Abstract
In this feature review we explore the idea that the discipline is collectively, possessively invested in a particular version of itself—white sociology. We think through some of the key elements of this investment, its consequences, and explore possible ways to divest from it.
Our Possessive Investment in White Sociology
At the 2018 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. On land that was originally inhabited by the Lenape tribe of the indigenous Delaware valley, who were removed to “Indian land” under Indian removal policies. A few blocks from where W.E.B. Du Bois (1899) and his assistant, Isabel Eaton, surveyed the African American neighborhoods of Philadelphia in what would become the groundbreaking sociological treatise The Philadelphia Negro. In the massive space of the Pennsylvania Convention Center, with its own history of displacement, in a city built and sustained by white supremacy and where you can be thrown out of a Starbucks in 2018 for being black. Here, sociologists gathered to take President Eduardo Bonilla-Silva up on his invitation to feel race and to “explore racialized emotions”: the theme of the meetings. An important theme about understanding our affective relationality and its link to structure, culture, and, indeed, the politics of belonging in our own discipline. Discussions of racist expulsion from spaces, racist exclusion from the discipline, racist expansion of white supremacy and whiteness into virtually every aspect of our lives took place at the annual meeting. Ultimately, the racial elitism in the discipline of sociology is still with us. We feel it, and we must face it, and challenge it, for the sake of the discipline, its knowledge production, and to enhance its relevance in a world that so desperately needs it.
For us, to speak of elitism in the discipline of sociology, one must speak about power (Mills 1956). To speak of power in the discipline of sociology, one must speak about epistemology (Sprague 2005). To speak of epistemology in the discipline of sociology, one must speak about race (Ladner 1973; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). To engage with issues of elitism and power in the discipline of sociology, one must speak of the whiteness of sociology and our collective, possessive investment in white sociology (Stanfield 2011). To invest in white sociology is to invest in and buttress its epistemological center. To invest in its epistemological center is to invest in and support its structure of power. To invest in its structure of power is to reproduce its elitism. These are not new ideas; however, the need to renew our efforts to divest in white sociology may be as urgent as ever. We acknowledge and validate the intersectional matrix of human social experience, as well as the brilliant matrix of experience of our colleagues in this discipline, many of whom (especially sociologists of color) have been rallying against the whiteness of sociology for more than a century and continue to do so. We hope to add to that discussion (echoing those 100 years of voices) by reminding us of the ways that our collective, possessive investment in white sociology continues to plague the discipline and its potential.
We draw the idea—that whiteness creates for its constituents the incentive to invest their time and energy on the creation and re-creation of whiteness—from George Lipsitz’s (1998) famous book The Possessive Investment of Whiteness. We borrow further from W.E.B. Du Bois’s (1935) argument in Black Reconstruction in America about the psychological wages of whiteness received in the late nineteenth century, when a social structure constructed on the oppression and exploitation of racialized masses made interracial class solidarities impossible. We also take inspiration from Charles Mills’s (1997) explanation that the possessive investment in whiteness “maintains and reproduces the racial order,” whereby whiteness is “conceptualized as consent, either explicit or tacit, to the racial order [of] white supremacy” (p. 14). For Mills, white supremacy is a meta-racial contract that is political, moral, and epistemological, a racial contract whereby “all whites are beneficiaries” of the racial contract, even if “some whites are not signatories to it” (p. 11). Social scientists have raised issues of elitism, epistemology, and power in the discipline for a very long time (e.g., Anzaldúa 1999; Collins 2000; Hunter 2002; Ladner 1973; Margolis and Romero 1998; Segura 2003; Sprague 2005). We are thankful for them. Having spent a combined 30 years in the discipline now, we have seen the many faces of elitism in sociology. Many, if not most, of these faces of elitism have their pylons rooted deeply in the whiteness of sociology and our collective, possessive investment in it. Our thoughts here come from years of listening to the experiences of those who are oppressed by such elitism and the published scholarship of those who have attempted to decolonize the discipline for a long time (and who continue to do so). Additionally, we are inspired by the work of those who have studied the endogenous and exogenous processes that govern the training of sociologists in the departments of sociology over the years, including the work of Wyse (2014), whose mixed-method study investigated the top 20 graduate departments of sociology in the United States and uncovered the ways racism underwrites sociological knowledge production in these spaces (Margolis and Romero 1998; Smith 2004).
