Abstract
Popular culture’s recent fascination with zombies rose along with the Democratic Leadership Council’s (DLC) triangulation strategy (kill the left and proclaim the center) and the New Right’s strategy (simply move further to the right and pull the dead husk of America’s political center with you). Together, these groups completed the Reagan Era U-Turn away from an increasingly progressive, social democratic state (Baker, 2007), toward a more brutal form of corporate banditry supported by a “blame the victim” ideology (Greenbaum, 2015). Like the original Night of the Living Dead where formerly satisfied, 1950s suburban middle-class whites ascended from the grave to threaten and devour the progress of 1960s social movements—fin de siècle zombies rose again to show the toxic and hungry blend of capitalist hegemony, hyper individualism, patriarchy, and white supremacy would not stay quiet in the grave (Dolgon, 2015).
As the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter uprisings further exposed what journalist George Packer and others argued was already a “failed state,” it should come as no surprise that the Leni Riefenstahl of Sociology, Lawrence Mead, has also risen, hungry from the grave. Mead’s most recent commentary on “poverty and culture” was published on 21 July 2020, but after an uproar from anti-poverty advocates and social scientists, it was retracted by the journal Society and is currently under investigation for its veracity (Mead, 2020). But why Mead? And why now?
An intellectual forbearer of the Reagan Administration, Mead (1985, 1992) provided the ideological facade for welfare retrenchment in the 1980s by blaming poverty on the undisciplined poor and war on poverty liberals. He promoted a paternalistic welfare system intended to impose order and austerity on poor communities depicted as culpable for their own predicament. Mead, along with conservative co-conspirators, Charles Murray and George Gilder, made up the academic frontlines that used pseudo-science to give ideological cover to the continued corporate exploitation and white supremacy of America’s power elite. These credentialed scholars distorted and delegitimized the successes of post-WWII labor and civil rights movements in order to dismantle the Great Society.
Of course, Mead ignored radical historians and social scientists who had exposed how centuries of racial and gender oppression converged with capitalist and colonial expansion to create persistent, structural inequality for working class and poor people, particularly nonwhites (Abramovitz, 1988; Gordon, 1990; Horsman, 1981; Marable, 1983; Robinson, 1983). These studies demonstrated how historical exploitation, structural violence, institutional power, and discrimination not only maintained inequality but also rationalized white supremacy and developed what George Lipsitz called a “possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz, 2006). Mead’s posse summarily ignored this research in their rush to legitimate the 1980s reworking of capitalism under the global leadership of Reagan and Thatcher.
Instead, Mead et al. advanced reactionary and discredited theories about the cultural pathologies of poor people, moving the causes of poverty from the powerful—who design, maintain and profit mightily from systemic inequality—to the mostly powerless who suffer the consequences (Katz, 1990). The “reform” policies that ensued simply created new forms of social control and domination over working class and minority communities. Over the next few decades, social scientists would explain how such policies and ideologies laid the groundwork for Newt Gingrich’s Personal Responsibility Act and what would amount to over 30 years of massive economic transfers from the poor and middle class to the wealthy—what we now call neoliberalism (Chomsky, 1999; Dolgon, 2015; Erdmans and Black, 2015; Piketty, 2014; Piven, 2001; Prasad, 2006).
So, is it any surprise that Mead would rise again when new social movements for racial justice are exposing the brutal realities of structural racism and economic exploitation? In a time of passionate mobilizations and creative reflections over ending centuries-old forms of inequality, Mead’s rallying cry remains a violent revanchism: impose draconian external order on undisciplined black and brown communities through tougher law enforcement and market conformity. It should be equally obvious how Mead’s ideologically driven fictions will find political traction as Trump breathes new life into a racist, pro-inequality agenda. In the past, liberal sociologists settled for carrying on professional debates with Mead and others, serving only to legitimize pseudo-intellectual lies and distortions. This time, however, we—as critical sociologists in search of real solutions to structural oppression—must stand up to Mead’s apologies for white supremacy and instead directly support anti-poverty warriors. We must rise and insist that “never again” will we tolerate or give legitimacy to this diversionary intellectual enterprise.
