialism and slavery systems were dramatically expanding throughout the nineteenth century. European analysts, including the new social scientists, helped to create systems of thought and knowledge that justified the human actions and social praxis of racial oppression necessary for colonization and enslavement across the globe. European colonialist empires and slavery systems, well-established by the eighteenth century, were formed through acts of massive oppression tied to major new knowledge claims, the latter by the nineteenth century involving full social scientific legitimization and rationalizing of these acts of extreme oppression. Newly formed European social sciences, along with Western religious doctrines and framing, played increasingly central roles in the material development and intellectual justifications for colonialism and slavery, and in the centuries-long subsequent post-slavery and post-colonial oppression of people of color.²

Europeans’ global oppression of peoples of color—a central facet of colonialism and slavery systems—was sanctioned by social scientific arguments about the “racial superiority” of whites and “racial inferiority” of people of color living outside of Europe. The social sciences emerging in the nineteenth century were significantly influenced by previous European social philosophers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant. In his writings, the still-influential Hume openly described “negroes” as inferior “breeds of men.” Additionally, Europe’s most celebrated philosopher, Immanuel Kant, actually taught courses on what would later be considered social science topics, in which he asserted that “humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race” and that there is a hierarchy of “races of mankind” with superior whites at the top.³ Kant was among the very first Western thinkers to explicitly use the modern term and concept of “races” in a deterministically biological and hierarchical sense. About the same time, the prominent European anatomist Johann Blumenbach utilized “races” in the same biological sense in his influential “race” classification. He coined the term “Caucasians” (Europeans) for those at the top of his race hierarchy, with Mongolians (Asians), Ethiopians (Africans), Americans (Native Americans), and Malays (Polynesians) down the hierarchy.⁴ Early white European and North American social scientists were influenced by these Enlightenment thinkers, whose racialized perspectives accented the biological and sociocultural supremacy of the European (white) “race.”

One of the central activities of the newly forming social sciences was the further development of measures and questions about the differences among races and related theoretical arguments and research methods intended to demonstrate whites’ racial superiority. Early European social scientists’ preoccupation with racial matters centered on their theories and methods for understanding race, and this preoccupation had great impact on the development of the social science disciplines. Auguste Comte, the white European analyst who coined the term “sociology” and is often considered the “father” of the sociology discipline, developed the blueprint for sociology’s early theoretical framework with his organicist theory of society, informed in part by European colonialist expansion and European-imposed social hierarchies. Comte’s thought influenced numerous founders of mainstream sociology in Europe and the United States. Comte was not a racial analyst per se, but his sociological analyses such as Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42) delineated a Eurocentric view of society and a hierarchy of human beings.⁵

Underlying Comte’s organicist societal model and human relations, and its subsequent development as “structural functionalism,” are beliefs in the social supremacy and innate power of certain “advanced” individuals, groups, and nations. The model reflects beliefs in a naturally occurring social hierarchy and an unequal division of labor among individuals, groups, and nations. Additionally, built upon these beliefs is a view that some of these individuals and groups are naturally destined to rule over others. This theory of group superiority was easily adapted to justify group exploitation across racial, ethnic, class, religious, and gender lines. In the case of racial matters, versions of Comte’s framework were used to justify colonialism and slavery systems—that is, to justify whites’ colonizing, exploitation, and violence-enforced power over people of color.⁶ Eighteenth-century Christian beliefs that distinguished between God’s chosen (whites and those who are civilized) and damned (those who possess the “mark of Cain” and who are primitive) also influenced Comte’s view of human beings and the social realm.

Comte’s influential sociological perspective clearly established a social theory of white or European supremacy. For Comte, “evolution at its highest point” is discovered in “the civilization of Europe.”⁷ He endorses a sociological view of a racial hierarchy with whites at the top of the social pyramid, supported by people of color. According to Comte, whites are intellectually and morally superior to other races, and Europeans’ societal organization is the most “civilized”—the model for a good society. He perceived the social organization of people of color as “primitive.” By viewing non-Europeans as “underdeveloped” and “inferior,” Comte further opened the door to the new social sciences’ obsession with studying social pathologies of people of color and viewing white folkways as the norm to measure other racial groups. Additionally, by referencing shaky biological understandings of race popularized by the pseudo-sciences of “cerebral physiology” and “phrenology,” Comte foreshadowed the future implementation by some social scientists of quack theories of race and quack methods for investigating racial group differences.⁸ More problematically, Comte formatively translated his ethnocentric social views about group differences and hierarchy into understandings of an organicist model of society and human relations, a general model that other European social analysts, such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Émile Durkheim, and Herbert Spencer, would develop into conventional forms of structural functionalism and social conflict theory, major frameworks in mainstream social sciences ever since.⁹

