As a sociologist who spent nearly a decade in a department of sociology before joining the Department of African American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley in 2014, I read The Scholar Denied: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology [Morris 2015] with great interest. The premise of Professor Morris’ book is that W.E.B. Du Bois, who published The Philadelphia Negro in 1899 while appointed as an assistant instructor at the University of Pennsylvania, is not merely a side note to sociological history, but rather that Du Bois’s rightful place in the lineage of the discipline is as a founding father of Modern Sociology. The Scholar Denied provides a powerful argument for how the study of race relations, the study of the so-called “Negro problem” and even the study of the city began not, as we are so often told, with Robert Park and “the Chicago school.” Rather, as Morris explains in lively and engaging prose, the foundation of so much of what we call sociology today was born in the late 19th century in the 7th Ward of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In The Scholar Denied, Morris makes the provocative claim that a corrective is needed in the discipline. The corrective Morris calls for would, in fact, require nothing less than a paradigm shift: it would call on those who study modern day versions of the Negro Problem, like urban poverty, inequality, mass incarceration, poor, black mothers––the list goes on––to begin their studies with the presumption––the radical presumption––that black people are human. That black people are not immutably inferior—culturally or otherwise—that they/we are neither “a problem” nor a curiosity in need of never-ending explanation. Beginning from this presumption would focus the attention of scholars not on black people (or the behaviors of black people) as a problem or the problem, but rather on the problems facing black people. When viewed from a Du Boisian perspective—a perspective rooted in the belief in the humanity of black people—the problems black people face include the forces of migration and immigration, the exclusion of black people from mainstream civic and economic life and the persistent problem facing black people then and now: the oppressive logics of whiteness and white supremacy, racism and anti-blackness.
As I read The Scholar Denied, I realized that I am one of the lucky ones. My formal training as a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, which began a century after the publication of The Philadelphia Negro, requires no such corrective. Instead, and in contrast to the training of most students enrolled in graduate programs in sociology at the turn of the 21st century, my sociological training and especially my training as an ethnographer was grounded in a Du Boisian perspective. I was introduced to Du Bois’ significance as a sociologist during graduate school in seminars led by Elijah Anderson, a preeminent urban ethnographer and race scholar. The reprinted edition included on Professor Anderson’s syllabi began with an introduction penned by Anderson in which he writes: “W.E.B. Du Bois is a founding father of American sociology, but, unfortunately, neither this masterpiece nor much of Du Bois’ work has been given proper recognition; in fact, it is possible to advance though a graduate program in sociology in this country without ever hearing about Du Bois.” He continues, “It is my hope that this reprint edition will help rectify a situation undoubtedly rooted in the racial relationships of the era in which the book was first published” [Anderson 1996: viiii]. While that edition, which was published in 1996, was not enough on its own to rectify the situation that Anderson describes above, it is clear that Morris’ book holds great potential to do so.
I was also one of the lucky ones because the important intellectual contribution of Du Bois was not just touted by one faculty member, but was reinforced in conversations with other faculty—other black faculty (there was more than one, which is important)—like Professor Camille Zubrinsky Charles, a highly regarded expert of race and residential segregation, and Professor Tukufu Zuberi, a critical race demographer and author of Thicker Than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie [2003] (and who in 2012 orchestrated the awarding of a posthumous honorary professorship to W.E.B Du Bois at the University of Pennsylvania). That small group of faculty nurtured the intellectual development of what felt like a critical mass of black graduate students. Because of our varied interests, my fellow students and I were, at times, the only black students in some of our classes. However, outside of those classrooms, we created a supportive community for our minds and our spirits as we came together to talk, study and sometimes argue about race and research. Among this group of faculty and graduate students there was no stigma, no apology and no justification needed for expressing an interest in producing work with some relationship, some commitment, some connection to racial justice and to, as Morris describes it, “understanding and transforming humanity.”