We all come to sociology for a wide variety of reasons. Ultimately, as practicing sociologists, we are first and foremost knowledge producers (through our research), knowledge consumers (through our professional engagement), knowledge purveyors (through our teaching), and applicators of knowledge (through our public engagement). At the base of this disciplinary reality is the epistemological terrain upon which we produce, consume, purvey, and apply that knowledge. If epistemology is the structured relationship between what is known, who can know, and the process of knowing, and if such an epistemological structure is about race, race is about power, and power buttresses elitism and what counts as what is known, what counts as who can know, and what counts as legitimate ways of knowing, then, we must speak of the whiteness of sociology and the discipline’s collective, possessive investment in it (Sprague 2005; Wyse 2014). Such a structure has been with us and continues to be with us. We appreciate the space in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity to think through some of the key elements of this investment and how to divest from it.
The Ways of Our Possessive Investment in White Sociology
Sociology’s Racialized History and White Collective Memory
In the same way that Du Bois (1903) identified the white supremacist color line as the problem of the twentieth century, so too is it the problem of sociology’s history, especially in the United States. In the decade during which sociology was institutionally woven into U.S. higher education, the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), legalized racial segregation. Such a structure saw the birth of two schools of U.S. sociology: the University of Chicago (1892) and the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory (1895) (Calhoun 2007; Morris 2015; Sica 2007; Wright 2002a, 2005). In real time, the white supremacist color line structured who and what ideas were privileged and included and who and what ideas were “othered” and excluded (Rabaka 2010; Wright 2002b ; Wyse 2013); the results still affect us in fundamental ways.
Although the University of Chicago and the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory represent sociology’s racialized history, they also represent the historical roots of our discipline’s distinct racialized paradigmatic approaches to doing sociology—white sociology and Black sociology (Stanfield 2011; Wright and Calhoun 2012). In the 1970s, scholars of color made visible Black sociology as a paradigmatic approach to doing sociology (Elias 2009; Ladner 1973; Staples 1976), which holds fundamental (1) the assumption that race is a central organizing force in society; (2) the need for historical and global contextualization of the social phenomena being studied; and (3) the assumption that sociology is a tool of emancipatory knowledge that challenges racism, injustice, and oppression, serving to empower racial and social justice projects (Ladner 1973; MacLean and Williams 2008; Staples 1976; Steinberg 2007). With that said, Black sociology recognizes that knowledge production is structured by sociohistorical matrices of race, gender, and class and therefore the objectivity of knowledge production is a façade, especially within the historical context of white supremacy that does not afford objectivity to racialized “Others” (Collins 2000; Jones 1973; Kershaw 1992). Furthermore, Black sociology emphasizes the importance of cultural relativism to combat ethnocentrism (Bell 1992 ; Ladner 1973; Staples 1976). As such, Staples (1976) identified Black sociology as a “science of liberation.”
In contrast, conceptualizing Black sociology made hegemonic white sociology visible, or what Staples (1976) identified as the “science of oppression” (Ladner 1973). White sociology is a paradigmatic approach that holds as central (1) that sociological knowledge creation is an objective process, embedded with objectivity; (2) the practice of a “value-free” approach to doing sociology; and (3) the privileging of the positivist methodological approach to doing sociology (Ladner 1973; Stanfield 2011; Staples 1976; Steinberg 2007). However, in practice, white sociology’s objectivity centers on Eurocentric experiences that produce ethnocentric research and the objectification of racialized Others (Staples 1976; Stanfield 2011; Steinberg 2007). As Stanfield (2011) noted, “the objectification of knowledge is a matter of power and privilege” (p. 19). In practice, the value-free approach of white sociology enables moral detachment and stigmatizes social activism, highlighting the gap between social thought and action (Steinberg 2007). Last, white sociology’s privileging of positivism coincides with a deemphasis on the historical and global context of the social phenomena being studied (Steinberg 2007). In sum, to understand the racialized history of sociology is to hear a “double-voiced discourse” of both oppression and liberation (Higginbothom 1995).
