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SOCIAL STUDIES
I
n the great debate over nature versus nurture, there was no doubting which side had
the upper hand in 1900. The men who
founded and shaped anthropology, sociology
and economics as academic disciplines
believed in racial essentialism. The various
“races” of mankind, they believed, possessed
distinct, heritable characteristics and harboured
differing mental capacities. In this model, white
people of Anglo-Saxon stock stood at the top of
the evolutionary ladder, black people at the
bottom. The American statistician Walter Willcox argued that blacks were so far down the
Darwinian scale that they would literally die
out. Sir Francis Galton, the inventor of intelligence tests, proposed a science of “eugenics” to
further improve the already superior white race.
Even Franz Boas, a Columbia University
anthropologist who challenged the more absurd
claims of scientific racism, believed that black
people had smaller skulls, placing them at a
mental disadvantage.
Only one social scientist, argues Aldon D.
Morris in The Scholar Denied, challenged this
and proclaimed what is nowadays a given: that
“race” is the product of history and culture, not
biology. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
(1868–1963) is best known as the author of The
Souls of Black Folk (1903) and a lifelong champion of racial equality. A brilliant polymath and
crusading editor and activist, Du Bois was also
a prolific sociologist. His empirical studies of
black Americans were the first and best of their
kind. In The Philadelphia Negro (1899), Du
Bois, influenced by Charles Booth’s studies of
Racing ahead
In praise of the ‘master of sociological thought’
ADAM FAIRCLOUGH
Aldon D. Morris
THE SCHOLAR DENIED
W. E. B. Du Bois and the birth of modern sociology
320pp. University of California Press. £19.95
(US $29.95).
978 0 520 27635 2
the London poor, pioneered the community survey as a research technique. Between 1897 and
1910, as a professor at Atlanta University, he
organized annual conferences on black life,
produced a dozen books, and nurtured young
black sociologists such as Monroe Work,
George E. Haynes and Richard R. Wright, Jr.
Yet as sociology achieved respectability and
influence in the universities, its white gatekeepers barely acknowledged their debt to Du
Bois and his “Atlanta school”. Morris, an African American who grew up poor in Mississippi,
was astonished that none of the white professors
he encountered at university considered Du
Bois worthy of attention. As Professor Lewis
Coser told him, “Du Bois was not a master of
sociological thought”. What he meant was that
Du Bois didn’t spin grand theories in the manner of Emile Durkheim and Karl Mannheim.
In the long run, however, Du Bois’s commitment to empirical research proved more valuable than did the theorizing – often half-baked
and devoid of factual underpinning – of the
canonical masters. Du Bois believed that sociology could refute, through the use of data, the
assumption of innate black inferiority. In treating black people as fully-fledged human beings
rather than biological inferiors, he was forty
years ahead of the field. The study of American
race relations directed by the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and published as An American Dilemma (1944), rejected “scientific”
racism and embraced Du Bois’s sociology.
Morris makes a cogent case that Du Bois was,
indeed, “a master of sociological thought”.
Why, then, his neglect by the academic establishment? In one sense, says Morris, the explanation is simple. The movers and shakers of
sociology were white professors in Ivy League
universities. These institutions did not hire
black professors, even one as brilliant (he was
the first African American to gain a PhD at Harvard) and productive as Du Bois. Moreover, the
white professors who headed sociology depart-
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ments were academic empire-builders who
were prepared to undermine rival scholars,
especially when it came to competing for
research funds. Morris even argues that Robert
E. Park, the founder of the “Chicago school” of
sociology, plagiarized Du Bois.
The most compelling evidence for Du Bois’s
influence in the 1900s comes from that giant of
sociology, Max Weber. Weber and Du Bois
both studied at the University of Berlin, sharing
many of the same teachers, in the 1890s. In 1904
they met at a conference in St Louis and thereafter corresponded. Impressed by The Souls of
Black Folk, Weber turned to Du Bois for guidance on how to understand America’s race
question. Their exchange of views had a profound impact on Weber’s thinking. At the inaugural meeting of the German Sociological
Association in 1910, Weber challenged the
assertion that race was a “biological constancy”. The whole notion of “race”, Weber
countered, was false. “I am partly French, partly
German and as French surely somehow Celticly
inflected. Which of these races then . . . flowers
in me?” This was pure Du Bois.
Morris can sometimes be led astray by his
saeva indignatio. He castigates Booker T.
Washington as a kind of “Uncle Tom”, where
Jeff Norell’s biography of Washington, Up
From History (2009), depicts a more complex
reality. In the Du Bois–Washington conflict,
each man tried to undermine the other while
ostensibly cooperating. Washington proved to
be the better politician in the short term; Du Bois
the more influential in the long term.