Abstract
Taking Stock of the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
On January 1, 2014, the editorial offices of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (SRE) opened the submission portal to begin reviewing manuscripts. Now, two years later, at the very beginning of calendar year 2016, the first full volume of SRE is complete. Volume 1 boasted an unparalleled inaugural issue that set the stage for three more issues, each full of cutting-edge original research articles, innovative pedagogical pieces, and a stellar set of book reviews. On behalf of the entire editorial team at SRE, including our associate editors, Editorial Board, and all the members of the Section of Racial and Ethnic Minorities (SREM) of the American Sociological Association, we would like to welcome you to Volume 2.
By the time this issue is printed, we will have received well over 300 manuscripts across those two years of submissions, perhaps even more. This is a strong indicator of the need for SRE as well as an excellent sign for the continuing development of the area of sociology of race and ethnicity. This is what we had hoped for in the original journal proposal and portended in the introduction to the inaugural issue. Although various sociologies of race and ethnicity have been published across a diverse array of interdisciplinary and general sociology journals, having a centralized location for publishing original, sociological research on race and ethnicity will provide a more focused and sustained intellectual discourse whereby the field can be more fully theorized, empirically bolstered, and practically engaged. As noted in the introduction to the inaugural issue, “Sociology of Race and Ethnicity will provide a structure that will assist us in consolidating our research, and, better allow us to assess—and intervene in—the problem of the color line in this century and in the future” (Brunsma, Embrick, and Nanney 2015:7). SRE will allow us to begin to truly take stock of the ideas, concepts, theories, research questions, and scholarship that go into the ongoing making of the sociology of race and ethnicity.
As we embark on our second year with SRE, we are curious which pieces of scholarship, methodologies, theories, and topics constitute the field that the journal serves to bring together. There are many ways one might be able to assess what elements combine (or might be combined) in the twenty-first century to inform the sociology of race and ethnicity as a field. One could canvass the various reading lists used by graduate students who take their comprehensive exams in the area. Another strategy might be to compile the graduate course syllabi for sociology of race and ethnicity, and other resonant graduate courses, across PhD-granting departments of sociology. Yet another might be to look at the past 10 years of presentations given at major national and international meetings and conduct analyses that would help us glean the sorts of topics, questions, methodologies, and theoretical scaffoldings engaged by those working within our field. Yet another idea would be to investigate the work SREM members do in their published research as well as classroom teaching. Indeed, all of these are potentially good ideas and perhaps will someday be done as we continue to build the field. Here, we are presenting some basic results from another approach: a descriptive look at all of the keywords used by authors who submitted to SRE as well as a tallying of the most referenced books and articles as cited in the entirety of original research submissions to SRE in the past 2 years.
The Data and the Approach
For decades, the University of Chicago’s Robert Dreeben collected the “Sociology of Education Bibliography.” Before the Internet, this ever growing compilation made its rounds in sociology and education departments as well-worn pages. Those who trained and studied the sociology of education all knew of its existence, and if one was lucky, one’s department had a copy. In 2003, the most recent compilation of the bibliography, it was some 215 pages long and can be found easily online. This labor of love was deeply important for the building of that area: the sociology of education. The journal of the same name is now in its 88th volume.
Taking a cue from Dreeben, before our first submission was received at SRE, the editorial team decided that the managing editor would, as manuscripts came in, keep a file of every cited reference. The idea was that someday we would use those data to begin building the “Sociology of Race and Ethnicity Bibliography” and to eventually house the file online so that colleagues around the world could crowdsource such a vital document, continue its development, and make it available to all. Along with this amazing endeavor, it became clear to us that the author-submitted manuscript keywords also give us a way to glimpse the contours of the sociology of race and ethnicity as we move deeper into the twenty-first century.
We merged all 2014 and 2015 references and keywords, keeping all of the duplicates, triplicates, and so on. This created a data set including every cited work from every manuscript submitted to SRE thus far—some 12,500 references—consisting of books, articles, book chapters, and a wide variety of other primary and secondary sources. We refer to these as the reference data. This process also created another data set, the keyword data, that included the entire list of keywords submitting authors attached to their manuscripts across all submissions in 2014 and 2015. This keyword data contains 1,334 keywords authors either wrote themselves or chose from a preconstructed list of keywords.
