Race Relations

A Critique

Stephen Steinberg

• Publisher: Stanford Social Sciences
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780804763233
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Diskriminierung & Rassenbeziehungen

Stephen Steinberg offers a bold challenge to prevailing thought on race and ethnicity in American society. In a penetrating critique of the famed race relations paradigm, he asks why a paradigm invented four decades before the Civil Rights Revolution still dominates both academic and popular discourses four decades after that revolution.

On race, Steinberg argues that even the language of "race relations" obscures the structural basis of racial hierarchy and inequality. Generations of sociologists have unwittingly practiced a "white sociology" that reflects white interests and viewpoints. What happens, he asks, when we foreground the interests and viewpoints of the victims, rather than the perpetrators, of racial oppression?

On ethnicity, Steinberg turns the tables and shows that the early sociologists who predicted ultimate assimilation have been vindicated by history. The evidence is overwhelming that the new immigrants, including Asians and most Latinos, are following in the footsteps of past immigrants—footsteps leading into the melting pot. But even today, there is the black exception. The end result is a dual melting pot—one for peoples of African descent and the other for everybody else.

Race Relations: A Critique cuts through layers of academic jargon to reveal unsettling truths that call into question the nature and future of American nationality.

PART ONE

THE ORIGINS AND IDEOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF THE RACE RELATIONS PARADIGM

To trace the black man in American sociology is tantamount to tracing the history of American sociology itself.

Stanford Lyman, The Black American in Sociological Thought¹

NINETEEN SIXTY-THREE WAS THE YEAR the Civil Rights Revolution reached its explosive climax. Pressures had been building up for nearly a decade, as grassroots insurgency evolved into a full-fledged political movement, replete with organizations, leaders, goals, and strategies, all aimed at the complete dismantling of the Jim Crow system that was the stepchild of slavery itself. Protest leaders tapped the smoldering resentments of African Americans over the indignities and abuses of racial segregation and second class citizenship, and mobilized these resentments into a political movement that threw the entire society into crisis. In hindsight, the Civil Rights Revolution has the appearance of a linear and inexorable progression, beginning with Rosa Parks’s courageous act of defiance, and culminating a decade later with the passage of landmark civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. Actually, the movement was one of fits and starts. Confronted as it was with powerful and intransigent institutions, the movement at times stalled and even tottered on the brink of defeat.

Indeed, 1962 was a year notable for its setbacks. To wit:

• The Supreme Court declined to review a ruling that overturned a Washington State law barring racial discrimination in the sale or rental of publicly aided housing.
• The Kennedy administration failed to put forward civil rights legislation.
• In Albany, Georgia, Martin Luther King led demonstrations protesting segregation of the city’s public facilities, but city officials cunningly refused to resort to violence that invariably backfired by generating headlines and sympathy for the movement. Without the glare of publicity, the demonstrations petered out.
• In New Orleans, segregationists sponsored reverse freedom rides by giving 1,000 blacks free one-way rides to any Northern city of their choice.
• President Kennedy’s bill to create a Department for Urban Affairs was killed by the House Rules Committee.²

Inexplicably, 1963 was the year that the pendulum shifted the other way, as the movement recovered from setbacks and extended protest to the North, vitiating the assumption that racism was just a “Southern problem.”

• Martin Luther King was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, on Good Friday, April 12. The next day the Birmingham campaign was launched, producing the images of fire hoses and police dogs that are forever etched on the national memory.
• On June 23, Martin Luther King led 125,000 people on a Freedom Walk in Detroit, signifying the extension of protest to Northern cities.
• In July and August there were mass demonstrations at construction sites in New York City, leading to the arrest of some 800 demonstrators.
• On October 22, 1963, designated “Freedom Day,” virtually every black student in the Chicago school system stayed home in protest against segregation, and thousands marched on City Hall.
• On August 28 Martin Luther King and Bayard Rustin led the famous March on Washington, the largest civil rights demonstration in history, in which a coalition of civil rights groups, labor unions, and white liberals marched “For Jobs and Freedom.” Note that “jobs” was given priority over “freedom,” though the march also sought to mobilize support for President Kennedy’s civil rights bill that was tied up by Dixecrats in Congress.
• The Birmingham protest persisted, involving the arrest of more than 3,000 people.