First, let’s actually examine Mead’s article and consider its racist underpinnings and the ways that right-wing scholars will rise from the intellectual boneyard to exploit current circumstances. He proclaims that poverty persists in the world’s richest country, not because an unregulated market economy generates extraordinary inequality thorough labor exploitation (Harrison and Bluestone, 1988; Moody, 1988; Smith and Hattery, 2008; Wise, 2013), corporate lawlessness (Huffington, 2003; Ramirez and Ramirez, 2017), and a coercive and punitive penal-welfare state (Black, 2010; Wacquant, 2009). Instead, he claims poverty emanates from cultural differences among white, black, and brown populations. He argues that diverse historical origins in either western or nonwestern societies shape our moral temperaments, work orientations, social responsibility, entrepreneurial ambitions, and, therefore, success.
According to Mead, the determining virtue of having originated from western culture is the individualist orientation responsible for generating not only wealth and power, but legitimate global supremacy. Because blacks and Hispanics originate from nonwestern cultures, they lack an individualistic, inner disposition that leaves them bewildered by personal and collective disorder, unable to take advantage of economic and political opportunities, and lacking the “inner moralistic temperament” to adapt. For nonwhites, these cultural characteristics result in a conformist orientation unable to distinguish between right and wrong or good and bad. Mead’s article rests on the belief that the persistence of poverty can be reduced to one simple proposition: “The great fact is that these [nonwhite] groups did not come from Europe.”
Mead produces no evidence to substantiate his western versus nonwestern cultural orientation theory. He simply presents a tautology that the persistence of “serious poverty” is evidence enough to attribute economic outcomes to the historical and cultural origins of nonwhite populations. Unsurprisingly, he does not try to prove the origins of individualistic entrepreneurialism in the corruption of the medieval Catholic Church or in Luther’s reactionary asceticism. Nor does he try to locate the human virtue of social democracy in Britain’s barbaric imperialism in Asia or in Belgium’s ruthless colonialism in the Congo or French atrocities in Algeria. A more comprehensive examination of history shows that the very “western civilization” Mead premises his theory with was advanced on the bodies of black, brown, and native peoples by brute force and greed, not some superior morality.
Further, when confronted with the most basic evidence that refutes his oversimplified theory, Mead is either slippery and deceitful, or just silent. For instance, the rise of a black middle class does not seem to temper his sweeping generalizations, but instead elicits an absurd caveat about how black mobility can be tied to the successful internalization of cultural individualism—something he attributes to Martin Luther King’s (MLK’s) call for “assertive selfhood.” Such ascriptions betray his willful contortions as MLK’s complete claim “[r]ecognized that African Americans would never be free until they signed their own Emancipation Proclamation ‘with the pen and ink of assertive selfhood’” (Carson, 2005: 26). MLK was not referring to some black entrepreneurialism and individualistic pursuit of status and wealth. His vision called for the collective organizing of political power to change the structural racism of American society. Such purposeful obfuscation is perhaps understandable given Mead’s weak argument, but his misuse of King to do so turns cunning into blasphemy.
And then there is glaring silence. Mead doesn’t even try to explain the poverty of 15.7 million whites in 2018 (compared to 8.9 million blacks and 10.5 million Hispanics); the 436,500 whites in state and federal prisons in 2017 (compared to 476,000 blacks and 330,000 Hispanics); or the 30 million white adults who lacked a high school education in 2018 (compared to 5.8 million blacks and 13.9 million Hispanics). 1 Of course, blacks and Hispanics have disproportionately higher rates of negative outcomes compared to whites, which is at the very core of historical and structural racism. Still, we are left to wonder how Mead’s cultural typology might apply to this mass of wayward whites? Did they somehow lose the virtues of their cultural origins or just not get the memo? Moreover, how would Mead address the fact that white men with felony records are more likely to receive callbacks and jobs from employers than blacks without criminal records? (Pager, 2003). While Mead’s cherry-picking evidence, historical inaccuracies, sweeping generalizations, flawed logic, and outright distortions should be damning enough to flunk any peer review process, his own white privilege, and class status seems to have gained him access to the professional journal Society. Talk about entitlements. 2
The article only gets worse and more glaringly racist as the reader gets past Mead’s regurgitated 1980s schtick to the more recent manifestations of his undead academic gore. Consider Mead’s claim that whites self-segregate because nonwhites possess a flawed inner development and cannot foster the trust necessary for integrated communities. We learn from him that “the privileged” actually live with less “inner freedom” because of their “commitments to others.” We learn that integration relies on racial minorities internalizing an “individualist way of life,” but that this remains unlikely since they are unable to deal with the “burdens of freedom.” We learn that Hispanic immigrants are so blessed by the virtues of American jobs that their desires to want more are blunted; further, we learn that Hispanic immigrant struggles are not about oppression, but stem from their lack of internal controls needed to deal with freedom. And most disturbing and dangerous, Mead asserts that slavery and Jim Crow “kept disorder at a low level” in black communities. Without these brutal forms of domination, African American neighborhoods have disintegrated into pathology and disorder. Mead’s claims are white supremacy at its worst—a replay of years of colonial cultural hegemony. It is zombie sociology.
