A People’s Sociology: Toward A Holistic Understanding of Inclusive Diversity
By Bryan R. Ellis
This piece is a part of our Spark series: University Faculty Are Change Agents
I have taught at a historically black university, an all-female university, a community college, and a diverse but predominantly white university. Given each student population, I had to change my curriculum, style, and approach to be effective. Students are not devoid of social history and experience, so our teaching must relate to their individual lives and communities.
It is doubtful if a mainstream, middle-class education is beneficial to those who are poor, working class, and oppressed and exploited. The sociologist, Patricia Hill Collins (2009), said her traditional education left her silent. The 1993 Noble Prize laureate in literature, Toni Morrison, said she writes to overcome the crippling of her former education. In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire (1970) argued that the oppressed need an education that does not coerce them into conformity but inspire them to liberation and freedom.
My discipline is sociology. My subject the United States. I regretfully admit that both tell half a truth about race and diversity, a truth that focuses more on weaknesses than on strengths. I learned about the problems with deficit-based research when teaching at a predominantly African American and Hispanic all-female university. The course was “The Sociology of Race and Racism.” My topic for the day was white privilege. After documenting all the advantages that white Americans have compared to their African American and Hispanic counterparts, I asked the class for questions and comments. One student asked, “what about black privilege”? The other students agreed. Unprepared for this comment, I went on a defensive exhortation about how there is no such thing as black privilege. I documented more black pain, suffering, and inequality. The students were disappointed. Feeling like a literary character in a psychological drama, I wandered home in a cloudy fog of confusion. How could they think black people were privileged?
Upon arriving home, I realized the meaning of the question. The class wanted to know about black success and achievement. Success is defined as an accomplishment of a goal. Privilege is defined as special rights, opportunities, and rewards given to a particular person or group. I recalled my own undergraduate days when I learned about black deviance, crime, and welfare. I was even criticized by a fellow student for not speaking up on these topics. She was an outspoken Native American woman who took every opportunity to voice her ideas about her culture. Like me, my students were tired of hearing about black failure. We get enough from the media and politicians. They wanted encouragement and uplift. I wanted to provide this self-help, but when I looked at my many sociology textbooks, I realized that they focused on black disadvantages: school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration, the wage and academic gap… ad nauseum. Important historical and individual contributions were omitted.
I remembered I had a volume on The Gifts of Black Folks by the father of modern American sociology, W.E.B. Du Bois (2009), and that I read the works of the Senegalese anthropologist, Cheikh Anta Diop (1991 and 1987) on the origins of black civilization. Since that class, I have never omitted the discussion of success and achievement in my coverage of race and diversity — it is imperative to our understanding of the history and experiences of diverse groups and the making of the world and the United States.
The Effects of Miseducation
In teaching about society, we need not only focus on social problems and inequality. Especially when working with young marginalized women and students of color, we should highlight the achievements of their communities and use diverse voices to do so. Otherwise our classes could lead to student self-loathing, as indicated by the famous Clark doll study. This study was used in the 1954 Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education to show the effects of racial segregation on young African Americans. In the study, black children were asked to choose their preference for a white or black doll. They were asked to identify which doll was the prettiest, smartest, and worthiest. The study revealed that these black children preferred the white doll to the black doll. The Clark doll study illustrates how miseducation leads to the belief that everything great, beautiful, and civilized is European. W.E.B. Du Bois (1965) challenged this perspective: “Egyptian culture was in this way the fore-runner of Greece…When persons wished to study science, art, government, or religion, they went to Egypt. The Greeks inspired by Asia, turned toward Africa for learning, and the Romans in turn learned of Greece and Egypt.”
The confounding of whiteness with intelligence manifest itself in subtle ways. For instance, some of my “Introduction to Sociology” students believe that fields like math, physics, and computer science are colorblind and genderless. They overlook the fact that women and people of color are numerical minorities in these disciplines. They think that these disciplines are based solely on merit. But if that were the case, that would mean that women and people of color are less intelligent in math and science.
The Importance of History
In my teaching, I have even encountered students who ask if they can use sources that are older than a decade. Upon inquiry, I learned that these students were taught this form of academic ageism from some professors and librarians, who argue that sources older than 10 years are outdated. The assumption is that newer articles have assimilated older knowledge and have built upon them, so they are superior. This is not certainly true. Should we not read Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Karl Marx, Jane Addams, and Max Weber? Should we not grapple with their ideas? Currently, most of our historical coverage of these authors is tantamount to finding our disciplinary roots, without exploring how these scholars are useful and relevant today.
In sociology, we argue that societies and cultures are different in that there is neither a standard of absolute beauty nor a consensus on the perfect society, so mainstream sociologists have given little attention to historical research and ancient societies. No matter how much we try to escape it, there is a past. We do have ancestors who thought about humankind, happiness and society, and culture and social relations — and we are not more human than they were. If sociologists studied the past, they would see that Africans, Asians, and Meso-Americans had great civilizations, which counter the sociological and mainstream narrative that either non-European peoples are biologically inferior or that their social conditions have made them inferior. Both are racist ideas (Kendi 2016).
When I ask my students how America was built, they often respond by referencing innovators, frontiersmen, and noble politicians and statesmen. They rarely mention Native American genocide and land removal, chattel slavery, and labor exploitation and violence. When I ask them to tell me about the American Gilded Age, they respond that it was a time of industrialization and great wealth. They usually fail to mention it was a period of extreme inequality and monopoly, political corruption, and labor protest.
Yet the sociological imagination contends that we should, at a minimum, give students a better understanding of themselves in history and teach them about the experiences and cultures of others (Mills 1959). But today, because of our limited scientific scope, sociology focuses on how to study people rather than teaching students about people, society, and history. Sociology textbooks are full of theoretical debates that leave students with the notion that sociology is an opinionated discipline. In part, they are right. As a multi-theoretical and multi-methodological discipline, sociology textbooks reflect this diversity. They do not amass the agreed upon facts and generally accepted truths about social conditions, culture, and history to impart to its sociology students.
To be effective teachers, we must consider the experiences and histories of our students. Secondly, we must tell a more complete truth about race and diversity, one that is rooted in history. Thirdly, we must add the voices of the historically marginalized to the classroom rather than rely on the traditional cannon. This, I think, is not a panacea, but it is better than what we currently have.
Part of a series, University Faculty Are Agents of Change.
Bryan R. Ellis is a visiting lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is also a member of the Diversity Scholars Network at the National Center for Institutional Diversity.