It is difficult to capture through this litany of events the electrifying sense of crisis that gripped the nation. Basically, it was a constitutional crisis over whether the federal government or the states had jurisdiction over civil rights. The nation was again torn apart along the very fault lines that had produced the Civil War: the division between the slavocracy and the rest of the nation, this time over whether Jim Crow was protected under the doctrine of states rights, which the founding fathers had inserted in the Constitution to appease the slaveholding South. In essence, the Civil War was being fought again, initially in the courts but now in the streets of the old Confederacy. Instead of the Union Army, there were legions of civil rights protesters, mobilized by disciplined organizers. Southern authorities—ranging from U.S. senators, to state governors, to local sheriffs, to lynch mobs—played out their scripted role as defenders of the old order, which yielded a steady stream of disturbing television images beamed into homes across the nation, and indeed the world.

The asymmetry of ordinary citizens—descendants of slaves demonstrating for elementary civil rights—juxtaposed against fire hoses, police dogs, and other instruments of state power, had all the earmarks of a morality play dramatizing the perpetual struggle between good and evil, except that it was being enacted on the stage of history with a disfranchised people crying out for justice. A number of recent historians have stressed the role that foreign policy considerations played in shaping national policy. Against the background of the Cold War, how could the United States compete for “the hearts and minds” of people in the Third World when its own Third World minority was subjected to glaring humiliation and abuse? Even so, it is doubtful that the 1964 Civil Rights Act would have passed but for the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. In the context of this national tragedy, liberals in Congress were able to invoke cloture on a civil rights filibuster for the first time, assuring passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. With this legislation, the civil rights movement had achieved its principal objective : the end of second class citizenship. Of course, there is bitter irony in the fact that this legislation only restored rights that were supposedly secured by Reconstruction Amendments a whole century earlier, and that these rights were restored only after a protracted and bloody struggle that pitted defenseless protestors against powerful institutions of a racist state.

Despite the depth of the racial crisis, it was a long time before the reverberations penetrated the American university, where even the architecture and landscaping suggest a refuge from the seamy and chaotic world outside. This warrants a moment’s reflection. The monastic ambience of the university has its origins in a time when college functioned as a breeding ground for gentlemen, and the curriculum emphasized Greek, Latin, theology, and the classics. How is a monastic conception of the university possible in a field like sociology, whose very subject matter includes the seamy and chaotic business of race? Could sociologists remain stubbornly detached in the face of such glaring injustice? Was it not a professional obligation, if not a moral imperative, for sociologists to dirty their hands, to become engaged? Let us return to the question: What did sociology do while Rome burned?

WHILE ROME BURNED

It should come as no surprise that sociology remained on the sidelines during the critical early phases of the Civil Rights Revolution. Sociology was not alone. In the case of political science, only six articles containing the word “Negro” in their titles, and four with the word “race,” were published in the American Political Science Review between 1906 and 1963.³ Nor did the black liberation movement receive much support even from the nation’s public intellectuals, as Carol Polsgrove shows in Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement. According to Polsgrove, “when white intellectuals were faced with the challenge of racial equality, they hesitated—fearful, cautious, distracted, or simply indifferent.”⁴ Among the luminaries whom Polsgrove singles out for criticism are such literary figures as Robert Penn Warren, William Faulkner, and Norman Mailer; public intellectuals such as Reinhold Neibuhr and Hanna Arendt; and leading scholars such as C. Vann Woodward and David Reisman. According to Polsgrove, some of these intellectuals were swayed by romantic attachments to the Old South. Others succumbed to the pressures of McCarthyism and the Cold War. Still others feared a reactionary backlash that would engulf liberalism and bring down the Democratic Party. This is why they hesitated and counseled moderation and gradualism. To be sure, there were some intellectuals and scholars who provided ardent support for the movement, and who opposed the “neo-Confederates,” as they were derisively called. But as Polsgrove shows, most remained silent. Writing in The New Republic in 1956, Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, a black historian, fired this salvo:

