The Place of Race in Disciplinary History

Though I suggest with many others that from the second through the sixth decade of the 20th century, political science's treatment of race largely conformed to Ralph Ellison's sense of himself as an “invisible man,” that was never exclusively the case, and in the discipline's beginnings it was not primarily the case. One can debate how deeply racist the American profession of political science was at its inception, but no one can deny that there was a great deal of explicit racism in the writings of many of its key figures. Race, in the form of Darwinist evolutionary accounts of racial struggles, along with histories of constitutional liberty as the achievement of bearers of the “Teutonic germ,” comprised a central theme of many of the new late 19th century Ph.D. programs. These include the pioneering graduate program in history and political science that Herbert Baxter Adams created at Johns Hopkins, where he taught Woodrow Wilson; the similar program at Harvard in which Henry Adams and then A. Lawrence Lowell taught, a program which trained an early Ph.D. in history and political science, Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr.; and the programs combining political science, constitutional law, and history that John Burgess and William A. Dunning shaped at Columbia, in which Theodore Roosevelt studied (Klinkner with Smith 1997, 95–97, 102). Through these figures racial themes were carried forward into academic political science, as in Wilson's works at Princeton and those of many of the political scientists trained at Harvard and Columbia. These racial views also greatly affected American public policy, as when Wilson championed segregation, Lodge proposed racebased immigration restrictions, and Roosevelt eventually came to support extensive though not complete black disfranchisement. To get a sense of what I mean by the explicit racism of much of this political science scholarship, consider Burgess's leading work: “… the Teutonic nations … are called to carry the political civilization of the modern world into those parts of the world inhabited by unpolitical and barbaric races” (1890, 45). Similarly, here is Woodrow Wilson in repeated editions of his textbook The State: “In order to trace the lineage of … those stronger and nobler races which have made the most notable progress in civilization, it is essential to know the political history of the Greeks, the Latins, the Teutons, and the Celts principally, if not only, and the original political habits and ideas of the Aryan and Semitic races alone” (1898, 2).

Racial conceptions are overt here, and they played a significant role in defining what these and other early American political scientists studied and, even more, did not study. Similarly, Robert Vitalis argues that the field of International Relations, inside and outside the discipline of political science, began chiefly as the study of the problems of imperial governance of “lower” races by “higher” ones, as well as conflicts among imperial powers. He notes that the country's first IR journal was originally entitled The Journal of Race Development. The lead article of its first issue in 1910 argued that the U.S. had “as fundamental an interest in races of a less developed civilization as have the powers of Europe” since, after all, the “key to the past seventy-five years of American history is the continuing struggle to find some solution for the negro problem—a problem still unsolved” (Vitalis 2002, 12).

James Farr's contribution to this symposium provides further evidence of this initial disciplinary racism and plausibly links it to the discipline's close connection to a history profession reaching out to the white South. Still, let me concede again that one can dispute how dominant these racial themes were in early political science: Wilson, for example, invoked racial concepts at the outset of his book and used them to decide on its topics, but rarely referred to them thereafter. As Farr notes, we also cannot judge how many political scientists agreed with the anti-black voting presentations at early conferences. The Journal of Race Development, moreover, bore that now-startling name for only nine years. It became The Journal of International Relations in 1919 and then in 1922 assumed its current stately title, Foreign Affairs (Vitalis 2002, 13). The questions of just how pervasively racist the discipline was at its outset, and what consequences its teachings had for American life, are ones that need further exploration. The fact that we do not have more discussions of those issues is due to the other main pattern in the discipline's treatment of race that was visible even in these early years and became dominant from perhaps 1920 on. That pattern is a neglect which may not have been consciously malignant but which is hard to call benign.

Though that very pattern means that many political scientists may still not be aware that our discipline largely ignored racial topics for a long time, much more than the other social sciences did, at this point many scholars have documented that silence. In 1969, Donald Matthews found that from 1906 to 1963, only 13 articles in the American Political Science Review contained the words “Negro,” “civil rights,” or “race” (1969, 113). In 1995, Hanes Walton Jr., Cheryl M. Miller, and Joseph P. McCormick II found that from 1906 to 1990, only about 2% of the over 6,000 articles published up to then in the APSR and Political Science Quarterly addressed the experiences of African Americans, and only three of the 79 APSA presidential addresses up to that time mentioned the words “Negro,” “black,” or “African-American.” They argued, furthermore, that nearly two-thirds of the articles fell into what they termed a tradition of “race relations politics,” concerned ultimately with how the “Negro” or “black problem” could be managed to the benefit of whites. A much smaller number embodied what they termed an “African-American politics tradition,” concerned with black experiences, perspectives, and empowerment (Walton, Miller, and McCormick II 1995, 52–53). In 1993, Paula McClain and John A. Garcia noted that the study of Latino politics in the profession is essentially a post-1970 phenomenon, and that from 1964 to 1988 the APSR and the American Journal of Political Science published no articles focused on the topic and the Journal of Politics published only one. What was then the Western Political Quarterly did better, publishing nine such articles, aided by the Western Political Science Association's “Best Paper in Chicano Politics” award, created in 1975. They found research on American Indians and Asian Americans to be even more limited and, in the latter case, more recent (McClain and Garcia 1993, 257, 265–67). Their article, not so incidentally, appeared in the second volume of the APSA's State of the Discipline series. The first volume, published in 1983, had no article on racial minority politics. Furthermore, Rupert Taylor (1996, 891–892) analyzed the APSR, the AJPS, World Politics, Comparative Politics, and the British Journal of Political Science from 1984 to 1993 and found that only 1.5% of their articles explicitly addressed topics of “race” or “ethnicity.”

