Abstract
Aldon D Morris concludes his magisterial study of WEB Du Bois’s impact on sociology with a proposition that his book ‘suggests that searching questions need to be raised about contemporary social science, especially race scholarship’ (p. 221). Morris’s book is not a biography, but rather a study of the development of US sociology told through Du Bois’s role in it. It methodically pinpoints how conventional tellings of this history deny the foundational impact that Du Bois had, not only on race scholarship, but on sociology as a whole. The Scholar Denied not only provides in depth analysis of Du Bois’s intellectual trajectory, his methodological contributions, his impact on the work of a range of scholars including Max Weber, his institution building and his mentoring of a whole generation of black scholars; it also unveils the lacunae in US sociology owing to the discipline’s denial of Du Bois’s scholarship, an act borne of systemic racism that continues to impact negatively on the field.
The Scholar Denied reveals how disciplinary obsession with ‘objectivity’ originated in an institutionalised belief in the inability of blacks or, as Morris also demonstrates, women, to be reliable knowers and analysts of their own lives. By recounting the ways in which racism was embedded in US social sciences from their inception, not only through their endorsement of the segregationist status quo and active promotion of Social Darwinist beliefs, but also through the foundation of sociology as a white supremacist discipline which actively barred resistant black scholars, Morris helps us to connect this history to the elisions that persist in sociology in matters of race.
Piecing together Du Bois’s place in the development of ‘scientific sociology in America’ from the late 1800s, Morris shows he very often preceded theorisations and methodological discussions that were later to become disciplinary orthodoxies credited to white scholars. For example, as discussed in the second chapter on ‘Du Bois, scientific sociology, and race’, despite being excluded from one of the first international gatherings of social scientists held in the USA in 1904, Du Bois nonetheless advanced a critique of the leading ideas discussed there. For example, Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer’s grand theories of an ‘abstract’ society were limited by being based on what Du Bois called ‘car window sociology’ rather than empirical data. This principle undergirded his work from the start and, as Morris later shows, was at the bedrock of the school of sociology at the historically black Atlanta University which he led from 1897 until leaving in 1910 for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), which he had helped found. Despite severe funding shortfalls due in great part to active undermining by white scholars, most prominently Robert Parks, and the conservative black leader, Booker T Washington, the output of the Atlanta school was enormous.
According to Morris, Du Bois was able to sustain such a substantial body of work on a vast range of subjects far exceeding a singular focus on African-American life (a publication every 12 days over the course of his career), as well as mentoring younger scholars, in particular fellow black sociologists and women who were also overlooked in the academy, by relying on ‘liberation capital’. He thus engaged the labour of ‘black leaders, scholars and students to conduct research’ who were embedded in ‘social networks and communities’ thus connecting the Atlanta School directly to its research subjects (p. 189). It was this deep engagement and commitment to the African-American community that informed Du Bois’s social constructionist view of race at a time when Social Darwinism went mainly unchallenged, allowed him to see the links between racial and gendered oppression which make him an early proponent of intersectionality and established him as an incipient of what we would today call ‘engaged research’. His 1899 The Philadelphia Negro is the first ‘major empirical sociological study’ carried out in the USA (p. 45). Nonetheless, it is Thomas and Znaniecki’s (1918–1920) The Polish Peasant, which carried no mention of Du Bois’s study, which is formally credited as such. In similar ways, the Chicago School’s Robert Park is commonly thought of as the founder of US race studies despite not only portraying ‘African Americans as an inferior race’ (p. 119), but also doing next to no empirical research especially in comparison to Du Bois’s enormous oeuvre. The practical effect of the importance given to Park and other white race scholars over Du Bois was that the social constructionist ideas present in Du Bois’s work from the inception of sociology in the USA were only to take hold in the post-civil rights era.
Much more can be said about The Scholar Denied, in particular for race scholars for whom this work will undoubtedly become a major reference. But one aspect stands out: Morris’s achievement is in demonstrating how race, like gender, must be seen as central and not marginal to the study of modern social processes in general. Moreover, the study of the denial of Du Bois’s scholarship, and that of other black and majority world scholars in other contexts, is fundamental for a full understanding of the past and present of sociology as a discipline and as an institution. I welcome similar studies of the marginalization of black scholars in Europe where, despite nascent work (see Gutiérrez Rodríguez et al., 2012), much more has to be done to challenge the institutionalized Eurocentrism of the social sciences.