Rabaka (2010) conceptualized this process as “epistemic apartheid” or “the racial colonization and conceptual quarantining of knowledge, anti-imperial thought, and/or radical praxis produced and presented by non-white intellectual activists” (p. 16). However, using a “global politics of knowledge” framework, the process of epistemic apartheid can be centered within a reality that explores how race, power, and coloniality structure the global epistemological landscape, where the “coloniality of power” reflects the “coloniality of knowledge” (Bhambra 2014a; de Sousa Santos 2014 ; de Sousa Santos, Nunes, and Meneses 2007:xlvii, xxxix). Epistemic apartheid enables a racialized “symbolic hierarchy of knowledge” in which ideas are hierarchically structured, some privileged as elite and others stigmatized (Collins 2007:577). W.E.B. Du Bois never saw his work published, or even his groundbreaking study The Philadelphia Negro reviewed in the American Journal of Sociology (AJS), yet Jane Addams had five articles published in AJS (Calhoun 2007; Rabaka 2010:4). Collins (2007) explained that racial segregation and stratification of knowledge result in the very real consequence of ideas losing holistic value. For example, the exclusion of black women from the “mainstream” of sociology resulted in the subjugation of the concept of intersectionality and the institutionalization of race, gender, and class studies in sociology graduate departments (Collins 2007; Wyse 2013). However, the subjugation of intersectionality and the separation of analyses of race, gender, and class lessened the discipline’s holistic understanding of how structures of oppression interact to produce our lived realities (Collins 2000, 2007). Scholars explain that the racialized segregation of knowledge as structured by white supremacy reproduces a “white ignorance,” which is “not confined to only white people” (Mills 2007:15, 22), or an “epistemology of ignorance” (Steinberg 2007).
Within the racialized historical context of sociology, the problem exposes itself: to what extent do we possessively invest in a white collective memory of our discipline and forget the excluded scholars of color and their ideas? To remember and commemorate are political acts—so too are forgetting and rendering invisible (Irwin-Zarecka 1994; Zerubavel 1997). Although the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago is widely recognized as prestigious, sociology collectively forgets the researchers, such as Monroe Nathan Work and Lucey Craft Laney, and scholarship cultivated at the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, such as the institutionalization of theoretical and methodological triangulation (Wilson 2006; Wright 2002b, 2009). Wright (2002a, 2002b) argued that white supremacist racism explains why the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, and the scholarly contributions thereof, have largely been forgotten and excluded, or negated, from our collective memory. In doing so, sociology collectively forgets the history of Black Women’s Club members, such as Anna Julia Cooper (1892) and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1895), who, at the turn of the twentieth century as part of the larger Black Women’s Club movement, used sociology to identify social problems and create social solutions for their communities; some of whom, such as Victoria Earle Matthews, presented their research at the Atlanta University Conference, in connection with the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory (Wilson 2006). The discipline does, however, remember a few scholars of color by naming awards or scholarships after them, for example, the ASA’s Cox-Frazier-Johnson Award. Yet to what extent do we remember the scholarly contributions of Oliver C. Cox (1948) or the black radical thought tradition, of which Cox and Du Bois were a part of (Rabaka 2009; Robinson 1983)? Or does naming awards divest our responsibility to remember and engage with their scholarship?