To be sure, race-related scholarship was not totally absent from 1920 up through 1970, particularly in studies of black politics by black political scientists. A decade ago, McClain and Garcia (1993, 248–255) perceived four generations of scholarship on black politics, beginning with the work of the first African-American Ph.D. in political science, Ralph Bunche, as well as William F. Nowlin's The Negro in American National Politics (1931). McClain and Garcia and many others have especially and appropriately stressed the mid-1930s work of the first “mainstream” white political scientist to pay attention to black politics, Chicago's Harold Gosnell, who published an APSR article on black politics in Chicago in 1934 and followed it up with a landmark 1935 work, Negro Politicians. That book included an introduction by sociologist Robert Park, the influential leader of the “Chicago school” of racial and ethnic studies in the 1920s, and it cited Park's rather condescending concern to explore whether blacks could “rise from a lower to that higher cultural level … which is the standard in the modern world” (Gosnell 1935, 11). Yet, Gosnell actually took black political leaders and voters more seriously in an account that viewed their political decisions as eminently reasonable. But Gosnell's study had few immediate successors, at least in white “mainstream” political science, until James Q. Wilson's Negro Politics (1960).¹

These authors have made a wholly persuasive case that, along with and especially after the heyday of the early explicitly racist political science, the “mainstream” of the discipline gave race little direct attention for a long time. In a widely quoted comment, Ralph Bunche suggested further in 1941 that political science was unusual in this regard, that “Anthropologists deal with the Negro as a respectable topic … In respect to my own field … there isn't a very cordial reception for papers dealing with the Negro” (Holden 1973, 34). On this question of the comparative inattentiveness of political science to race, there is less systematic evidence, but Ernest Wilson (1985) and Michael Dawson and Wilson (1991), among others, have argued forcefully that the relative lack of receptivity Bunche perceived has long been the case and probably remains so. It is easy to recall widely read scholarship on race by historians such as C. Vann Woodward and Eugene Genovese, sociologists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and William Julius Wilson, anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, even a Swedish economist named Gunnar Myrdal. Probably the best known work on race by a political scientist is Charles Murray's The Bell Curve (1994), a book that is recent, co-authored with a psychologist, and perhaps better described as notorious than renowned.

Dawson and Wilson suggested more than a decade ago, moreover, that there remained two “communities of discourse” about race in the profession, with black and white scholars, despite internal differences, displaying contrasting central tendencies in their references, methods, evaluations, and senses of purpose in their scholarship (1991, 223–226). Much of the attention given to race by black political scientists since Bunche has therefore never penetrated into “mainstream” political science dominated by white scholars. It is not clear if the political science profession (with its predominately black National Political Science Review as counterpart to the American Political Science Review) is more internally segregated than other disciplines, and it is not clear how deeply this pattern persists today. Again, these are things we need to examine. My hunches are that despite progress, this disciplinary segregation is real and remains especially true of our discipline, as Dawson and Wilson argued (228).

Even so, things have clearly changed dramatically in the past decade and a half, with a proliferation of race-related scholarship so massive that I shall not try to summarize it here. Suffice to say that race has become a concern in studies of voting behavior, legislative behavior, public opinion, history of political ideas, executive, administrative, public policy and judicial studies, urban studies, and much more in ways that were unknown a generation ago. But why was it not so all along?

Explaining the Patterns

The profession's early explicitly racist themes require no explanation: those were dominant ways of thinking in all of America's emerging late 19th century intellectual disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, and history as well as psychology, biology, medicine, law, and many more. The puzzle is the ensuing disregard of racial topics in a country that was seeing the spread of Jim Crow segregation, race-based immigration restrictions, legislative battles over anti-lynching and civil rights bills, court cases dealing with racial voting and jury exclusions, the growth of a huge separatist movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, in the 1920s, followed by the growth of the older NAACP into a mass-based organization, the formation of racially exclusive black labor and then protest movements, and so much more.

