Dark Side of the Force: One Hundred Years of the Sociology of Race
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The Dark Side of the Force: One Hundred Years of the Sociology of Race University Press Scholarship Online Chicago Scholarship Online Sociology in America: A History Craig Calhoun Print publication date: 2007 Print ISBN-13: 9780226090948 Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: February 2013 DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226090962.001.0001 The Dark Side of the Force: One Hundred Years of the Sociology of Race Howard Winant DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226090962.003.0016 Abstract and Keywords This chapter focuses on the meaning of race in 1905. It addresses the following questions: How has the meaning of race changed, how has it developed, and how has it been challenged as it came down to the present day? To what extent has sociology influenced general conceptions of race, and to what extent has the field itself been shaped by racial meanings and racial conflicts? Keywords: sociology, race, racial meanings, racial conflicts What was the racial scene at the time of the American Sociological Society's founding in 1905? How race conscious and racially organized was the world the founding “fathers” saw at that moment? How racialized were U.S. social ties and identities, and those of the 1905 intellectual world, broadly conceived? On a general level these questions answer themselves. Of course race was present, as present (at least) as it is today in the everyday life and social structure of the United States. Race has always been present, indeed foundational, since the earliest moments of modernity. But what race meant in 1905 is less certain. How has that meaning changed, how has it developed, and how has it been challenged as it came down to the present day? To what extent has sociology influenced general conceptions of race, and to what extent has the field itself been shaped by racial meanings and racial conflicts? These questions require our consideration; they are the subject of this chapter. As a sociohistorical concept race connects to numerous familiar themes: the body and its social meaning, territoriality, (in)equality, identity/difference, collectivity, and politicization. But this has not always been the case. One hundred years ago the physiognomic, corporeal dimension of Page 1 of 30 PRINTED FROM CHICAGO SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.chicago.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Chicago Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in CHSO for personal use (for details see http://www.chicago.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: null; date: 12 January 2016 The Dark Side of the Force: One Hundred Years of the Sociology of Race race was the dominant theme in nascent sociological thought. Although an alternative view was beginning to take shape—one that conceived of racial difference as largely sociocultural—the idea of race as a political phenomenon, a matter of movement activity and policy formation, went virtually unheard in 1905. Race was not viewed as a political issue except by opponents of the disciplinary consensus, such as W. E. B. DuBois.1 (p.536) Background At the turn of the twentieth century, biologistic views of race were in command. Evolutionism had taken over. “Race war” was a source of anxiety to early sociologists. Race was about migration and fertility, “breeding,” and human genetics as it was then understood. It was also about development, though this too was conceived in a biological way. Empire and colonialism were comprehended and justified (in Europe most centrally, but elsewhere as well) as the logical outcomes of racial differences among the world's peoples. Non-Europeans, seen as backward and uncivilized, were thought to need and benefit from the uplifting forces of colonial rule. In the United States it was seen as “natural” that the black South and Native American peoples would be subdued by the “more advanced” white races. The U.S. Supreme Court had recently (in 1896) handed down the Plessy decision. What we would now call “ethnic cleansing” of indigenous people (seen most centrally in the 1887 Dawes Act) had been completed; it was widely supported as “civilizing” these supposedly backward and savage nations (or tribes). Tensions on the Mexican border were merely “normal” in 1905 but would soon intensify with the Mexican Revolution's onset in 1910; the border states and the Southwest were rife with anti- Mexican racism (Almaguer 1994). The restriction of Asian immigration (the Chinese Exclusion Act was reenacted in 1904; the “Gentleman's Agreement” with Japan would be concluded in 1907) was considered natural as well, for in America Asians were viewed as unassimilable aliens: their presence en masse was perceived as so threatening (especially to labor) that their wide-spread influx could not be tolerated. On the other hand a new imperial age was dawning: the “little brown people,” as McKinley called them (Rusling 1987, 