While Mead’s screed is nothing less than white supremacy redux, his zombie sociology tries to weaponize racialized pseudo-science at a crucial historical moment when an uprising for racial and economic justice gains momentum and the forces of white supremacy have found powerful representation in the White House. Thus, we believe critical sociologists must beat down these racist narratives before they gain traction. We would begin by “flipping the morality script.” For example, the moral supremacy of individualism as “the solution to poverty” denies the rotten underbelly of individualism. Was the moralistic and entrepreneurial temperament that Mead attributes to western individualism on display when white financial institutions sold blacks and Latinos subprime loans before the 2007 collapse? (Rugh and Massey, 2010). These practices not only wiped out the accumulated wealth of black homeowners, but were part of the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression (Phillips, 2012). This market collapse was fueled by the corrupt and fraudulent Ponzi schemes set up by supposedly virtuous whites of European descent who made fortunes by ripping off low-income home-buyers and U.S. taxpayers.
Meanwhile, with 4% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s Coronavirus cases and deaths, does the smug individualism inspiring screams of “Liberate Michigan” and “Liberate Minnesota” really provide an effective blueprint for health and prosperity? Are the “burdens of privilege” associated with social responsibility represented by corporate elites who use overseas tax shelters to rob the public coffers? Or is it simply the “less inner freedom” suffered by the privileged that accounts for the sociopath in the White House and the gangsters that surround him—Wall Street “bangers” and mob consiglieres whom he repeatedly pardons when they get caught breaking the law? Perhaps, the best example of the corrosive individualism that Mead heralds is his casual description that U.S. “westward expansion absorbed Native Americans and Mexicans.” Absorbed? Could it be any clearer that Mead’s narrative is rooted in a settler colonial story that must literally whitewash violent dispossession, torture, murder, and greed with some made up, pseudoscientific crap about superior morality and the piety of the powerful?
We could go on, but why bother. Why give any scholarly credibility to Mead’s lies and distortions by taking seriously his pretenses to be a cultural sociologist? That mistake was made by liberal sociologists in the 1980s and 1990s, who inadvertently legitimated Mead and his co-conspirators’ embrace of unleashed corporate avarice and racist tropes. For example, William Julius Wilson’s seminal book The Truly Disadvantaged was a response to Mead and other conservative pundits who had risen in the public spotlight (Wilson, 1987). Taking the thinly veiled racism of these authors seriously led Wilson to assert that the problems associated with the black urban ghetto were attributable to both structural and cultural forces. Wilson simply found that structural forces were more explanatory. This analysis resulted in Wilson advancing concepts like the “black underclass,” “ghetto-specific culture,” and the “tangle of pathology,” which unfortunately gave credence to Mead and others. In fact, Mead (2020: 2) references his academic sparring partner in his recent article by affirming Wilson’s point that the discouragement of joblessness “promotes dysfunctional lifestyles . . . producing troubled families and other ills.” Wilson’s moderate stance not only appeased his conservative counterparts, but made him a darling of Bill Clinton and the DLC. In fact, no one listening to Wilson in the 1990s could escape his references to sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom. In many ways, what Mead was to Reagan, Wilson was to Clinton.
While Wilson (1997) has since renounced his use of such terms as black underclass and his support for “colorblind” policymaking, and transferred his political affections from Clinton to Barack Obama, he continues to insist that both structural and cultural forces shape life in black urban ghettoes. In his 2010 book, More Than Just Race, Wilson praises Obama’s famous 2008 speech on race where the candidate addressed racial discrimination but balanced his condemnation of historical discrimination by insisting that the black community, and especially black fathers, also needed to exhibit more personal responsibility. In Wilson’s view, this approach represents the type of structural-cultural balance that informs his own theory. Wilson (2010: 143) writes, “I feel the perspective offered in Obama’s speech is exactly the type of framing that can result in broad support to address the problems of race and poverty.” Moreover, seizing on the notion of “cultural framing,” Wilson devotes several pages of this book to, once again, legitimate Mead’s racist ideology by examining more of Mead’s cultural explanations of pathological black ghetto behavior.
