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This article reports the results of an analysis of all racial and ethnic relations articles published in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, and Social Problems, from January 1969 through December 1995. The analysis identifies by journal: 1) major methodological orientation(s); 2) how the concepts of "race," "ethnicity," and racial and ethnic relations are operationalized, which is useful for examining tendencies toward, or against, reification; 3) substantive content--that is, what a sociology of racial and ethnic relations is; and 4) primary context--that is, are racial and ethnic relations treated as a substantive subdiscipline in their own right, or are they merely a topic of interest for other subdisciplines such as social psychology? In brief, although some differences exist between the journals, all four journals publish disproportionately racial and ethnic relations research that: 1) is highly quantitative as opposed to theoretical, conceptual, or sociohistorical; 2) reifies U.S. Census definitions of race and ethnicity as opposed to critically evaluating such definitions; 3) social psychologizes racial and ethnic relations, or subsumes such relations under stratification processes; and 4) subsumes the racial and ethnic relations problematic under subdiscipline rubrics other than a sociology of racial and ethnic relations. The conclusion discusses the implications of these findings; for example, by virtue of what they publish, these journals construct a paradigmatic frame that gives precedence to, or legitimizes, some views and excludes, or de-legitimizes others.

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This paper identifies the common themes in 245-plus refereed articles on whiteness studies that were published in academic journals after 1992 in an attempt to assess the implications of whiteness studies for the discipline of sociology. Of special interest is the relationship between whiteness studies and Michael Burawoy's call for public sociology. I argue that the emerging field of whiteness studies identifies itself as a public sociology that is infused by the moral vision of critical sociology. Nevertheless, the field does not accept professional sociology as Burawoy defined it. The ontological, epistemological, and soteriological foundations of whiteness studies encourage the field to pander to one segment of the public-the marginalized-and condemn another segment of the public-"privileged whites," thus rendering impossible a democratic dialogue on one of the most basic social issues of our time. Conflating Western epistemology with whiteness encourages a misreading of American social scientific work on race relations, thus opening the door to a so-called hermeneutics of suspicion. The result is not an innocuous "pop" sociology, but a partisan sociology, whose implications should caution sociologists against an uncritical embracing of public sociology.