These data represent all of the cited references and keywords that were submitted to SRE by our colleagues in the first two years of submissions. As such, one can use the keyword frequencies to get a sense of both the breadth and depth of substantive areas within the sociology of race and ethnicity. One can also use the reference frequencies to get a glimpse of which pieces of scholarship are used by those working within the sociology of race and ethnicity in the early twenty-first century. Of course, both data sets and their concomitant frequencies will also inform us about what topics are not being covered substantively and what scholarship is not being cited in contemporary work in the field that perhaps should be. Although we will ask some critical questions about these data, we are hopeful that such an exercise will provoke thought and discussion that will lead to a stronger sociology of race and ethnicity as we collectively move forward.
Seeing the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity through Keywords
For those close readers, you will recall reference to an earlier analysis (Brunsma et al. 2015) that helped us prepare for both the proposal for the journal as well as our decision regarding the substantive areas to highlight in the inaugural issue of SRE. We looked across almost a decade worth of published work in Ethnic and Racial Studies (2005–2012), Race and Society (2002–2004), Ethnicities (2005–2012), Du Bois Review (2005–2012), and Identities (2005–2012) to identify a set of themes that have been covered fairly extensively in publications, thematic sections, and entire special issues. These themes were, in order of frequency, international migration/immigration, diasporas and diasporic theory, Muslim experience and Islamophobia, racial and ethnic identities, race, politics, and social policy, race and globalization/neoliberalism/political economy, multiraciality/hybridity, racial inequality/stratification, comparative race, multiculturalisms/diversities, race and nationalism, race and criminology, race and education, race and popular culture, race and colonialism, colorism and color stratification, postraciality, race and religion, the black experience, difference, race and citizenship, race and gender, racism, and whiteness. As such, we wanted to steer somewhat clear of these substantive areas (especially those higher up the list) in order to bring scholarly light to issues that were needed to continue building the sociology of race and ethnicity. Additionally, we wanted to think of not only what research had been generally included and excluded in the sociological field of race and ethnicity but also to think about barriers to the field’s development because of social, academic, or political constraints. For example, consider the area of migration/international migration. The fields of migration/international migration and sociology of race and ethnicity have often talked past one another rather than to one another. This structure has led to immigration scholars’ failure to recognize the interaction of race and immigration as central to their research and vice versa.
Then, we looked at the substantive strengths of our associate editors, Editorial Board members, emerging reviewers early in SRE’s history, SREM leadership since 1980, as well as the expressed areas in the proposal for the journal. Our SRE(M) substantive strengths at the moment that submissions were beginning to come in were race and genomics/health disparities, current theoretical debates in the sociology of race and ethnicity, race and methodologies/epistemologies, racial attitudes/racial ideologies/social psychologies, race and the media, race and social movements, race and the environment, indigenous/race/racism, spaces of racial integration/inclusion, racial microaggressions, skin tone/colorism, international/transnational migration (in connection to sociology of race), and race and urban/rural sociology. All of these areas represent both strengths and areas that SREM members could effectively engage with in the inaugural issue of SRE—areas that needed work. Through this process, we identified four key focal areas for the inaugural issue: (1) race, space, and integration/inclusion; (2) current (and future) theoretical debates in sociology of race and ethnicity; (3) race, ethnicity, and social movements; and (4) race, ethnicity, and immigration. Indeed, the inaugural issue was very successful in bringing these important areas within the field of sociology of race and ethnicity to the fore.
