The Case for Scholarly Reparations

Posted in Articles, History, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2016-01-12 18:51Z by Steven

The Case for Scholarly Reparations

Berkeley Journal of Sociology
2016-01-11

Julian Go, Professor of Sociology
Boston University

Race, the history of sociology, and the marginalized man – lessons from Aldon Morris’ book “The Scholar Denied

If Aldon Morris in The Scholar Denied is right, then everything I learned as a sociology PhD student at the University of Chicago is wrong. Or at least everything that I learned about the history of sociology. At Chicago, my cohort and I were inculcated with the ideology and ideals of Chicago School. We were taught that American sociology originated with the Chicago School. We were taught that sociology as a scientific enterprise, rather than a philosophical one, began with Albion Small and his successors; that The Polish Peasant by W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki was the first great piece of American sociological research; and that the systematic study of race relations and urban sociology originated with Robert E. Park and his students. We were taught that we should not only read the Chicago school but also venerate it, model our work after it, and pass its wisdom on through the generations. But The Scholar Denied shows that the Chicago school was not the founding school of sociology in the United States. Neither Small, Park, Thomas and Znaniecki nor their students originated scientific sociology. The real credit goes to W.E.B. Du Bois, whom leading representatives of the Chicago School like Robert E. Park marginalized – perhaps wittingly. Moreover, and perhaps more contentiously, The Scholar Denied suggests that Park plagiarized Du Bois, and that venerated sociologists like Max Weber were perhaps more influenced by Du Bois rather than the other way around.

The implications are far-reaching. If the Chicago school is not the originator of sociology, then why spend so much time reading, thinking about, or debating it? If Morris is right, graduate students should instead focus upon the real innovators and founders: Du Bois and his “Atlanta School” of sociology. It only struck me after reading this book that Du Bois had barely if ever appeared on any my graduate school syllabi. Yet, this is not a question of adding more thinkers to the sociology canon. If Morris is right, there is an argument to made that Du Bois and the Atlanta School should replace the Chicago School, not just be added alongside it. For, with The Scholar Denied, Du Bois can no longer be seen as the “first black sociologist”, the originator of “African-American sociology,” or the one who pioneered the study of African-American communities. He must instead be seen as the first scientific sociologist who is the rightful progenitor of American sociology itself…

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The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology

Posted in Biography, Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Social Science, United States on 2015-08-31 01:08Z by Steven

The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology

University of California Press
August 2015
320 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520276352
Adobe PDF E-Book ISBN: 9780520960480
ePUB Format ISBN: 9780520960480

Aldon D. Morris, Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

In this groundbreaking book, Aldon D. Morris’s ambition is truly monumental: to help rewrite the history of sociology and to acknowledge the primacy of W. E. B. Du Bois’s work in the founding of the discipline. Calling into question the prevailing narrative of how sociology developed, Morris, a major scholar of social movements, probes the way in which the history of the discipline has traditionally given credit to Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, who worked with the conservative black leader Booker T. Washington to render Du Bois invisible. Morris uncovers the seminal theoretical work of Du Bois in developing a “scientific” sociology through a variety of methodologies and examines how the leading scholars of the day disparaged and ignored Du Bois’s work.

The Scholar Denied is based on extensive, rigorous primary source research; the book is the result of a decade of research, writing, and revision. In exposing the economic and political factors that marginalized the contributions of Du Bois and enabled Park and his colleagues to be recognized as the “fathers” of the discipline, Morris delivers a wholly new narrative of American intellectual and social history that places one of America’s key intellectuals, W. E. B. Du Bois, at its center.

The Scholar Denied is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, racial inequality, and the academy. In challenging our understanding of the past, the book promises to engender debate and discussion.

Contents

  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Race and the Birth of American Sociology
  • 1. The Rise of Scientific Sociology in America
  • 2. Du Bois, Scientific Sociology, and Race
  • 3. The Du Bois–Atlanta School of Sociology
  • 4. The Conservative Alliance of Washington and Park
  • 5. The Sociology of Black America: Park versus Du Bois
  • 6. Max Weber Meets Du Bois
  • 7. Intellectual Schools and the Atlanta School
  • 8. Legacies and Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Illustration Credits
  • Index
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Here, There, and In Between: Travel as Metaphor in Mixed Race Narratives of the Harlem Renaissance

Posted in Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2014-12-11 00:23Z by Steven

Here, There, and In Between: Travel as Metaphor in Mixed Race Narratives of the Harlem Renaissance

