Abstract
The “problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line,” W.E.B. Du Bois ([1903]1994:v) soberly forecasted in the classic Souls of Black Folk. While Du Bois’s brand of sociology would be marginalized for much of the twentieth century, the discipline and its philosophical watchtower Mafioso—the Robert E. Park-led University of Chicago sociology department—heard the call; they just pretended, however, as though the insight emanated from the cool breezes and lake-effect snow of Chicago’s shoreline. As we learn in Leah N. Gordon’s From Power to Prejudice: The Rise of Racial Individualism in Midcentury America, race and race relations would take a front seat in American social science, especially sociology. Which vehicle the front seat was situated within and who was best suited to develop this twentieth-century racial analysis, however, are tinged with important, understudied history and debate. This is the fertile historical and interdisciplinary soil on which Gordon builds her book’s deep analysis of how a distinct individualistic approach to Du Bois’s “problem of the color-line” emerged in the postwar ivory tower.
Rather than an approach that implicates slavery, Jim Crow, chain gangs, and lynch mobs, Gordon effectively illustrates that key educational institutions adopted a model emphasizing the role of individual behaviors and attitudes. Gordon refers to this framework as “racial individualism,” as it brought “together psychological individualism, rights-based individualism, and belief in the socially transformative power of education” and presented “prejudice and discrimination as the root cause of racial conflict, focused on individuals in the study of race relations, and suggested that racial justice could be attained by changing white minds and protecting African American rights” (p.2). This framework is not merely a set of ideas. Rather, it constitutes the major intellectual and policy approach to race and race relations through to the present day. The book aims to figure out “how and why racial individualism gained the traction it did” (p. 3).
To do so, From Power to Prejudice is divided into six chapters, five of which center on historical and archival case studies of prominent research and social justice institutions during the postwar period: the Rockefeller Foundation; the University of Chicago’s Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations; Fisk University’s Race Relations Institute; Howard University’s Journal of Negro Education; and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Alongside the post-World War II context, Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944) serves as a key intellectual and political backdrop and springboard. It is within this twin context, post-war and post-Myrdal, that the book’s analysis takes shape.
In the book’s initial chapters we learn that the central framework, racial individualism, owes its emergence to “psychology and sociology in the 1920s and 1930s” (p. 27). The nascent framework is bolstered by Myrdal’s thesis that the persistent conflict between American ideals and the mistreatment of black Americans by other Americans sowed the seeds of moral and mental crisis for white Americans. That is, “the problem of the color-line” could be reduced to the problem of white mindsets and prejudices.
Across the book’s chapters, Gordon weaves a narrative that includes and amplifies the tension among key scholars such as Oliver Cromwell Cox, E. Franklin Frazier, St. Clair Drake, Horace Cayton, W. I. Thomas, John Dollard, Hortense Powdermaker, and Charles S. Johnson (to name a few). The narrative that unfolds over the five substantive chapters illustrates the fact that earlier frameworks, such as that provided by Cox on systems of racial oppression, lost their currency in the postwar years in favor of perspectives that amplified attitudes and pathologies. While there was tremendous “theoretical diversity” (p. 57) on the issues affecting black communities during the interwar period, “[b]y 1950 . . . the theoretical frameworks many Rockefeller associates used to examine the race issues narrowed . . . into the interdisciplinary field of ‘human relations’” (p. 66). In this way, funding organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the university programs and scholars for whom such funding was key slowly migrated toward a more “atomistic” (p. 66) approach. The focus on issues of white prejudice were then linked to notions of science—measuring attitudes and behaviors was believed and argued to be more scientific and effective than measuring institutions.
As a result, “key voices that might have challenged the separation of the study of race relations and the study of political economy (namely, activists working on social problems in African American communities or scholars outside the behavioral sciences) were not part of the discussion” (p. 77), and scholars and studies “that favored racial individualism simultaneously created obstacles for advocates of systemic and relational approaches to the race issue” (p. 80). To investigate how scholars of color, especially black sociologists, reacted to this epistemic shift, the book looks to the scholars and scholarship radiating from historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), namely Fisk and Howard. Through Fisk’s Race Relations Institute and Howard’s Journal of Negro Education (JNE), we discover that the “social scientific interracial left that had flourished in HBCUs in the 1930s was alive and well, even as mainstream federal and foundation-supported research on race embraced attitude surveys after 1944, noneconomic ‘human relations’ paradigms after 1946, and behavioralism after 1949” (p. 117). Despite the pushback andfunding obstacles, the JNE continued to pursue “the Amenia ideal,” wherein social scientists’ “commitment to political engagement” was key and flourished (p. 133).
What we learn from this historical journey through the postwar academy, then, is that the currency of an idea and analytic approach involves institutional intermingling—a potent mix of elite white American institutions, European scholars studying the“American” race problem, and a lowering of the Ebony Tower’s voice and participationin the emergent debates, policies, andresearch projects. Then as now, the approaches and ideas of black scholars about black life and racism are second-class philosophies to the more favored white liberal attitudes and scholars of the time. From Power to Prejudice is truly a project of identifying the historical precursors and lineage for ideas about race and poverty that prefer the sociology of pathology rather than the sociology of systemic racism.
Despite the author’s effective arguments and key insights, there are a few missed opportunities. For example, missing from the examination of the origins and proliferation of the racial individualistic framework is the striking and important alignment between racial individualism and the very American cultural ideal of the “rugged individualist” that existed prior to the postwar period. Gordon is correct in the suggestion that the rise of racial individualism can be traced to the rise of Myrdal’s thesis and postwar American redevelopment. It is incomplete, however, without a recognition that frame alignment helped to ensure the success and dominance of the racial individualism framework. Racial individualism was able to gain traction not just because white liberals, black consenters, and funding and activist organizations believed one approach more scientific than another. Instead, racial individualism is also substantially aligned with the Horatio Alger cultural mythology of rugged individualism.
A second missed opportunity lies in not giving a bigger voice to the prescience of Du Bois on the race question. Often it is thought in the present day that race and race relations never really had their time in the intellectual sun until the post-Civil Rights era. Gordon’s well-researched book demonstrates that this assumption is quite false, demonstrating that what truly occurred was more a postwar battle of philosophical brands, where the brand favoring systemic analysis lost out to one that favored surveys on prejudice and not power.
Readers will find From Power to Prejudice a necessary historical assessment of one of the reasons why the social sciences wound up light years behind their humanistic counterparts on the race question. Despite sounding the alarm, Du Bois was invisibilized. Yet, he was right. So right that the Rockefeller Foundation, Gunnar Myrdal, and the University of Chicago would make themselves famous for the study of “the problem of the color-line.” In order to move forward earnestly as social scientists, we must have sincere historical accounts of the intellectual and political antecedents that prefigure the current scholarly landscape, accounts like Gordon provides in From Power to Prejudice. Scholars and students from a range of disciplines, including sociology, history, political science, anthropology, psychology, and African American studies, would find this work of great interest; for it tells the history of a problematic approach to race relations that, unfortunately, endures today.