Liberation capital and insurgent intellectual networks
After reading Morris’ book, I can identify the investment of faculty in our introduction to Du Bois as a form of what Morris describes as “liberation capital.” Our collection of faculty and students operated as a contemporary form of the “insurgent intellectual network” that Morris identifies as crucial to the development of the Atlanta school of sociology. As Morris explains, such networks are “constructed by subaltern intellectuals who—because of empire, race, class, and/or gender discrimination, are denied access to elite intellectual networks […] because of this exclusion, these networks draw on liberation capital, using donated resources and volunteer labor of activists to develop and validate counterhegemonic ideas; provide previously untrained students and others with scholarly tools; create media designed to make this scholarship visible to both scholars and consumers of these ideas (one might imagine such media as an early version of black Twitter); and seize opportunities to challenge and replace dominant paradigms” [Morris 2015: 193].
In contrast to the constraints that systematically excluded Du Bois from elite institutions and networks, our network of faculty and graduate students operated within in an elite, Ivy League institution—the kind of institution that Du Bois was excluded from during his day. As graduate students at an elite university, we had access to institutional resources and connections to elite intellectual networks. However, there were certainly times—as graduate students and now as faculty—when we were confronted with another kind of deficit––what Elijah Anderson describes as a “deficit of credibility.” It is a deficit that Du Bois faced in his time and it is a deficit that lingers in what Anderson describes today as “white space”: “overwhelmingly white” settings, from coffee shops to the academy, where black people hold “a perpetually provisional status” [Anderson Reference Anderson2015: 10; Anderson Reference Anderson2012: 12]. In such spaces, Anderson argues, it is black people who carry the burden of proving to whites (and, at times, middle-class blacks as well) that they belong—that they are competent at their jobs, are not a threat and are generally law-abiding citizens (ibid.). It is this deficit of credibility that confronts black graduate students who are warned against studying the places from which they come. These warnings against conducting “me-search instead of research,” as one graduate student of color described it to me, is reminiscent of Du Bois’ conclusion that he and his Atlanta school were deliberately dismissed and excluded from elite intellectual networks because they were viewed by elite whites as, in Du Bois’ words “merely Negroes studying Negroes” (this is but one of the many provocative quotes unearthed by Morris).
Such dismissals are not historical outliers, as Morris explains in The Scholar Denied. Rather, they are embedded in the discipline’s intellectual legacy and, as such, continue to shape the discipline in key ways: “History teaches that American social science has fallen short of functioning as a democratic institution where intellectual merit would be the criterion required for scholars to enter the gates and enrich the stock of knowledge. The ugly realities of racism, sexism and class bias have infiltrated American social science and stunted its growth.” Morris’ point on how “racism, sexism and class bias” has stunted the growth of the discipline cannot be understated.
Ignorance masquerading as knowledge
The Scholar Denied is packed with revealing historical details, yet it is more than an academic argument that Morris provides here. There are sections of the book that are particularly moving. There was one moment that I found especially so, a description that brought to life the inherent and enduring flaws in my disciplinary home––flaws that continue to shape how and what we know to be true. This description appears in the book’s fifth chapter, a chapter that provides a dramatic rendering of the relationship between Robert Park and W.E.B. Du Bois, in a section where Morris describes Du Bois as “the preeminent public sociologist” [Morris 2015: 133]. Here, we see how Du Bois’ marginality shaped his sociological work and the formation of concepts that continue to have relevance today (and from which other white social scientists borrowed from over time). Morris writes: “Du Bois inhabited a different world from white social scientists; he was often the victim of racism, and he abhorred the pain it inflicted on him personally and on his race. Speaking of a horrific lynching, after which he saw the victim’s knuckles on display in the window of a local grocer, Du Bois wrote: ‘One could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved’” [Morris 2015: 134]. By placing Du Bois’ work so vividly in a distinct racial moment, Morris helps to highlight the origin (or the standpoint) from which Du Bois’ “twoness” emerges. This excerpt highlights what was at stake for Du Bois, his writing and his research—not merely a career as a sociologist, but a commitment to producing scholarship that could liberate black people and white people from one of the most barbaric moments in US history.
Such a revelation also highlights a contradiction: at a time when white Americans lynched black people and displayed the knuckles of dead men in the store windows of their town’s main drag, it was black people that Science with a capital S had written off as inferior––not only as inherently violent, but also as somehow deserving of the violence that fell upon their bodies. This ignorance masquerading as knowledge is revealed in Morris’ account of the rise of Robert Park who, as Morris shows, used his proximity to “the Negro” during his years as a ghostwriter for Booker T. Washington to bolster his legitimacy as an expert on the Negro after joining the faculty at the University of Chicago. Park’s claim to be a legitimate expert is summed up in Park’s assertion that during his time at Tuskegee: “I became for all intents and purposes, for the time, a Negro myself” [Morris 2015: 125]. These types of claims on legitimacy continue to inform the politics of inclusion and exclusion from elite intellectual networks today.