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2014-05-09

Colin Enriquez
English Department

Created to comment on Antebellum and Reconstruction literature, the tragic mulatto concept is habitually applied to eras beyond the 19th century. The tragic mulatto has become an end rather than a means to questioning racist and abolitionist agendas. Rejecting the pathetic and self-destructive traits inscribed by the tragic label, this dissertation uses geographic, cultural, and racial boundary crossing to theorize a rereading of mixed race characters in Harlem Renaissance literature. Focusing on train, automobile, and boat travel, the study analyzes the relationship between the character, transportation, and technology whereby the notion of race is questioned. Furthermore, the dissertation divides travel into departure, interstitial, and arrival phases. With the ability to extend perception and experience, media is also interpreted here as transportation. Using figurative and literal travel, the selected narratives move between localities to allegorize 20th mixed race subjectivity. Socially ambiguous and anonymous, interstitial moments suspend the normative performance of race and enable the selected authors’ investigations of race binarism. After the introduction establishes a theoretical frame composed of transnational and migration studies methods, the ensuing chapters demonstrate the interpretive function of travel in Jean Toomer’s Cane, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and Walter White’s Flight. This reading is aided by the connection between modernism and mixed race identity as expounded upon in the works of Robert E. Park, Mark Whalan, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Jeanne Scheper. However, it differs from these in its assertion of travel as an interpretive mode for mixed race literature as a tradition.

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Robert Park’s Marginal Man: The Career of a Concept in American Sociology

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2014-01-05 20:00Z by Steven

Robert Park’s Marginal Man: The Career of a Concept in American Sociology

Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research
ISSN 2076-8214 (print)
ISSN 2078-1938 (online)
Volume 4, Number 2 (2012)
pages 199-217

Chad Alan Goldberg, Professor of Sociology
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Who now reads Robert Park? The answer, it turns out, is that many still do, and with good reason. Robert Ezra Park (1864–1944) was one of the leading figures in what has come to be known as the Chicago school of sociology, which played a central and formative role in American sociology as a whole, especially from 1914 to 1933 when he taught at the University of Chicago (Matthews 1977; Raushenbush 1979). Park remains well known among American sociologists today for his pioneering work on urban life, human ecology, race and ethnic relations, migration, and social disorganization, much of which continues to be assigned and read (though not uncritically) in graduate courses in the United States. This essay focuses on Park’s seminal concept of the “marginal man,” originally presented in his 1928 article “Human Migration and the Marginal Man” and later elaborated in the 1937 book The Marginal Man by Park’s student Everett Verner Stonequist (1901–1979), who earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1930. After examining the origins of the concept in the work of Park and Stonequist, I review the marginal man’s subsequent career in American sociology. This review is not intended to be exhaustive or comprehensive. Instead, it aims to highlight several important lines of development: attempts at theoretical revision; application and extension of the concept to new areas of social inquiry, including the study of occupations, gender, and scientific innovation; and a revival of interest in the marginal man concept as it relates to Park’s original interests in race and ethnic relations and migration. Throughout the essay, I emphasize how the reception, interpretation, and application of Park’s concept was shaped by the ambiguities of the concept itself, which suggested the potential for maladjustment and disorganization but also for creativity and innovation, and by the changing social and historical context in which American sociologists worked. In the essay’s conclusion I outline some ways in which Park’s concept remains relevant to present-day concerns, and I propose some directions for future research…

…While Park and his students regarded Jews as the prototype of the marginal man, they did not confine the concept exclusively to Jews. Indeed, it was partly inspired by Park’s interest in Americans of mixed black and white ancestry and by the similar notion of double-consciousness formulated by the African-American sociologist and social reformer W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963). The “American Negro,” Du Bois (1903:3) suggested in his book The Souls of Black Folk, was only permitted to see and evaluate himself through the eyes of an “American world” that regarded him with “amused contempt and pity”; the result was a feeling of “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Notwithstanding Park’s close ties to Du Bois’s rival, the African-American educator Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), Park ([1923] 1950:291–292) invoked Du Bois and his notion of double-consciousness a full five years before introducing his own concept of the marginal man. Park’s students were also familiar with the notion of double-consciousness (Wirth Marvick 1964:336; Stonequist 1935:6–7; Stonequist 1964:338). Thus, it was likely under Du Bois’s influence that Park and his students identified the mixed-race individual as a marginal man—not by virtue of heredity, they insisted, but because of the social situation in which he typically found himself (Park 1928:893; Park [1931a] 1950:382; Stonequist 1935:7). Over time they extended the concept from mixed-race individuals to African Americans, perhaps because the line between the two populations was difficult to draw (Park [1934a] 1950:67–69; Wirth and Goldhamer 1944:340; Stonequist 1964:336; for a dissenting view from outside the Chicago school, see Myrdal 1944:699–700, 1385n28). In addition, Park’s participation in a 1923 survey of race relations on the American Pacific Coast led him to conclude that the marginal personality type was also present among Asian Americans. Describing with sympathy a young woman of Japanese ancestry who was born and grew up in the United States, Park ([1926a] 1950:248–249) noted that she was not fully accepted in either country: her American manners, dress, and language provoked resentment in Japan, while her origins made her the target of race prejudice in America. According to Park, the Asian American thus found himself or herself, like the mixed-race individual, the African American, and the modern Jew, at the intersection of two worlds, not fully at home in either and internally divided as a result.

