Abstract
We raise concerns about Quadlin and Montgomery’s Social Psychology Quarterly article, “When a Name Gives You Pause,” a study of whether racialized names affect the time to dog adoption in a county shelter. Our comment is guided by the recent insistence of American Sociological Association leadership for greater critical introspection in sociological research. First, the study is ahistorical by overlooking histories of human-animal relations and naming in the construction of anti-Blackness. Second, the study is acontextual by contorting labor market research and color-blind perspectives in a manner that directs undue attention to the treatment of dogs without specifying the concrete disadvantages for Black people. The study’s narrow focus on adopters misrepresents organizational factors within animal shelters. These various oversights invest Quadlin and Montgomery’s article in a whiteness-centered sociological tradition. We urge divesting from this tradition and conclude with a call for sociology to be more educative and reflexive.
Everything great, good, efficient, fair, and honorable is “white” . . . and the devil is “black.” The changes of this theme are continually rung in picture and story, in newspaper heading and moving-picture, in sermon and school book. . . . There must come the necessary despisings and hatreds of these savage half-men, this unclean canaille of the world—these dogs of men. All through the world this gospel is preaching. It has its literature, it has its secret propaganda and above all—it pays! —W. E. B. Du Bois ([1920] 1999:25)
Building on research showing how employers and other gatekeepers penalize human applicants with non-white-sounding names, Quadlin and Montgomery (2022) (hereafter QM), in “When a Name Gives You Pause: Racialized Names and Time to Adoption in a County Dog Shelter,” ask whether these penalties extend to dogs. Drawing on animal shelter data and a survey analysis of racialized names, QM find that dogs with Black-sounding names are adopted at slower rates than those with white-sounding ones, with a concentrated disadvantage among pit bulls. The authors maintain that the implicit racial bias of adopters explains these outcomes.
As scholars of color with professional lives committed to studying and eliminating racism, we feel race (Bonilla-Silva 2019) and are therefore critical of studies that reify white supremacy and disregard the dangerous role that anti-Blackness plays in the social world. While QM speculate whether the penalties of nonwhite names extend to “nonhuman entities” (QM 2022:211), the authors never name the assumption driving that question: that historically, Black people are penalized as nonhuman. The purported innovation of their study is the application of research on the treatment of humans to the treatment of dogs, but this conceptual leap bypasses critical fields of research and a troubling history of racial taxonomies. The study’s claim to novelty concerning racialized animal naming merely reprises an age-old “gospel” naming Black people the “dogs of men” (Du Bois [1920] 1999:25).
Our comment is guided by 2023 American Sociological Association president Prudence Carter’s call for embracing sociology’s “educative power,” one that urges introspection on how “sociologists reproduce and mirror similar social dynamics akin to those we study and problematize in society.” 1 We begin by analyzing QM’s article in relation to the language of its title and its message implying hesitant adopters. We argue that QM “hesitate” (Du Bois 2000) themselves to identify and disrupt anti-Blackness. In so doing, they invest in white sociology, an exercise where “whiteness creates for its constituents the incentive to invest their time and energy on the creation and re-creation of whiteness” (Brunsma and Wyse 2019:2; emphasis in original) and which “reproduces analyses of race that are ahistorical” and “acontextual” (Brunsma and Wyse 2019:4). We raise two main concerns about QM’s study:
Histories of racial ontology and human-animal relations. The study overlooks a history of human-animal relations and naming in the construction of anti-Blackness. Such oversights misrepresent matters of racial ontology and give the study a false impression of novelty.
The context of dog adoption. QM contort labor market research and color-blind perspectives in a manner that directs undue attention to the treatment of dogs without specifying the concrete disadvantages for Black people. The study’s narrow focus on adopters and dogs misrepresents decision-making inside shelters and overlooks basic explanations for adoption delays.
In the spirit of an educative sociology, we close by encouraging greater reflexivity by the authors and urge social psychologists to divest from white sociology.
Histories of Racial Ontology and Human-Animal Relations
“Giving one pause” means to stop and make time for careful consideration. While the title is likely intended as an amusing play on “paws,” hesitations in research are serious concerns. Du Bois (2000:38–39) critiques the discipline’s founders, such as Comte, for being “strangely hesitant,” dedicating themselves to a “descriptive sociology” that is both obsessively empirical and compulsively abstract but hesitating to identify and define precisely what it is they are studying about the social world. The founders express “old thoughts anew . . . withal adding but little to our previous knowledge” (Du Bois 2000:40).