Worshipping at the Altar of White Sociology and Socializing Whiteness
Does the possessive investment in the white collective memory of our discipline influence how we perform sociology today? Are the theoretical and empirical heroines and heroes and our key sociological concepts and processes—as they pulse through the curricula of our introductory textbooks, our comprehensive exams, our literature reviews—possessed by a hegemonic investment in white sociology? Scholars have explained that collective memory serves to create collective social identity and provide a “resource for maintaining social bonds” (Irwin-Zarecka 1994; Zerubavel 2003). The discipline’s possessive investment in the white collective memory of sociology makes invisible our racialized epistemic history and makes white sociology invisible as “mainstream,” reproducing a white collective identity.
The possessive investment in the discipline’s white collective memory and forgetting facilitates the reproduction of white sociology’s white supremacist epistemological practices of “white logic” and “white methods” (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). Scholars have showcased the ways in which white sociology reproduces analyses of race that are ahistorical, acontextual, and atheoretical (Ladner 1973; Staples 1976; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). For example, the use of race as a “fixed construct” pulls race from its sociohistorical context and reproduces the idea that race is “rooted in biology,” and the atheoretical use of race as a control variable in dissertations defended at the top 20 U.S. sociology departments (Holland 2008; James 2008; Marks 2008; Wyse 2014). Relatedly, does comparison—that beating heart of the sociological method—serve to support our collective possessive investment in white sociology? Marginalized students more often than not do not see themselves reflected in the work they are reading. And if and when they get to graduate school, is the situation worsened? And when they seek to understand their communities, are they suggested the need for whiteness “for comparison purposes” in order to do so while using a terra nullius methodology stripped of all intentional relationship building and community implications in the name of institutional review boards’ “protection” of the white, neoliberal university and its bottom line? Maybe.
In a quest to diversify our departments and our discipline (which is already “diversifying” because racialized minorities see the critical liberatory potential of sociology), do our graduate (and undergraduate) training grounds demand a possessive investment in white sociology? There is reason to believe that this is the case in many, if not most of our graduate departments of sociology. Indeed, Wyse’s (2014) work shows quite profoundly the fact that nonwhite sociologists, who come to receive sociological training, who are socialized within our discipline, who develop a “sociological imagination,” and so on, come to a discipline that is already fully racialized with established, elitist structures, that are undergirded by structures that encourage a possessive investment in white sociology. Scholars have called for continued research into what Margolis and Romero (1998:1306) identified as the “hidden curriculum” or the “informal structures of control” that reproduce racialized knowledges and practices in the teaching, learning, and doing of sociology (Bhambra 2014b). Such work has the potential to increase the de facto liberatory potential of sociology that those who come to the discipline so often seek but who ultimately are dismayed not to find (Brunsma and Overfelt 2007).
The possessive investment in white sociology exacerbates this process as whiteness hides its own construction and is embodied in the socialization process of the discipline. There are those whose experiences barely brought them through the gates of academia, whose experiences are not validated as they read the textbooks, whose theory syllabi do not theorize their experience, or if they do, theorize it from the white epistemological gaze. There are those who find themselves—as they conduct their sociological analyses, design their studies, write their research, and teach their classes—fighting at every step of the way the heavy, magnetic pull of the collective, possessive investment in white sociology.
