|
|
|
Review
| The Social Sciences and Theories of Race, by Vernon J. Williams Jr. Urbana and Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 168 pages. $50.00, cloth. $25.00, paper.
|
| In recent decades, social scientists have abandoned biological conceptions of race and instead embraced the social construction of race; in other words, they have come to see categories such as "black" and "white" as cultural concepts created over time. As a result, understanding the historical development of conceptions about race has become even more important. In this book, Williams offers a collection of five essays, most of them previously published, that explore the thinking of five theorists of race, three of whom were African Americans and constituted what Williams terms "an oppositional yet fecund" African-American tradition "of resistance" within the social sciences. All five wrote during a crucial period in the history of the social sciences, the era of transition from the late-nineteenth century belief in scientific racism to the emergence of cultural relativism by the mid-twentieth. The book contains a general essay and an essay on each of his five intellectuals: Franz Boas, George Washington Ellis, Booker T. Washington, Ulysses G. Weatherly, and Monroe Nathan Work. The essay on Washington analyzes his increasingly romantic impressions of Africa. The essay on Weatherly, a white sociologist, concludes that he became at best a "chastened racialist" who clung to stereotypes of African Americans that helped shape American foreign policy in Latin America, on which Weatherly was considered an expert. Ellis, Williams shows, was an amateur anthropologist, troubled by the problems blacks experienced in the North after the Great Migration. He "preached a type of romantic racialism that stressed the inherent superiority of the Negro 'soul.'" |
1
|
|
The two best essays in the volume are those on Boas and Work. Williams traces Work's perspective to his roots in the African American church and shows how Work, and another sociologist, sought empirical data to challenge generalizations about African American inferiority. The essay on Boas is the longest in the book and analyzes the attitudes of Boas, the early twentieth-century anthropologist who was often credited with a crucial role in the development of cultural relativism and the retreat from scientific racism. Williams, who has published a book on Boas, shows how before 1915, Boas held to many of the tenets of scientific racism and abandoned those views more slowly and less completely than many have thought. When Boas's views did change, Williams argues, it was because of his own encounters with antisemitism and the impact of the changing role of African Americans in the North. One of Williams's most interesting contributions in this collection comes in encouraging historians to consider the importance of the Great Migration in changing the way American social scientists thought about race. |
2
|
|
In all five of the essays on individual thinkers, but especially that on Boas, Williams achieves his admirable goals of showing how these thinkers' views changed over time and how they made an important contribution to how society conceptualized race. Williams also seeks to show that "external social and political pressures and the ethnic origins of the social scientists themselves, as opposed to the internal methodological controls and intellectual rigor of the dominant practitioners of anthropology and sociology" (p. 4) shaped his subjects' scholarship and ultimately social science theories of race. Although he emphasizes external influences, he admits that a dialectic existed between external and internal factors, something that will come as no surprise to any historian familiar with Peter Novick's work on American historiography. Williams' essays do demonstrate the importance of external factors and of a resulting African-American tradition in reshaping concepts of race. Yet the essays also demonstrate the persistent power of the empirical norms of the professions on his theorists. Williams then concludes that "Boas and his disciples found themselves working within a tradition from which they could not fully extricate themselves. As a result, Boas and his students' responses to 'scientific racism' were compromised" (p. 125). This helps explain why variations on scientific racism still persist in American culture. Williams rejects racial essentialist arguments, be they offered by whites or blacks, and maintains that these ideas "have been effectively contradicted by the vast majority of competent social scientists' research." He interprets that as testimony to "the potency of activist scholarship within the academy" (p. 123). Specialists, and perhaps others who teach about changing conceptions of race, will find William's analysis of these social scientists interesting and his observation on how scholarship on race developed provocative. They may share these ideas with their classes, but it is hard to imagine that it would be wise to ask a class of high school students of even university undergraduates to read so nuanced and sophisticated a study of a handful of theorists as those found in this book. |
3
|
| | |
| Louisiana State University |
Gaines M. Foster |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|