Race Relations
Race Relations
The term race relations entered the sociological lexicon through Robert Ezra Park (1864–1944), who pioneered the study of race at the University of Chicago. Before becoming a professor in 1914 at the age of forty-nine, Park did a stint as a reporter and then worked for eight years as publicist and ghostwriter for Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), the founder of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, whose mission was to provide blacks with “industrial education.” Washington, of course, is famous as the apostle of self-help and racial accommodation. He was catapulted to national prominence in 1895 with his speech at the Atlanta Exposition exhorting blacks to forego politics and to pursue education and manual labor. His core assumption was that once blacks demonstrated that they were deserving of full rights of citizenship, better race relations would ensue. This raises the tantalizing question: To what extent was Park, as he entered the nascent field of sociology, the purveyor of ideological tenets associated with Washington’s uplift ideology?
Park was also heavily influenced by the evolutionary theories prevalent at the turn of the century when he studied social philosophy at Harvard and in Germany. Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), the English philosopher and political theorist, applied Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) theory of evolution to the social order, arguing that history progressed through a series of stages from lower to higher levels of development. Park, in turn, applied Spencer’s theory to the domain of race, and expounded a theory that “in the relations of races there is a cycle of events which tends everywhere to repeat itself” (1950, p.150).
According to Park’s famous formulation, the race relations cycle has four distinct phases. It begins with contact when different races come together through migration or conquest. This leads to conflict as the rival groups compete for supremacy. During the third stage, accommodation, the weaker group resigns itself to its subordination, and a racial etiquette is established that maintains social distance between the races. The final stage of the race relations cycle is assimilation, which involves the gradual but inexorable absorption of the subordinate group into the dominant group, culturally and biologically. Thus, according to Park, new races are formed out of “the broken fragments” of different racial groups, and the race relations cycle provides the impetus of human evolution.
Park applied the race relations cycle both to people of color and to “the races” of Europe who were flocking to Chicago and other American cities at the time he wrote. Park’s race relations model had a sanguine political subtext: it rebuffed the nativist claim that the new immigrants were “unassimilable,” and provided reassurance that the intermingling of the peoples of the world was the stuff of human evolution. As Park wrote in Race and Culture : “Every society, every nation, and every civilization has been a kind of melting pot and has thus contributed to the intermingling of races by which new races and new cultures eventually emerge” (1950, p.192).
Park acknowledged that the race relations model did not proceed as rapidly or completely when it came to people of color. Even so, he clung to his evolutionary optimism that the assimilation process eventually would run its course, and like Washington, he emphasized the great progress that blacks had made during the half-century after slavery. Park also shared Spencer’s view that attempts to influence the flux of history were in vain. He was contemptuous of social reformers, and exhorted social scientists to observe an Olympian distance from the world of politics. Thus, Park’s race relations model gave theoretical exposition and scientific legitimacy to Booker T. Washington’s politics of accommodation. As Charles U. Smith and Lewis Killian observed, Park “constructed a theory of assimilation which paralleled Washington’s program in its major premises of accommodation and assimilation, realism and optimism” (1974, p. 200).
Park’s race relations model emerged as the reigning paradigm in the social sciences, both in the United States and Britain (Banton 1967; Rex 1983). The hallmark of this paradigm was to normalize and naturalize race and racial inequality, and to remove them from the political realm. Even black demands for full civil rights remained off the radar screen of mainstream social science. In a trenchant analysis of the social science literature on race, Stanford Lyman shows how leading sociological theorists from Park to Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) to Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) avoided the issue of civil rights. Instead, they advanced teleological models that projected racial improvement as part of an evolutionary process of societal change. “Since the time for teleological redemption is ever long,” Lyman writes sardonically, “blacks might consign their civil and equalitarian future to faith in the ultimate fulfillment of the inclusion cycle’s promise” (1993, p. 394). Lyman concludes with an indictment of the entire discipline: “Sociology, in this respect, has been part of the problem and not part of the solution” (1993, p. 397).
The race relations paradigm had enormous implications for praxis as well as for theory. Social scientists of all disciplinary stripes were cast into the role of managers of the troubled and fractured “relations” between the races (Steinberg 2001). The root cause of racial conflict was seen as prejudice: the distorted, derogatory, and often malicious beliefs that placed a stigma of inferiority onto blacks and led to their discriminatory treatment. Sociologists over many decades have charted historical trends in the prevalence and distribution of prejudiced beliefs. Other practitioners in “the race relations industry,” as it came to be called, engaged in projects of education and social work, designed to bridge the racial chasm and to forge better, more tolerant and harmonious “relations” between the races (Killian 1979; McKee 1993). According to critics, the fatal problem with this otherwise innocuous approach was that it elided those structures of oppression that enforced black subordination: Jim Crow laws in the South, racial apartheid in jobs and housing in the North, and structured inequalities along racial lines that pervaded all major societal institutions.