Follow the White-brick Road? On Becoming Sociologists
Does the possessive investment in white sociology influence the sociological pipeline or vice versa? Unfortunately, there is very little research on sociology in high schools. The lack of the discipline’s institutionalization in American K–12 education, for instance, is likely to unequally serve a certain set of ideas at the expense of others. In fact, one of the very few sociologies of sociology regarding high schools is the work of Michael DeCesare (2002, 2007), who has often taken a sociology of knowledge approach to his work, highlights the writing on the wall: The next step is for academic sociologists to begin paying consistent and serious attention to changing the secondary sociology course for the better. Doing so will not only positively affect each of us as individual sociologists, but also the collective sociological enterprise. (P. 9)
His entry in the Handbook of Public Sociology (DeCesare 2009) makes it even more clear as he thinks about Burawoy’s four faces of sociology—public, policy, professional, critical—the latter, more likely to engage underrepresented minorities in the discipline, he states exists nowhere in high school sociology: In closing, let me be as blunt as possible: Without a serious commitment on the part of the ASA, none of Michael Burawoy’s four faces of sociology will become fixtures in high school sociology courses. And unless we first plant the seeds of professional sociology, the others will not—and cannot—ever grow. (p. 201)
It would be 2015 when the ASA (largely stemming from the 1990s and DeCesare’s work) would release its “National Standards for High School Sociology” (American Sociological Association 2015) with race and ethnicity holding a marginalized position in these standards at best. The ASA’s data on high school, though improving, has been incredibly sparse: we should do better. Somewhat less sparse is our understanding of the pipeline structure from postsecondary up through the ranks of the professoriate, especially for African Americans; however, it is not very uplifting. The most recent analysis, looking at the 2004 cohort, showed a baccalaureate sociology pool of African Americans of 3,900 at that time, some 1,150 of those enrolled in sociology graduate programs, with 270 of those awarded MA degrees in sociology, 40 awarded PhDs, 30 becoming assistant professors in sociology, and 20 becoming full professors of sociology (Spalter-Roth and Erskine 2007). We need comparable data on other underrepresented minorities in the discipline.
What kind of structure are we supporting here? Does our possessive investment in white sociology help explain such a pipeline? Does it help explain the rankings of our graduate programs in the discipline? Is the social closure enacted among the top 20 part of the long game of white supremacy to preserve its epistemologies, theories, and methodologies as the legitimate ones? Gated communities, sure (Bute 2013). A plantation system, perhaps? An elitist racialized hierarchy of knowledge production, dissemination, application, with disciplinary legitimacy and value declining as one goes down the hierarchy? If one takes a look, the sociological pipeline from high school to postsecondary, from post secondary to graduate school, from graduate school to the academy, and from assistant professor up to full professor does seem to support a collective, possessive investment in white sociology. Woe are we if we do not more fully support the Minority Fellowship Program and other structures that challenge such a pipeline.
Publishing White Sociology
To raise another set of issues for us to consider within the fog of our collective investment in white sociology, we turn briefly to publishing and writing. Who are the “peers” in “peer review”? Are they possessively invested in white sociology? What is “blind” about “double-blind peer review”? Feminist scholars (Grant and Ward 1991), critical geographers (Berg 2004 ), and indeed, critical scholars of race and other critical sociologists such as Lee (1976), whose insights led to the nonblind peer-reviewed journal Humanity and Society, have argued that the dominant practice of blind and double-blind review draws its assumptions from deeply patriarchal, enlightenment, white, notions of objectivity whereby referees are assumed to have no location within the matrix of domination. Of course this is patently not true. Does this structure protect our collective possessive investment in white sociology or challenge it? It is worth thinking about and investigating. Perhaps the new analyses coming from the digitized files from the infamous “ASA journal boxes” (American Sociological Association 2017) will reveal something about the possessive investment in white sociology as it appeared in the peer-review process throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, as well as just how “blind” such a process was and is, and perhaps how to alter it differently.
Relatedly, we have often wondered about the racial inequality and racial politics of citation practices in our discipline. Do our citational practices reflect our possessive investment in white sociology? Victor Ray (2018) recently wrote about this: Much of the bias in citation patterns may be unintentional, as a path of dependency is built into them that reflects, reproduces and legitimates racial inequality. Inequality is reflected through a veneration of the classics. In the social sciences and humanities, many of these works were written during a period when racial and gender exclusion was simply expected and taken for granted. What counts as canonical is shaped by who had access to existing knowledge and the tools and institutional resources to produce new knowledge.
Sounds like an institutional habit we should work hard to break. But how? Some members of the ASA spawned a movement at the 2018 annual meeting to encourage sociologists to cite black women, as a much needed corrective to our current possessive investment in white sociology. We applaud this and add that in addition to citing black women and other marginalized scholars of color, that we should all actually read and engage with their work in our own.