QM are also strangely hesitant. They evade naming the problem that demands scrutiny when they overlook literatures on animal naming and animal shelters, which is troubling as much of this work is written by scholars of color and/or adopts critical race and intersectional approaches (Fillingim, Reyes, and Rucks-Ahidiana 2023). Social psychologists of race (Bobo and Fox 2003) long ago called for building bridges with other intellectual communities, and yet QM fail to engage research at the intersection of sociology and gender studies (Guenther 2020), Black studies (Boisseron 2018; Jackson 2020), American and ethnic studies (Kim 2015), and environmental studies (Pellow 2016)—among other fields—that foregrounds anti-Blackness as a structuring principle of human-animal relations. Distinct among racisms, anti-Blackness is “the notion that the construction of blacks as nonhuman structures the status of all other racial groups” (Ray et al. 2017; emphasis added). Anti-Blackness is not an “unreasonable attitude” (QM 2022:231) but rather the very intended logic of whiteness that structures the racial order of humanity.
QM (2022:211) write that “[d]ogs, by definition, exist outside the human racial hierarchy.” This erroneous a priori assertion allows the authors to then claim the presumed novelty in finding that canines exist inside human racial hierarchies. Yet for centuries racist ideologies have shaped the selective breeding of animals. In fact, the science of eugenics was modeled after animal breeding (Skabelund 2008), and race is therefore “a metric of animality . . . that orders human bodies according to how animal they are” (Kim 2015:18; emphasis in original). Research must begin with the (troubling) linkages between humans and animals in the construction of racial taxonomies. QM (2022:214) acknowledge that pit bulls are “constructed as Black” but miss the decisive point that the animalization of Blackness determines the racialization of dogs.
As the category of race is dislodged from the very history of the racialization of animality that QM overlook, race becomes a fixed and neutral construct, a problem characteristic of traditional white sociology (Brunsma and Wyse 2019). QM fail to account for the troubling history of dogs, naming, and anti-Blackness where white people owned Black people and named Black people and dogs after one another. Enslaved people were collared like dogs, and enslavers unleashed “Negro hounds” on runaway slaves (Boisseron 2018). This racialization of dogs and naming continues today (e.g., “dog whistles” are coded racist messages). QM also neglect the gruesome history of the racialization of dog shelters (Axelrod 2021). Without any of this engagement, QM (2022:230–31) claim misleadingly that it is “surprising” and “unlikely” to find racism in the “unrelated” and “decidedly nonhuman matters” of pet naming and shelters. These claims about the discovery of racism constitute a “racial spectacle” and are “entirely predictable” facts (Hatch 2022:2; see also Fillingim et al. 2023).
The Context of Dog Adoption
QM next misrepresent the two frameworks—labor market research and color-blindness—on which they principally reply, which veils the scope and consequences of dog adoption. Scholars have urged those studying color-blindness (which QM cite as driving racial bias) to take the necessary step of explaining its material consequences (Burke 2016). And labor market research specifies the concrete disadvantages for Black people. This focus is necessary because social science is preeminently concerned with the social, or the “inescapable ontological ground of our common life as humans” (Sewell 2005:369). Instead of focusing on the social, QM’s study targets discrimination against dogs but never explains what that means concretely for Black people. This oversight perpetuates a tradition of “misplaced sympathy” for dogs over Black people, a condition of anti-Blackness (Stewart 2020:185). 2
Since race and species are mutually reinforcing categories, scholars have urged embracing an “ethics of avowal” (Kim 2015) which assesses the linked fates of humans and animals. Such an ethics addresses how the fate of dogs confined and assigned a premature death (like pit bulls, euthanized at far greater rates than other dogs) is linked with that of Black people who are confined and assigned a premature death (Guenther 2020). Structural violence against Black people and against dogs “are connected all the way down” (Kim 2015:278).
Curiously, QM fail to analyze the shelter as a market, which involves an application process for adopting pets and the gatekeeping role of shelters. QM (2022: 211) write that “[t]ime to adoption is a meaningful outcome because it represents the extent to which adopters were willing to welcome a dog into their home.” Here they inaccurately equate adopters with the gatekeepers in labor market research (e.g., hiring managers). The appropriate analogous relationship between labor market research and the market for dog adoption is that potential adopters are the applicants and not the gatekeepers.
In general, QM assign far too much influence to adopters. Guenther’s (2020) important ethnography of an animal shelter is especially instructive here. 3 Shelter personnel (who are nearly absent in QM’s study) play decisive roles in determining when dogs get adopted and who gets to adopt them (see also Gunter, Barber, and Wynne [2016] for how shelter employees shape the decision-making of potential adopters). The primarily white, middle-class women who staff shelters and rescues act like the employers in labor market research, screening for and refusing applications from Black and Brown applicants. Shelter personnel “promptly abandon” certain pet names in favor of those that “are deliberately intelligible as part of white culture” (Guenther 2020:181).