Wilson remains a beacon among liberal sociologists and he has opened a frontier to more cultural analysis of the black urban poor (see for instance, Patterson, 2015; Sharkey, 2013; Small et al., 2010). These analyses have certainly become more sophisticated since Wilson’s early days when he was using Census behavioral indicators to represent a black underclass culture, rousing the contempt of other black scholars (Kelly, 1997; Reed, 2000). However, this new frontier rarely, if ever, gets situated within the historical and social reproduction of power. Missing in these studies are references to capitalism, white supremacy, or class exploitation—central historical forces that are either ignored entirely or glossed over with politically benign statements like “the growing internationalization of economic activity,” a phrase found repeatedly in Wilson’s (2010: 8) recent work.
Mead and Wilson represent a sociology tied to the policy space of political elites—Mead’s effort to return to the scene provides intellectual currency for Donald Trump’s neo-fascism, while Wilson maps on to the Obama wing of the Democratic Party now cast in Obama’s shadow, Joe Biden. While we certainly need to vehemently dispose of the dangerous intellectual seed that Mead wants to plant in the current political turbulence, neither do we need the voices of liberal sociologists giving scientific legitimacy to Mead and reaching for moderation by advancing a so-called balanced structural and cultural analysis. The opening that has been created by Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement calls out for more radical voices and analyses to provide the intellectual foundation for political and economic transformation. It is an opening that critical sociologists need to seize.
There is of course much work to build on that provides a different language and theoretical orientation from our conservative and liberal colleagues. Efforts to finally include DuBois as part of the sociology canon are inspiring (Itzigsohn and Brown, 2020; Morris, 2017; Wright, 2017). Similarly, the work of post-Marxists to bring the essential, but forgotten, work of Oliver Cromwell Cox on race and capitalism into the fold is also significant (Cox, 2020; Embrick et al., 2020; Virdee, 2019). Along these lines, recent work to advance an understanding of racial capitalism seems to be gaining traction (Burden-Stelly, 2020; Fletcher Jr., 2020). Feminist social reproduction theorists are taking center stage as well to illuminate the current crisis in care—that is, our declining social capacities “for birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family members, maintaining households and broader communities, and sustaining connections more generally” (Fraser, 2016: 99). In the recently published Feminist Manifesto for the 99%, the authors underscore that the current crisis of care is derivative of a “crisis of society as whole,” that includes the degradation of the economy, the environment, and democracy (Arruzza et al., 2019: 22). Work inspired by Bourdieu has advanced a more extensive understanding of the state as an institution of symbolic power that classifies and stratifies populations (Wacquant, 2010, 2014). Scholars drawing on Foucault have expanded our understanding of poverty governance and the welfare state (Soss et al., 2011), neoliberal reason (Brown, 2015), and governmentality and political power (Rose, 1999a, 1999b). And there is of course much more.
Critical sociologists need to take the stage and advance a paradigm that challenges both conservative and liberal sociology with a radical sociology that exposes how white supremacy and corporate hegemony fuels bad science and oppressive social policy. What distinguishes this critical approach from the dominant paradigm in sociology is that it begins with a conception of the organization of power as reflected in intersecting hierarchies that include social class, race, gender, sexuality, religion, and physical ability. Critical sociologists insist that data collected through all methodological strategies—surveys, interviews, field observations—cannot be understood outside of a conception of power dynamics embedded within a social and historical context. At this very important historical juncture, language such as racial capitalism, white supremacy, class exploitation, and social reproduction, as well as ableism, heteronormativity, and patriarchy need to be at the center of our discipline. And a revolutionary sociology must link these analyses with the kinds of social movements that can make the structural and fundamental changes to bring about new democratic forms of resource distribution and social liberation. Journals, like Critical Sociology, remain an essential vehicle for achieving these ends. Launched as the Insurgent Sociologist in 1971 when a group of sociologists challenged the mainstream apologists in the discipline, Critical Sociology will soon celebrate its 50-year anniversary and remains as important today as it did then. But let’s be clear; at this moment, above all else, we must make sure that zombie sociology does not rise again.