Nor was criticism of the University of Chicago’s race relations model only a matter of hindsight. There were some contemporaneous critics, though they were mostly black or Marxist, and therefore could be easily marginalized. Throughout his long career as both scholar and activist, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) treated racism not as an individual anomaly but as a feature of major political and economic institutions. In 1909 Du Bois was a principal founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whose main purpose was to secure full rights of citizenship for blacks. Oliver Cox (1901–1974), another black Marxist, directly challenged Park’s “new orthodoxy” on race relations, arguing that Park’s “teleological approach has diverted him from an examination of specific causal events in the development of modern race antagonism” (1948, p. 476). For Cox, race prejudice was merely “the social-attitudinal concomitant of the racial-exploitative practice of a ruling class in a capitalist society” (1948, p. 476). That both Du Bois and Cox were beleaguered and ostracized within the sociological profession, and their work dismissed as “propaganda,” underscores the intellectual hegemony of the Chicago School of race relations (Deegan 2000, p. 284).
Just as the Chicago School studiously ignored power “from above,” it was oblivious to the possibility of revolt “from below.” All of this changed with the eruption of black insurgency, beginning with the Birmingham, Alabama, boycott in 1955 and culminating with the passage of landmark civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. The ensuing societal crisis threw into question the prevailing paradigm on race. A pivotal moment occurred at the 1963 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association when Everett Hughes (1897–1983), a student of Robert Park, delivered his presidential address in which he pondered the reasons that sociology had failed to anticipate the civil rights revolution (McKee 1993, p. 9). Here was a rare admission of intellectual failure and an unmistakable sign of paradigm crisis. Indeed, with the intensification of racial conflict beginning with the Watts revolt in Los Angeles in 1965 and the escalating black militancy during the 1970s, events demonstrated the utter failure of the race relations paradigm to shed light on the forces that were tearing American society apart. The time was ripe for paradigm change.
TOWARD A NEW PARADIGM
The civil rights revolution engendered a “scholarship of confrontation” that emphasized the centrality of race and racism, and incorporated minority and radical voices that had long been relegated to the fringes (Steinberg 1995). The most important revision to the race relations paradigm came from a book that was a collaboration between Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998), a frontline activist, and Charles V. Hamilton, a political scientist at Lincoln University. In Black Power (1967), Carmichael and Hamilton posited a distinction between “individual racism” and “institutional racism,” the latter referring to the ways in which racism is not necessarily predicated on racist motives but rather embedded in routine institutional practices that reproduce racial inequalities. The concept of institutionalized racism provided a crucial theoretical underpinning for affirmative action policy, which succeeded in integrating significant numbers of blacks into blue-collar industries, corporate management, and the professions (Collins 1983; Darity and Myers 1998).
In another landmark study, Racial Oppression in America (1972), Bob Blauner gave theoretical exposition to ideas that emanated from the anticolonial movements in the third world. Even his title, Racial Oppression, implicitly challenged the obfuscating terminology of the “race relations” model. Blauner also drew a sharp distinction between “immigrant” and “colonized” minorities— the latter referring to people of color who did not arrive as voluntary immigrants seeking a better life, but who entered American society en masse, as the result of conquest or slavery. These “colonized minorities” were not only exposed to more virulent prejudice, but were also denied the rights and opportunities that delivered immigrants from poverty.
Recent scholarship is marked by two opposing schools of thought. On the one hand, there has been a “scholarship of backlash” that contends that racism is of declining significance, and restores the victim-blaming discourses that anteceded the civil rights revolution (Wilson 1978; D’Souza 1995; Thernstrom and Thernstrom 1997). In the tradition of Washington and Park, these theorists see racial progress as contingent upon blacks acquiring the education and skills that explain the relative success of the black middle class. The flip side of this proposition is that the sources of persistent inequalities are located not in societal structures but in putative defects of black families, communities, and culture. Institutionalized racism is either ignored or defined out of existence.
On the other hand, there is a rival discourse that builds on “the scholarship of confrontation” associated with the civil rights movement, and posits “colorblind racism” as the central concept for both theory and praxis (Bonilla-Silva 2006; Brown et al. 2003; Feagin 2006). According to these writers, despite progress on some fronts, we are far from the colorblind society that Martin Luther King (1929–1968) envisioned in his 1963 “I Have a Dream” oration. Indeed, the claim of colorblindness has been used as a smokescreen to conceal the retreat from the affirmative action and other antiracist policies that account for much of the success during the post–civil rights era.
This intellectual contestation is indicative of an ongoing struggle for intellectual hegemony between rival paradigms. The outcome may well determine whether sociology will continue to be part of the problem, as Stanford Lyman has alleged, or whether it will be part of the solution.
SEE ALSO Park School, The; Park, Robert E.; Race; Race and Education; Race Relations Cycle; Racism
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Smith, Charles U., and Lewis M. Killian. 1974. Black Sociologists and Social Protest. In Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, eds. James E. Blackwell and Morris Janowitz, 191–230. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Steinberg, Stephen. 1995. Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy. Boston: Beacon.
Steinberg, Stephen. 2001. “Race Relations”: The Problem with the Wrong Name. New Politics 8 (2) (new series), whole no. 30. http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue30/steinb30.htm.
Thernstrom, Stephen, and Abigail Thernstrom. 1997. America in Black and White. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Wilson, William Julius. 1978. The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stephen Steinberg