The assumption that shelters want to get rid of pit bulls quickly is incorrect. The stakes are higher in finding the “right” home for these dogs, and so the adoption requirements (stated explicitly or guided by the personnel’s own assumptions) are stricter for pit bulls (Guenther 2020). This process requires vetting applicants and subjecting dominant breeds to “temperance tests.” Indeed, various shelters in Columbus, Ohio (QM’s study site), require interviews, a process that invites discrimination and delays time to adoption. Moreover, the perception of pit bulls has changed dramatically over the past two decades, and many adopters are actually likely to want pit bulls more because they view these dogs as innocent victims (Guenther 2020). While these desires may stem from white-savior impulses, the fact remains that delays to adoption are driven by factors within shelters that QM do not account for.
Without an adequate understanding of the aforementioned history and the context of adoption, QM (2022:232) can only, to end their article, recommend that shelter personnel avoid “leaning into bias” by giving dogs white-sounding names. But sociologists know that individual-level recommendations are sorely insufficient. Given how embedded anti-Blackness is in the social structure, change will require much more than making people aware of their racist beliefs (e.g., through the redistribution of resources; see Ray et al. 2017). QM’s recommendation only guards against the mistreatment of dogs without adopting the necessary “biocentric view” that views dogs as “actants” that facilitate relations (and discrimination) between humans (see Mayorga-Gallo 2018). Instead, a recommendation guided by the insights of critical human-animal studies, labor market research, and the color-blindness framework is an appeal for structural interventions to prevent shelter personnel from discriminating against Black people who apply to adopt animals.
Investing in Educative Sociology
We urge moving from strange hesitations to deep introspection and urge divesting from white sociology and investing rather in an educative sociology where we “engage in reflexivity and conduct a sociology of sociology.” 4 In that spirit, we end by encouraging QM to be more reflexive. To quote QM (2022:212), “Claims of color-blindness pose a challenge to the study of racial prejudice because researchers must be skeptical of what people say and place more weight on what people do.” Here, QM suggest that researchers should be sensitive to how the biases of research subjects can complicate the study of race, but they fail to consider how those same appeals to color-blindness have also privileged white researchers historically. Readers should also be skeptical of what researchers say and question whether QM were reflexive in the study’s design and execution, an expectation often demanded of scholars of color (Hordge-Freeman, Mayorga-Gallo, and Bonilla-Silva 2011)—who, for example, are frequently alleged to be conducting illegitimate “me-search.” 5
In summary, QM’s study should give us pause: to consider how social psychology’s established concepts, including bias and stigma, cannot capture the “technologies of dehumanisation” and the sheer extent of anti-Black racism (Tyler 2018:761), the very logic of modernity as well as the discipline—sociology—that was founded in order to understand modernity (Jung and Vargas 2021). We amplify recent calls for our colleagues to “transgress the academy” (Fillingim et al. 2023) and urge reflection on positionality and the purpose of the empirical investigation of race and racism, engagement with critical research by scholars of color, the disruption of anti-Blackness, and full consideration of the material consequences of those logics for Black people. This introspection is needed given that racial exclusion structures the history of American sociology and especially urgent for social psychology and the study of human-animal relations. 6 And as Bonilla-Silva (2019:18) has cautioned, “defensiveness or self-absolution will not help us address the serious racial issues afflicting sociology.”
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank Theresa Rocha Beardall, Jelani Ince, Patricia Louie, and Alexes Harris for their tremendous support from the start and for their generous assistance in helping shape the vision for this comment. The authors also extend their gratitude to Rory Kramer, Caleb Scoville, Anna Skarpelis, Andrew McCumber, and Felipe Dias for their thoughtful feedback. Last, the authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and to thank the editors of Social Psychology Quarterly for creating a space for this conversation.
2
However, an ethics of avowal refuses to pit sympathies for animals and humans against one another (Kim 2015).
3
There is no evidence that the authors engaged seriously with any scholarship on animal shelters.
5
QM never explain their positionality within a larger environment of animal advocacy led by middle-class white proponents who “make dogs adoptable by connecting them to signifiers of middle-class. .. white, mainstream animal companionship” (
:184 -5). QM's research could have addressed the ethical obligations that sociologists have in conducting a study animated by the violent associations between Blackness and animality.
6
In 2022, African Americans represented just 7.1 percent of the American Sociological Association Social Psychology section membership. There was not a single African American member in the Animals and Society section. See https://www.asanet.org/diversity-equity-inclusion/dei-at-asa/asa-membership/current-sections-2022/. While the “whiteness of the publication process” incentivizes the never-ending discovery of racial inequality as the goal of objective research (Fillingim, Reyes, and Rucks-Ahidiana 2023:273), we agree instead that “the study of race must be political and politicized because there is no good reason to study race other than working toward the elimination of racial oppression” (:2; emphasis in original).