The answer cannot be simply that political science long remained a racist profession. That would not by itself account for inattention to race—remember John Burgess—nor would it explain why political science should be more racist than other disciplines. By the same token, although political science treatments of race have undoubtedly been shaped by external political forces and worldviews, as writers like Mack Jones (1992) and Walton, Miller, and McCormick (1995, 147–49) have argued, that reality alone cannot account for our discipline's distinctiveness. Presumably similar forces have also shaped American sociology, history, and anthropology.

Wilson and Dawson have canvassed possible reasons for these patterns most extensively. In 1985, Wilson suggested that political science's distinctiveness might stem from the fact that political science has traditionally focused on governing institutions, the elites who inhabit them, and others, such as voters, who formally participate in the selection of such elites. Since historically most American blacks were neither elites nor voters, most political scientists ignored them. Disciplines like sociology and anthropology, in contrast, have long been more “bottom-up” rather than “top-down” in their interests. History has always been that way to some extent and has become more so over time. These disciplines are correspondingly more concerned with the lives of ordinary people living under highly constrained conditions, with the emergence of new forms of mobilization and group identities, and with informal institutions and practices (1985, 603–604). Dawson and Wilson added that the segregation within the discipline may reflect the facts that blacks experience race in American society differently and more severely than most white scholars do; that many politically minded African Americans place a higher priority on improving the condition of blacks than on improving political science, in contrast to white scholars and to all scholars in less politically-centered disciplines; that many black political scientists also feel themselves pressured to be politically involved and do other pro bono activities more than most whites; that black political scientists have also been more often employed in teaching rather than research universities; and that as a result of all these factors, black political scientists long ago established their own publishing outlets and professional organizations, such as the National Conference of Black Political Scientists, making it more convenient to pursue separate if dubiously equal professional existences (1991, 224–225).

I see force in all of these arguments. My experiences with African-American colleagues and friends in the profession suggest, particularly, that many feel internally and externally prompted to define their scholarly careers more in terms of contributions to improving the condition of African Americans and other disadvantaged groups than in terms of recognition won within the “mainstream” of the political science profession. I admire those priorities, though I also very much regret the internal disciplinary segregation, and the related diminishing of scholarship in “mainstream” political science, that can accompany those choices. Dealing well with race in America remains very hard for all of us.

My main aim here, however, is to offer an additional argument for the comparative neglect of race in American political science through so much of its history, one that is not quite captured by noting that political science has tended to be “topdown,” focused on elites, governing institutions, and formal processes—for I believe those institutions and processes have mattered greatly for racial identities and statuses. My point concerns the way scholars have conceived of “race.”

Through most of modern intellectual history, most American writers have treated race either as essentially a biological category, a cultural/sociological category, or as both. Others have deemed it actually an economic category, mislabeled as “racial” so as to justify exploitation. And much recent scholarship depicts race as rooted specifically in social psychological tendencies to create and embrace senses of “us” v. “them” group identities. Until very recently, then, most scholars inside and outside political science believed “races” came from our genomes or economic systems or our historical and present social and cultural practices and the psychic needs they express—anywhere but from our formal politics. And scholars have also thought race mattered most in social and cultural contexts, though they have acknowledged that race has, some of the time, affected politics as an exogenously generated independent variable. Still, if race is thought to be fundamentally exogenous to politics, it makes sense to bring race into political analysis only on those occasions where it seems likely to help explain political behavior.

And when the race of most political actors is homogeneous, as seems to be true in governing institutions and formal electoral politics throughout most of U.S. history, then it can seem pointless to include race as an independent variable at all—there are no variations in it to correlate with variances in other dimensions of political life. Instead, the origins of race and, for the most part, the significance of racial experiences can seem properly to belong to other disciplines, to biological or cultural anthropology, to sociology, to social history and the arts and humanities, much more than to political science. In adopting such views, let me underline, I think political scientists have only embraced assumptions common across most American disciplines, in ways that did make race naturally seem a central concern in some professions but not our own.

It is also possible that many or all of the above conceptions of race are correct, and that it does not make sense to see race as something that is instead substantially created by politics, as much or more than as something exogenous that affects politics. But today, there is good reason to doubt that conclusion—though not because political scientists have on their own initiative moved to claim the construction of racial identities as a central concern in the study of politics. It is true that, when they looked abroad, American political scientists began in the early 1970s to recognize that “ethnic” and “tribal” identities might be “instrumental” political creations rather than “primordial” realities. Yet even so, many still treated ethnicity as an independent variable, not as a political product; and in any case American political scientists did not take the lead in applying these same insights to racial identities at home (Taylor 1996, 888–891).