Recently, at the Critical Race Studies in Education Association, our black and LatinX colleagues were asking questions about academic writing itself. Is academic writing a mechanism for preserving whiteness? Is there a standard language structure in academia predicated on our possessive investment in whiteness? In a powerful presentation, Garcia, López, and Vélez (2018) asked whether the logics of publishing are upholding an investment in whiteness and a white market of publishing that serves the interests of white scholarship. These scholars seek to disrupt the colonial logics of publishing; we think they are onto something that we should care about and act upon.
More Questions about Our Possessive Investment in White Sociology: Can You Feel It?
Can we see evidence of our collective possessive investment in white sociology in the elected offices in our discipline? In the governing bodies of our national and regional associations? Is that evidence linked to the structures and processes, bylaws and “Robert’s Rules of Order,” and nominations committees? Are such questions worth asking? Investigating? Challenging? Are there patterns to our honorees and award winners and a possessive investment in white sociology? When do structures of popularity intersect with structures of elitism, power, and therefore, whiteness in our honorifics? With what effects? Such questions have been around a long time and perhaps are worth pursuing solutions. Many folks have, are, and will continue to challenge these structures. Please join them.
Do the current sections of the ASA and their respective anchors in the sea of the possessive investment in white sociology represent the discipline? Do the major theoretical apparatuses, “core readings” for comprehensive exam lists, primary research questions, and “legitimate” epistemological and methodological approaches in each of these areas invest in white sociology? And, if so, at what cost to knowledge? To pedagogy? To our research-informed approaches to social problems? To policy?
Much can be said about hiring practices, the racialized tea leaves of job advertisements, the processes of hiring committees and departments faced with hundreds of applications, the interviews, navigating the campus visits, getting the offers, negotiating the offers, not to mention facing the daily experiences of being a faculty member and facing the grind we all face and the fact that though our Latina colleagues may share our same department, we face very different departments due to the daily machinations of the possessive investment in white sociology. Not to mention pursuing tenure, getting (or not getting) tenure—there is no space to go into this racialized and gendered organizing structure here.
The disciplines that consider race a possible area of inquiry, including sociology, perhaps because they have not thought deeply, reflexively, and critically about the way that race underwrites their own (our own) disciplinary practices and habits, and, because of our possessive investment in white sociology, undermines our value to public policy and discourse, especially around issues that touch that very inquiry: race. Perhaps, because we have not thought enough about it within our own ranks it reduces our voice in the public sphere. Those who battle racial inequality on a daily, grounded basis, can see through us.
Finally, as directed by President Bonilla-Silva at these meetings—an invitation to consider racialized emotions—one should also understand that elitism is felt. Elite spaces and their exclusionary affective flows are felt. Just like the homophobic spaces, racist spaces, hegemonic masculinity spaces, adult spaces for children, and so on. This affective experience is keen evidence of our collective possessive investment in white sociology, and it is always vibrantly on show at our annual meetings. Affective flows are often exclusionary (e.g., microaggressions), but they can be intentionally structured in ways that lessen their exclusionary effects. When whiteness is normalized into institutional and disciplinary fabric, perhaps we need to be more intentional and deliberate about microaffirmations, microrecognitions, microvalidations, microtransformations, microprotections.
Disinvesting in White Sociology and Rebuilding Our Discipline
We have highlighted many questions that interrogate the possessive investment in white sociology. We have only touched the surface of our investment in white sociology as it possesses us, the ways we daily invest in it, and the structural, cultural, and epistemological stranglehold we are suspended by in its design. And again, we are only echoing a call more than 100 years old and one that we need to continue to make sure is a part of the conversation about elitism in the discipline. We hope these will serve to both continue these old questions as well as generate new ones. But, wow. Now that we have thought about it a bit—many of us spend a lot of time investing in white sociology. We should stop.
Stuart Hall (Hall and King 2005) once said, “I want to pluck [sociology] out of its articulation, and rearticulate it in a different way.” An echo 100 years long. Echoed even today by our own Aldon Morris, from his 2017 Social Problems piece: If we wish to build a better sociology in the future, this is not the time to bury our heads in ethereal intellectual clouds pretending knowledge production is an objective enterprise emanating from on high. Demographic inclusion is crucial to the production of a diverse and relevant sociology.