Alexis de Tocqueville, one of Comte’s contemporaries, is often considered to be a founding sociologist whose analyses of US society in Democracy in America (1835) are routinely covered in social theory courses. De Tocqueville, a white French intellectual, forcefully spelled out Comte’s and other early European and North American social scientists’ views of “races,” when he wrote: “If we reasoned from what passes in the world, we should almost say that the European is to the other races of mankind, what man is to the lower animals; he makes them subservient to his use; and when he cannot subdue, he destroys them.”¹⁰ While praised as a brilliant analyst and defender of democracy by most contemporary social scientists, de Tocqueville was in fact an early white supremacist theorist with an aggressively negative framing of African and Native Americans: “Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the man preeminently so called; below him appear the Negro and the Indian.” Later, he indicated in some detail his blatantly racist framing by insisting that a black man’s “physiognomy is to our eyes hideous, his understanding weak, his tastes low; and we are almost inclined to look upon him as a being intermediate between man and the brutes.”¹¹ The fact that mainstream social scientists have generally ignored de Tocqueville’s white supremacist framing of US racial groups and society reveals as much about contemporary US social science as it does about the social science of de Tocqueville’s era.

Much of Comte’s thought, once translated and condensed by British social scientist Harriet Martineau, was imported into the US by the early white sociological thinkers George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes.¹² In their influential books they utilized Comte’s organicist thinking, evolutionary views of “races,” and Eurocentrism to support a white-dominated US society that legitimized slavery and white oppression of black people and other people of color. Written in the 1850s run-up to the Civil War, Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South (1854) and Hughes’ Treatise on Sociology (1854) formulated “sociological” theories, arguing forcefully that whites serve a more important function and necessarily occupy a higher position in the social structure than blacks and other people of color.¹³ Because of this “natural” and “divinely ordained” division between superior and inferior races, a racialized society involving black enslavement and a social system controlled by whites was essential.

Hughes’ Treatise envisioned a “societary” system labeled warranteeism that divided whites into a superordinate race of warrantors and blacks into a subordinate race of warrantees.¹⁴ This social relationship with whites exerting complete power over black people reflected the “laws” of nature and the “ways of God.” Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South and his later work, Cannibals All! or Slaves without Masters (1857), express the same racial views and sociological outlook as Hughes, arguing that black enslavement by whites was sanctioned by the Bible and that slavery and other blatant exploitation of people of color were part of the natural racial order.¹⁵ Most white US social scientists of the late nineteenth century would try to bury these social science writings of Hughes and Fitzhugh in efforts to erase the link between the developing social sciences and earlier aggressive pro-slavery thought. However, many of the racial understandings of Hughes and Fitzhugh were not discarded but often reinvented with new terminology and theoretical reformulations that accompanied the growth of mainstream, professionalized social sciences in the early twentieth-century colleges and universities of the United States.

Along with utilizing Comte’s thought, most early white social scientists embraced some of Herbert Spencer’s ideas, specifically his social Darwinism that reworked Comtean notions of European social dominion. Spencer, a white English intellectual, borrowed Comte’s views about race, but added a new dimension to understanding racial matters: a “natural” competition and conflict among races that leads to the social “survival of the fittest,” a phrase he coined. Spencer examined the conflict among different societies. Drawing on the Comtean organicist metaphor, he discussed racial groups in diverse societies as organisms in “competition/conflict,” organisms that are subject to different levels of adaptation and success. He claimed that superior racial groups adapt to changing social circumstances more quickly than inferior racial groups.¹⁶ Equating skin color with intelligence and morality, and emphasizing the “more perfect intellectual vision” of Europeans, Spencer argued that whites possess inherent “traits”—social skills and technologies—that give them an advantage over people of color.¹⁷ Additionally, he presented ...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Post-Racial America And Social Science: Reality Or Myth?
• Part I Social Sciences' Historic Misframing of “Race”
• Part II Contemporary Mainstream Social Science And Race Theory
• Part III Systemic Racism Theory Background And Overview
• Index