Taking these key focal areas as outlined in the inaugural issue into consideration, it is interesting to see how, over the past two years, they compare with the substantive areas and topics that submitted manuscripts have brought. Figure 1 shows a visual representation of the keywords submitted to SRE in 2014 and 2015. The larger and bolder the keyword, the more frequently it was used by submitting authors to identify the substance of their manuscripts. What immediately jumps out is the importance and centrality of the black experience in the development of the field; this should not be surprising, and, in fact, the experience of the African diaspora on the sociology of race and ethnicity is fundamental. The sociological understanding of racism also remains of deep importance to the field, perhaps more so now than the investigation of discrimination and prejudice—an indication of the theoretical development in the past 30 years. The inaugural issue certainly had its finger on the pulse of the field when it highlighted the intersection of immigration and racialization—two keywords that rise to the level of introspection in the keyword data. Strong indications of various institutional interests (e.g., education, family, politics) are present, and the importance of gender, class, sexuality, and region is highlighted. Of course, one would do well to look past the pulse of the data and into the space between: stress, hegemony, trust, discourse, colonialism, antiracism, memory, health, and crime, to name just a very few.
Visual Representation of Keywords Submitted to Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2014–2015.
These keyword data raise many questions and trajectories of important discussion and debate. What is our scholarship motivated by? Where do we locate ourselves epistemologically? Which analytic fields are within our vision? Why these and not others? What reasons explain the particular configuration of these substantive focuses of our colleagues given what is invisible and what is visible? Are we focusing on the right things? Are there other things we should be focusing on in our research? Why? Why not? We look forward to the conversation as well as the manuscripts that are submitted as a result of this discussion.
Seeing the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity through References
We were deeply impressed by the breadth and depth of the references used by those who submitted manuscripts to SRE in the past two years. Such variation should be kept front and center in our minds as we sample the scholarship that makes up the sociology of race and ethnicity. Before SRE, we were able to recognize the varied and disparate locations of the published building blocks of the field: books, court cases, journal articles, federal agency reports, primary sources, book chapters in edited volumes, and, more recently, blogs and Web sites. Now, as our colleagues submit their research to our new journal, we are witness to a set of these building blocks as we all conduct sociological research on race and ethnicity. Although there is still a wide array of outlets for our work, the primary material we draw from is books and journal articles. Below, we move through the key publications cited in each category across all of the manuscripts submitted to SRE in 2014 and 2015.
Books
Table 1 shows the 37 books that were most cited in manuscripts submitted to SRE in our first two years. Given the distribution of SRE citations across the book reference data, we decided to keep those books that were cited 8 or more times. To provide more information than simply the number of times a book was cited in all submitted manuscripts to SRE, we also include the number of Google Scholar citations each book has received since its year of publication (this includes all subsequent editions as well). Finally, we calculated the number of Google Scholar citations per year since the original publication date; this measure helps standardize the citational impact of these books regardless of recency of publication.
Most Referenced Books in SRE, 2014–2015.
One can think about these data in a wide array of ways, and indeed, our purpose in this article is to simply show the data in the hopes of encouraging various kinds of discussions that may stem from such an exercise. Looking across these books, there is little doubt of their impact in the creation of the sociology of race and ethnicity, the questions they ask, the explanations they offer, the methodologies they use, and the substantive focuses they cover. Looking at SRE citations alone, we see a host of books cited 8 times and up to a high of 67. There is a clear cutoff point in terms of the degree to which SRE authors cite four books in particular: Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists (67 times), Omi and Winant’s Racial Formations (57 times), Massey and Denton’s American Apartheid (25 times), and Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (24 times). Looking at Google Scholar citations per year offers a different view altogether of the impact of books on the development of scholarship in the sociology of race and ethnicity. Taking 500 citations per year as a cutoff point, five different books arise: Charmaz’s Constructing Grounded Theory (1,826 cites per year), Glaser and Strauss’s Discovery of Grounded Theory (1,574.83 cites per year), Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (1,003.50 cites per year), Portes and Rumbaut’s Immigrant America (605.50 cites per year), and, again, Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (627.79 cites per year). Looking at sheer citational data, we also can see that Glaser and Strauss, Collins, and Charmaz, in addition to Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, all are widely recognized and used works.