Ultimately, we feel it necessary for the discipline to increase the visibility of the “sociology of knowledge.”
It is no coincidence that in the 1970s, as Black sociology highlighted the importance of the sociology of knowledge (Ladner 1973), white sociology declared the subfield “nearly dead” (Curtis and Petras 1972). By the 1990s, the sociology of knowledge was a marginalized subfield, as evidenced by the observation that the majority of textbooks published between 1995 and 1997 did not “mention knowledge” and “ignor[ed] the social process” of constructing knowledge, and other scholars were calling for a “new sociology of knowledge” (Garrison 1999; Swidler and Arditi 1994). However, as Garrison (1999) argued, being ignorant of the “social sources of knowledge” reduces our ability to understand our social world. Instead, understanding the social processes of knowledge empowers our understanding of the social world, encourages the practice of self-reflexivity, and begins to make visible the “epistemological diversity of the world” (Collins 2000; de Sousa Santos et al. 2007). The more we recognize the diversity of knowledges within our social world, the less likely we are to follow “ethnocentric tendencies” (de Sousa Santos et al. 2007).
Even further, using a sociology of knowledge approach, it is necessary to challenge the discipline’s possessive investment in the white collective memory of sociology. The discipline must empower our historical consciousness of how the racialized structure of white supremacy excluded scholars of color and subjugated knowledges of race, as well as remember the excluded knowers and subjugated knowledges of race in our curricula, our research practices and our citations. Irwin-Zarecka (1994) identifies this as a “memory project” that reclaims “the past . . . [and] . . . the power to define it” (p. 133). For example, remembering, and incorporating into the curricula, the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, including the researchers and the research program produced there, the history of the Black Women’s Club movement and the club members’ use of sociological research to produce “community reforms,” as well as the theoretical concepts of intersectionality and methodological practices of triangulation (Collins 2007; Wilson 2006; Wright 2002a, 2005, 2009, 2012).
In addition to making the racialized history of the discipline visible, it is necessary to make visible the racialized paradigms of white sociology and Black sociology. Lipsitz (1998) argued that “whiteness almost always comes to possess white people themselves unless they develop anti-racist identities, unless they disinvest and divest themselves of their investment in white supremacy” (p. x). With that said, sociologists need to evaluate, and make clear, their own paradigmatic approach to doing sociology. Scholars have previously noted, sociology of sociology research should continue to explore the ways in which white supremacy structures how we do sociology, including making visible how we reproduce white sociology in the classroom (Bhambra 2014a, 2014b; Margolis and Romero 1998; Wyse 2014).
Is the possessive investment in white sociology global? Colonial? Imperial? Can we see evidence of this? Du Bois did. Cox did. Wells-Barnett did. Anzaldua did. Said did. Cox did. Bush did. Steinberg does. Go does. Mignolo does. Stanfield does. Cazenave does. Collins does. Jung does. De Sousa Santos does. As such, sociology’s racialized production of knowledge should be placed with the global politics of knowledge in order to contextualize white sociology as part of the “coloniality of knowledge” (Bhambra 2014a; de Sousa Santos et al. 2007). By empowering our understanding of the discipline’s racialized history, we also empower the decolonization of our sociological imaginations. As Hordge-Freeman, Mayorga, and Bonilla-Silva (2011) wrote, it is imperative that we decolonize our sociological imaginations in order to “unlearn received truths about race, race relations, race research, and even ourselves and our own potential” (p. 115).
When we contextualize “what happened” in our space, then we can move forward. Certainly Sociology of Race and Ethnicity provides a space where there is much decolonial work being done, but there can be much more. Here is a very simple but powerful suggestion: the next project you start, do not start with the most cited, most engaged with, most validated scholarship; start with scholarship from journals that support explicitly the work of nonwhite intellectual activists and subordinated knowledges.