Instead, challenges to older “extra-political” notions of race arose first within the disciplines that had long favored them. Biologists now doubt that the standard racial categorizations genuinely reflect meaningful divisions inherent in biological human genomes. Many anthropologists, sociologists, and some social psychologists also now fear that talking about racial categories in cultural or social psychological terms simply reintroduces a new kind of essentialism, and they stress instead that social psychological needs for senses of group identity and meaningful cultures can be met in many ways other than through racial concepts. Why and how racial concepts have been adopted therefore still need explaining. And though economics clearly matters greatly, in all likelihood few economists now believe that all racial categories can be explained simply as products of systems of economic domination or as wholly due to rational stereotyping designed to limit information costs in market decision-making.

So for anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, especially, issues of how racial identities arise have become more uncertain. And as they have sought answers, many, including the historian/sociologist team of Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994), the legal scholar Ian Haney-López (1996), the cultural historian Matthew Frye Jacobson (1998), and others, have encountered overtly political processes of race creation in American political history. These include the statutory elaborations of shifting racial classifications to determine the status of persons with differing amounts of European and African ancestry in the antebellum South and later the midwestern and southern Jim Crow states; the efforts of courts to make sense of the statutory requirement that all immigrants, including South and East Asians and Latin Americans, be judged as to whether they were “white” or not; and the often politically charged census categorizations that have always been used to justify different public policy approaches to different populations, among other means. Given their disciplinary origins, it is not surprising that the sociologists and social historians, particularly, have responded by popularizing talk of the “social construction” of race, and many of these scholars continue to suggest that race has been created fundamentally in various non-state, if nonetheless politically significant, social arenas. Yet they have provided ample evidence that, wherever they may have first been conceived, American racial identities have gained much of their practical reality from their institutionalization by political elites in laws, public policies, and governmental programs.

Political scientists today have begun to pursue this theme of race as a specifically political construction, even in regard to the United States. The work of scholars like Anthony Marx (1998) on race and war, Melissa Nobles (2000) on race and the census, and Dvora Yanow (2002) on race and public policies and administrative practices are examples. But this is a relatively new theme in political science. Many more political scientists still treat race as a product of social psychological forces, often invoking Henri Tajfel's account of prejudice, or as something that arises fundamentally from economics or rather unspecified processes of “social construction” (e.g., Brady and Kaplan 2000). The sense of race as politically created is one we are really only beginning to explore, in part because, I believe, we have accepted for too long the common assumptions that race is something that largely arises and exists outside politics and is therefore largely to be studied outside politics.

And why have we accepted these views, particularly about the racial identities in our own society, more than others? The answer may well lie in the reasons why American political institutions have constructed race as they have: we have institutionalized conceptions of race as something generated outside of politics, as something given and natural, precisely because those conceptions have helped make racial hierarchies and persistent inequalities seem less avoidable and more legitimate. In my own recent work, I argue that racial conceptions often operate as what I term “ethically constitutive” stories of political membership, conceptions that present belonging to a specific political community ordered in specific ways as both ethically valuable and as intrinsic to the core identities of the members. Such accounts are politically potent because they can sustain allegiance during eras when political communities are not providing substantial economic or power benefits to their constituents. But they work best in this regard if the identities are presented as given by god, nature, and/or history in ways that it seems foolish to question or try to alter (Smith 2003, 72–125). It is likely, then, that political scientists and other American scholars have thought of races as created beyond the bounds of politics precisely because those notions have best served to legitimate what were in fact always profoundly political constructions of status and identity.

And I would go further yet: I believe that once we begin to recognize that elite political actors, institutions, and public policies have not simply been reflecting, expressing, or “enacting” racial identities through much of U.S. history, but instead have been creating and transforming them, we will then begin to see much more fully how those actions have been profoundly bound up with many other things they were doing—with their divisions of power among national, state, and local levels, with their structuring of power in the congressional, executive, and judicial branches, with their construction of systems for defense and criminal justice, education and social assistance, and much more. I think we may find, in fact, that racial politics, understood in this broader sense of racial construction as well as in more traditional “independent variable” senses, has played and continues to play some role in virtually all the forms of politics that we study. And again, it seems likely that this will prove to be true not only in America but everywhere racial identities and statuses have been constructed.

Or perhaps not; but I believe that we in American political science have a special professional responsibility to see how far that is the case. For recall the history with which I began. If it is true that race has been a deeply political construction in the U.S., then it is likely that in its period of explicit racism, and perhaps as much or more in its long period of neglect of racial topics, our profession has contributed historically to the political construction of race in America as a vast system of unjust inequalities. Insofar as we have done so, then we in the profession of political science, not just as much but more than other Americans, have a rather profound duty today to do better.