Julian Go: We see how Du Bois laboriously built his Atlanta School but how he faced countless difficulties stemming from limited funding and institutional help. And we see how he was repeatedly set aside due to claims that, as a black man, his sociology was taken by the powers-that-be to be “biased” (while work by Myrdal, for example, was presumed to not be biased despite the fact that Myrdal was white).
One instance of this suppression of heterodoxy is especially worth noting. When Du Bois argued that his findings proved that black people were not inferior, the US Department of Labor refused to publish his work and even destroyed the manuscript report on the grounds that it “touched on political matters.” All the while, when Park at Chicago or Giddings at Columbia proclaimed the inferiority of the “savage races”, their views were taken to be not political. They were taken to be objective, while the views of Du Bois were not. Institutional racism here took the form of claims to objectivity and science – and both functioned to suppress heterodoxic social theory.
The story told by Morris is tragic. But, on the other hand, it should not be entirely surprising. After all, sociology, as it has come to us through the Chicago School, Columbia University and other major white institutions was founded as a project of and for power. It emerged in the nineteenth century as an intellectual formation meant to manage disorder from below: to stave off the threats to social order and coherence posed by recalcitrant workers, immigrants, women, and native.
Let us not forget: the earliest use of the term “sociology” in the title of a book in the United States came from George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes, who used it as part of their intellectual effort to vindicate the slave system in the American South. And later in the nineteenth century, as sociological ideas conjoined with scientific racism, and as sociology began to be institutionalized at Chicago or Columbia, sociology’s task become one of giving intellectual coherence to the fact of ongoing imperial domination, offering a putatively scientific justification for Anglo-Saxon rule over those whom sociologist Franklin Giddings and others referred to as the “savage hordes” and “inferior races” of the world. More here.