It is in such moments in the book that Morris reveals how deeply modern sociology is influenced by early assumptions of black inferiority. Yet, this book is not merely a historical account. The Scholar Denied compels social scientists to consider how excluding certain stories, groups of people and the perspectives they bring to the study of a range of social problems continues to hinder our understanding of the most basic sociological phenomena; in doing so, this patterned exclusion continues to stunt the growth of the discipline. Along this line, Morris ends the book with a provocative question: “To what extent do progressive white scholars of today unwittingly interject racist biases in their science even while believing they stand above prescientific racial assumptions?” Morris continues, “The findings here suggest that contemporary white scholars should engage their highest levels of reflexivity to expunge deep-seated racial biases from their work that are embedded in American culture and social institutions.” The legacy of bias belongs to all who receive traditional training in sociology, including non-white scholars, who, Morris warns, must also be aware of how “racist assumptions enter their work, because racially biased scholarship that all scholars draw upon has permeated academia historically and has not been eradicated from the modern academy” [Morris 2015: 221].
The Scholar Denied is a provocative and potentially transformative book. Morris provides insights that shed new light on Du Bois’ training in Germany, his relationship to Weber, the relationship between Park and Booker T. Washington and, in turn, the rise of the Chicago School. There is, however, one place where I was not entirely convinced of the magnitude of Du Bois’ contribution as described by Professor Morris: Du Bois’ contribution to intersectionality. Here, Morris encourages us to consider Du Bois as something of a founder of intersectionality. Morris writes: “Race, class and gender have become central to a sociological approach seeking to understand social stratification in the contemporary world by explicating the interaction among these systems of oppression and showing how they are mutually reinforcing. This approach to stratification has come to be known as the theory of intersectionality. While it has developed over the last three decades, its intellectual roots are to be found in Du Bois’ work nearly a century ago” [Morris 2015: 220].
Morris makes a convincing case that Du Bois was indeed ahead of his time in his collaboration with women and also his description of the distinct predicament of women. It should be noted that in the early part of his career Du Bois was writing at a time when women were denied the right to vote. Like Du Bois, women were largely excluded from intellectual life and subject to forms of oppression that systematically devalued their work. So, while Du Bois recognized women as allies in oppression—a challenge that still faces feminists today—we cannot forget that there is a reason that The Scholar Denied is about reconsidering Du Bois’ place among the founding fathers of American sociology and the elite white men of his time.
Intersectionality is about more than the interrelationship among variables, as it has been reduced to in some parts of academia today. Intersectionality is rooted in black feminist thought, including thought that emerged in places far outside of elite intellectual networks. Du Bois’ insights about the “uplift of women” no doubt emerged, in part, from his exposure to the local knowledge of black women that he met during his career. This connection to black feminist thought reminds us that intersectionality is about more than recognizing the intersection of systems of oppression. The theoretical foundation of intersectionality places value on local knowledge, embraces emotion and reflects an ethic of care, the latter often standing in tension with a traditional commitment to Science with a capital S [Collins Reference Collins2000]. Certainly, elements of black feminist thought are reflected in Du Bois’ work, but I am not quite convinced that he ought to be crowned the father of intersectionality.
Still, The Scholar Denied will take a place in my library and on my syllabi as one of the most important contributions not only to the discipline, but also to my own sociological practice. As we look out at what is happening in the US today—pictures of lynching have been replaced with pocket-sized videos of the police killings of black people; generations of poor, Black people are mired in poverty; and millions of Black people are under some form of penal control, from jails, to prisons, to community corrections, as it is now called—it is clear that a need for a Du Boisian sociology remains. The Scholar Denied provides a clear definition of what that means. In doing so, Morris not only rights the record, but he also provides a work that will inspire and even embolden a new generation of sociologists to practice a sociology that can bring us closer to the ideas of equality, liberation and justice that were so fundamental to Du Bois’s work.