The marginal person as Park and Stonequist conceived him or her was an ambiguous, Janus-faced figure. On the one hand, Stonequist ([1937] 1965:220–221) suggested, the marginal man’s “mental conflict” could become a “disorganizing force” preventing his “psychological integration.” Personal disorganization could, in turn, lead to social disorganization. Wirth, for instance, citing his own study of Jewish immigrant families in Chicago, linked culture conflict to delinquency (Wirth 1925; Wirth [1931] 1964:235–236). On the other hand, living simultaneously in two worlds made the marginal man “the individual with the wider horizon, the keener intelligence, the more detached and rational viewpoint” (Park, in Stonequist [1937] 1965:xvii–xviii). He was therefore well suited to become an intermediary and interpreter between the races or cultures that were represented in his own person (Park [1934b] 1950:136–137; Stonequist [1937] 1965:175, 177–179, 182; cf. Willie 1975). Furthermore, culture conflict could serve as an impetus to creativity. Veblen, who was not part of the Chicago school of sociology but spent fourteen years at the University of Chicago from 1892 until 1906, suggested as early as 1919 that the intellectual pre-eminence of Jews in the modern world stemmed from the conflict of cultures which they experienced as a result of their dispersion and migration. According to Veblen (1919), culture conflict imbued Jews with a healthy skepticism toward Jewish and gentile conventions alike, which in turn was a primary requisite for creative contributions to intellectual life. Park ([1931b] 1950:366–369) also envisioned the possibility that the marginal man might become a creative agent, particularly through his leadership of nationalist or racial mass movements. Likewise, Wirth ([1931] 1964:241) was careful to acknowledge that “not every case of culture conflict inevitably leads to delinquency…. Delinquency represents merely one way in which the conflict may be expressed if not resolved.” Echoing Park, he added that a person experiencing such conflict, “far from becoming a criminal, may develop into a prophet, a reformer or a political leader.” Stonequist made a similar point: The marginal man could seek to overcome his inner conflict by changing the external ethnic relations which had produced it. The culture conflict which he experienced as a crisis provided him with an opportunity to “reconstruct his conception of himself as well as his place or role in society,” and “those [marginal] individuals who have the potentialities to reconstruct their personalities and ‘return’ as creative agents not only adjust themselves but also contribute to the solution of the conflict of races and cultures” (Stonequist [1937] 1965:122–123, 220–221)…

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Human Migration and the Marginal Man

Posted in Articles, Media Archive, Social Science on 2012-11-19 03:49Z by Steven

Human Migration and the Marginal Man

The American Journal of Sociology
Volume 33, Number 6 (May 1928)
pages 881-893

Robert E. Park (1864-1944), Professor of Sociology
University of Chicago

Migrations, with all the incidental collision, conflicts, and fusions of peoples and of cultures which they occasion, have been accounted among the decisive forces in history. Every advance in culture, it has been said, commences with a new period of migration and movement of populations. Present tendencies indicate that while the mobility of individuals has increased, the migration of peoples has relatively decreased. The consequences, however, of migration and mobility seem, on the whole, to be the same. In both cases the “cake of custom” is broken and the individual is freed for new enterprises and for new associations. One of the consequences of migration is to create a situation in which the same individual—who may or may not be a mixed blood—finds himself striving to live in two diverse cultural groups. The effect is to produce an unstable character—a personality type with characteristic forms of behavior. This is the “marginal man.” It is in the mind of the marginal man that the conflicting cultures meet and fuse. It is, therefore, in the mind of the marginal man that the process of civilization is visibly going on, and it is in the mind of the marginal man that the process of civilization may best be studied.

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Civilisation, Culture and the Hybrid Self in the work of Robert Ezra Park

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Social Science on 2011-01-26 19:52Z by Steven

Civilisation, Culture and the Hybrid Self in the work of Robert Ezra Park

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 27, Issue 4 (November 2006)
pages 413-433
DOI: 10.1080/07256860600936911

Vince Marotta, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

Contemporary discussions on hybridity in cultural and ethnic studies have overlooked the work of the Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park. Park’s idea of the “marginal man” and his work on cultural and racial hybridity can shed further light on the construction and representation of the hybrid self. The contribution that Park has made to a social theory of hybridity has been overshadowed by research conducted within post-colonial and cultural studies. I do not suggest that recent conceptualisations of hybridity are inadequate; rather that Park has something to contribute to contemporary accounts and in some cases anticipates some of the themes and issues surrounding the concept of hybridity. The following examination connects Park’s work on hybridity with ideas such as civilisation, culture and modernity and argues that a mild form of primitivism underlines his notion of the “marginal man”.