Countless editors, scholars and men of letters, in and out of the South, who personally might shrink from killing an insect, give their sanction to the intransigence of the racists. Is it too much to say that there is a connection between the essays, editorials and novels of the literary neo-Confederates and the howling mob that blocks the path of little Negro children on the way to school integration?⁵

In the case of sociology, culpability goes even further. Here we have a designated field, ambiguously called “race relations,” that purports to practice objective social science but whose knowledge claims inescapably have moral consequences, either in subverting racism, or alternatively, providing scientific legitimation for the prevailing racial order. Without doubt, most sociologists proudly see themselves and their discipline as engaged in an antiracist project, and cite the role that social science played historically in discrediting the Social Darwinism that once buttressed notions of racial superiority and inferiority. My contention, however, is that sociology has too long bathed in self-congratulation over the achievement of some of its founders in discrediting biological racism and establishing the irreducibly social character of “race.” The singular achievement of American social science was to bracket “race” with quotation marks, signifying that it is a social construction and not a biological fact. But W. I. Thomas famously wrote: “If men define a situation as real, it is real in its consequences.” This raises the paramount question: What role did sociology play in relation to the consequences of this biological fiction? To return to the question I posed earlier, what role did sociology play “while Rome burned,” when the grievances of blacks erupted into a movement demanding elementary rights of citizenship, and the entire nation was thrown into crisis?

In a 1993 paper entitled “Race Relations as Social Process: Sociology’s Resistance to a Civil Rights Orientation,” Stanford Lyman showed that generations of social theorists evaded or downplayed civil rights as a matter of social urgency. Instead, they advanced theoretical models that projected racial amelioration as part of an evolutionary process of societal change. “Since the time for teleological redemption is ever long,” Lyman writes sardonically, “blacks might consign their civic equalitarian future to faith in the ultimate fulfillment of the inclusion cycle’s promise.” Lyman issued the following verdict, “Sociology . . . has been part of the problem and not part of the solution.”⁶

Sociology’s reckoning with its failure to champion civil rights took an unusually public form. It occurred at the 1963 meetings of the American Sociological Association when Everett Hughes delivered his presidential address under the title, “Race Relations and the Sociological Imagination.” “Why,” Hughes asked, “did social scientists—and sociologists in particular—not foresee the explosion of collective action of Negro Americans toward immediate full integration into American society?”⁷

This was an extraordinary moment in the annals of social science. Here was Everett Hughes, the eminent president of the American Sociological Association, issuing a public confession of intellectual failure in the most public of venues: the annual meetings when sociologists gather with ceremonial expectation to hear the presidential address. By uncanny coincidence Hughes’s address occurred on the very day of the historic March on Washington, the largest civil rights demonstration in the nation’s history. Whatever else needs to be said, Hughes deserves credit for his intellectual candor and for raising provocative questions about sociology’s failure to anticipate the Civil Rights Revolution.

Hughes was willing to go only so far in challenging the received wisdom, however. This was evident even in the way he framed the question. If our eminent president had critical distance from his profession and the role that he played in it, he might have asked, why did the sociological establishment fail to anticipate the Civil Rights Revolution? Framed in this way, the question is almost self-explaining. Like the other movements of the 1960s, the civil rights movement was a movement “from below.” These were grassroots movements by subaltern groups challenging their subordination by powerful institutions. Notwithstanding its claims to the contrary, the sociological enterprise is an elite formation. It routinely selects its practitioners from the privileged strata of the population, its research programs depend heavily on funding from government and foundations, it is centered in elite institutions of higher learning, and this ivory tower offers a remote and rarefied vantage point for observing the world below. True, we send emissaries “into the field,” as we say, like voyagers to a foreign land who come back with narratives to enlighten the rest of us about “how the other half lives.” The problem, though, is that these emissaries typically see the world through an ideological lens that reflects their position of racial and class privilege, not to speak of the dominant paradigm in the field and the prevailing ideologies in the society at large.

The net result, in matters of race, has been an “epistemology of ignorance,” to use the trenchant phrase that political philosopher Charles Mills coined in The Racial Contract. “One has to learn ...