What do these data tell us about the sociology of race and ethnicity as constructed, as being actively constructed, and as it will be constructed in the future? Which books appear on this list for their theoretical import to the field? Are there theoretical, epistemological, methodological, and substantive cohorts that influence our field (13 of the books are from the 1990s, 14 from the 2000s, and the 2010s is perhaps on pace to match those decades)? Is list this related to graduate training in the field? The mentoring of junior scholars? Or lack thereof? What of the positionalities of the scholars on this list? Why are three fourths of these highly cited books written by men? Does the racial and ethnic composition of this set of authors reflect our discipline as it was in the 1980s? The 1990s? The 2000s? Does it reflect our discipline now? What are the implications of this? What substantive areas are (over)represented here? What methodologies? What sociological traditions do these books represent? Or are these books paving a new sociological tradition? Which publishers are present? Which are not? How were each of these projects funded? These and many other questions arise. We hope you will think about this with us.
Articles
Table 2 shows the 27 journal articles that were cited most frequently in submitted manuscripts to SRE. We kept those articles that were cited six or more times in the table in order to facilitate discussion. As we did for the books, we also include the year of publication, the number of SRE citations, the sheer number of Google Scholar citations, as well as the Google Scholar citations per year measure. We also use journal acronyms to save space—all of these articles are easily located by searching online.
Most Referenced Articles in SRE, 2014-2015.
It is interesting to look at these data. One can see that there are five articles that were cited most often in SRE over the past two years: Bonilla-Silva’s 1996 ASR article on rethinking racism (22 times), Bonilla-Silva’s 2004 ERS article on the Latin Americanization of the racial social structure (17 times), Portes and Zhou’s 1993 AAPSS article on segmented assimilation (17 times), Blumer’s 1958 PSR theoretical article on race and group positioning (14 times), and Harris and Sim’s 2002 ASR article on multiracial contextual identity choice (13 times). Looking at the Google Scholar citations per year since the publication of these articles, we see a different pattern. If we use 100 citations per year as a basic cutoff point, we see a citational impact of five different articles: McPherson et al.’s 2001 ARS article on homophily (564.38 cites per year), Crenshaw’s 1991 SLR article on intersectionality (291.91 cites per year), Crenshaw’s 1989 UCLF article on intersectionality (160.40 cites per year), Lamont and Molnar’s 2002 ARS article on cultural boundaries (158.50 cites per year), and, again, Portes and Zhou’s 1993 AAPSS article (165.57 cites per year). One gets a similar picture looking at the sheer Google Scholar citations over time. Interestingly, Bonilla-Silva’s 2015 piece in the inaugural issue of this journal also made the list.
Again, this is far from a popularity contest. Right? Although it does appear to be the case that the sociology of race and ethnicity has been primarily a “book field,” there are some significantly influential journal articles that have helped build our field, a field that, through these pages, will continue to be built. But what are the harder questions here? Why do only 3 of these 27 articles appear in journals devoted to race? What have the implications been of sociologists of race and ethnicity publishing much of their work in generalist social science journals, including the top sociological generalist journals (e.g., ASR, AJS)? What has been the role of editorships and editorial board composition in the publication of scholarship in sociology of race and ethnicity? Here we see a much more representative distribution of male and female authors than we saw with the books; why? Are white scholars more represented in this distribution of highly cited journal articles? How does the institution one comes from influence article publication? How does this influence knowledge production in the sociology of race and ethnicity? Many questions.
Conclusions
We present these data largely for collective interest, collective introspection, and collective innovation. What do these data say about the sociology of race and ethnicity? What do they not say? As sheer frequency, one could say that these cited articles and books constitute the “core” scholarship on race and ethnicity, and the keywords our “central” focuses. Perhaps these data show a set of work that is highly influential in the historic (and contemporary? future?) shaping of the sociology of race and ethnicity. Alternatively, one could say that these are simply the articles that have been sent to us whose keywords and citational structure do not represent the sociology of race and ethnicity closely. All of the above? None of the above?
One thing we are sure of: what we cite, how we frame our research, which scholarship we engage with, as well as the raced, classed, gendered, and placed boundaries of our sociological imagination, matter fundamentally for our starting points and the limits of our destinations.