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Mentality of Racial Hybrids

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Media Archive, Social Science on 2010-09-13 05:47Z by Steven

Mentality of Racial Hybrids

American Journal of Sociology
Volume 36, Number 4 (January 1931)
pages 534-551
DOI: 10.1086/215474

Robert E. Park (1864-1944), Professor of Sociology
University of Chicago

Racial hybrids are one of the natural and inevitable results of migration and the consequent mingling of divergent racial stocks.  The motives bringing peoples of divergent races and cultures together are, in the first instance, economic.  In the long run, economic intercourse enforces more intimate personal and cultural relations, and eventually amalgamation takes place.  When the peoples involved are widely different in culture and in racial characteristics, and particularly when they are distinguished by physical marks, assimilation and amalgamation take place very slowly.  When the resulting hybrid peoples exhibit physical traits that mark them off and distinguish them from both parent-stocks, the mixed bloods are likely to constitute a distinct caste or class occupying a position and status midway between the two races of which they are composed.  The mixed bloods tend everywhere to be, as compared with the full bloods with whom they are identified, an intellectual and professional class.  The most obvious and generally accepted explanation of the superiority of the mixed bloods is that the former are products of two races, one of which is biologically inferior and the other biologically superior.  In the case of the Negro-white hybrids in the United States, other and less obvious explanations have been offered.  It has been pointed out, for example, that the mulatto is the result of a social selection which began during the period of slavery, when the dominant whites selected for their concubines the most comely, and presumably the superior, women among the Negroes.  There is, however, the fact to be considered that in a society where racial distinctions are rigidly maintained, the mixed blood tends to be be keenly conscious of his position.  He feels, as he frequently says, the conflict of warring ancestry in his veins.  The conflict of color is embodied, so to speak, in his person.  His mind is the melting pot in which the lower and higher cultures meet and fuse…

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Friendship choices of multiracial adolescents: Racial homophily, blending, or amalgamation?

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2009-10-28 20:37Z by Steven

Friendship choices of multiracial adolescents: Racial homophily, blending, or amalgamation?

Social Science Research
2007
Number 36
pages 633-653

Jamie Mihoko Doyle
Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
University of Pennsylvania

Grace Kao, Professor of Sociology, Education, and Asian American Studies
University of Pennsylvania

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we utilize the concepts of homophily, blending, and amalgamation to describe the possible friendship patterns of multiracials.  Homophily occurs when multiracials are most likely to choose other multiracials as friends. Blending occurs when friendship patterns of multiracials are somewhere in-between those of their monoracial counterparts. Amalgamation consists of friendship patterns that are similar to one of their monoracial counterparts. All groups exhibit signs of amalgamation such that non-white multiracials resemble Blacks, and White multiracials resemble whites except for Black-White multiracials. Black-Whites, Asian-Whites, and Asian-Blacks also exhibit signs of blending, while only Native American multiracials show signs of homophily. Multiracials have different experiences depending on their specific racial composition, and while they seem to bridge the distance between racial groups, their friendship patterns also fall along Black and White lines.

Introduction

In Robert E. Park’s seminal essay in 1928, he argues that a multiracial person lives in “two worlds, in both of which he [or she] is more or less a stranger,” (Park, 1928, p. 893).  This idea, often referred to as The Marginal Man Theory, has dominated sociological thinking about multiracials and their position in the racial structure of the United States and elsewhere. In the new millennium where multiracial identities are more prevalent and are officially recognized by the 2000 US Census, one emerging question is how multiracial people might self-identify in the modern racial landscape. Do they remain in the racial borderlands or act as a bridge between their two or more racial groups, as Park and Stonequist suggest, or do they simply assimilate into one of their monoracial counterparts?

To address this question, we investigate the extent to which self-identified multiracials are integrated into single-race groups by examining their best friend choices during adolescence. We know that racial groups are salient in part because peer groups tend to be racially homogeneous. Friendship choice offers a gauge of the social distance between groups; best friends, in particular, show with whom people feel the closest identification and greatest sense of acceptance.

Our paper proceeds as follows. We first delineate the specific contributions of previous research, focusing on the limited literature on multiracials and research on the determinants of peer selection. Then, drawing on key points from selected literature, we sketch our theoretical approach to this study and outline our hypotheses. We then describe our data, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). The survey instrument not only allows individuals to check two or more races, but unlike other datasets, provides linkages to the respondent’s friendship network, making it possible to directly examine survey responses by the respondent’s friends. Race of both the respondent and his/her best friend is self-reported, reflecting the racial identity of the respondent as well as his/her best friend. Lastly, we estimate logistic models using Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) to examine the actual friendship choices of multiracial youth, taking into account the opportunities for interaction…

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