22–23), of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, were now ripe for U.S. colonization. This too was “natural,” a patent continuation of the expansionism of the nineteenth century. Not only would the United States prosper from heightened control of the Caribbean, the isthmus of Panama, and the Pacific Rim, but the areas thus subjected would gain as well: they would be civilized and Christianized by imperial activity.2 In 1905 race was as much a global issue as it was a U.S. one. Colonial (p.537) resources and labor fed, clothed, and housed the imperial countries that exploited their riches. In the Congo King Leopold's massacres continued unimpeded, a fact reported in detail by Robert E. Park (not yet installed at the University of Chicago) and by George Washington Williams, another pioneering journalist/sociologist of race (Hochschild 1998). “Semper novi quid ex Africa!” DuBois repeated in his analysis “The African Roots of the War” (1915/1995). Imperial rivalries shaped international relations, an arena in which the United States was a newcomer, albeit a formidable one. On the Russian front, the Japanese defeated the czar in the Pacific in 1905, and the first Russian Revolution erupted that same year; it featured strikes, mutinies (on the Potemkin and elsewhere), and government troops shooting down unarmed demonstrators in the streets of St. Petersburg.3 These events all had racial dimensions. Page 2 of 30 PRINTED FROM CHICAGO SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.chicago.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright University of Chicago Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in CHSO for personal use (for details see http://www.chicago.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: null; date: 12 January 2016 The Dark Side of the Force: One Hundred Years of the Sociology of Race These were but some of the main events that shaped the sociopolitical context in which the founding sociologists were working. Although they were necessarily subject to the “common sense” prevailing at the field's founding moments, they were far from wholly subservient to it. To some of the field's founding fathers such as Sumner and Giddings, race was a matter of human biological nature, instinctual, “hardwired.” It was an intractable matter, a question of evolution, not sociality. But other leading sociologists—such as Lester Frank Ward, the American Sociological Society's first president, and Albion Small, founding editor of the American Journal of Sociology—had been publishing critical appraisals of what we would now call racism since before the American Sociological Society's founding in 1905. In his 1980 assessment of the twentieth-century sociology of race, Thomas Pettigrew noted that “critical work is in the minority throughout” the whole arc of mainstream sociological writing on the subject (Pettigrew 1980, xxv). But challenges to the received wisdom were still present from the first in such publications as the AJS. These critical reappraisals of the received racial wisdom included contributions by such vital figures as W. I. Thomas, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W. E. B. DuBois, Monroe Work, and various writers associated with Jane Addams and Chicago's Hull House (p.538) (Deegan 2002).4 Still, in 1905 and for a long time thereafter, the sociology of race took shape almost exclusively as a conversation among whites, even though this required the marginalization of W. E. B. DuBois, who was not only the founder of the field in its modern, empirical, and theoretically sophisticated form but also arguably the founder of modern American sociology tout court.5 The origins of American sociology considerably predate the founding of the American Sociological Society in 1905. Just as in Europe the field developed to interpret onrushing social change, so too in the United States sociology developed in response to pressing demands for new social knowledge. In France sociology was invented during the era of Comte and de Tocqueville as a “positive science of society,” a tool to explain industrialization, the downfall of absolutism, and colonial war.6 In the United States sociology arose in response to racial upheaval and the crisis of the slave system. The onset and intensification of U.S. convulsions over racial slavery roughly paralleled the European transition from absolutism to democratic rule, as well as the trajectory of industrialization. The Civil War was among other things a semirevolutionary battle to overthrow absolutism in its American incarnation, as DuBois argued (see below). So it should come as no surprise that in the United States the nascent field found in the racial problematic some of its earliest and most foundational explanatory tasks.7 In 1873 Herbert Spencer's The Study of Sociology crossed the Atlantic to (p.539) the United States. Spencer, a contemporary of Darwin,8 asserted that a racial instinct was crucial to human evolution and thus joined a long list of taxonomists whose preoccupation was the racial ranking of human groups.