Assimilation scholarship is rooted in the race relations framework that has been critiqued for providing legitimacy to the prevailing racial order, not least because it credits ethno-racial group agency as the mechanism that causes inequities among groups’ socioeconomic outcomes and the degrees to which they are socially accepted. To explain socioeconomic inequities, alternative frames centering on racialization and structural racism look to white supremacy and the unequal ends it engenders, but the sociological theory developed in these alternatives is largely tangential to assimilation theory. That the assimilationist model still dominates leaves a key part of the discipline vulnerable to supporting white supremacist ideologies about societies falsely believed to be colorblindly meritocratic. For this reason I call upon sociologists to work together to dethrone assimilationism from its exalted status in the sociology of immigration and scholars of race knowledgeable in these alternative approaches to actively reenter the arena of immigration studies and take the ground that has been ceded to the assimilationist frame. I suggest these as next steps in a campaign to overturn the dominance of the race relations model in sociology as a whole.

The contribution in this introduction, and in this monograph issue of Current Sociology itself, is to explain how patterns of inequality associated with global capital have been reconfigured in different contexts and have historically produced varied results. The definition of global inequality used here transcends Euro- and US-centric models of linear development and comparisons of national income and its distribution to explain how complex socioeconomic hierarchies, including – but not limited to – class, reinforce inequalities among social groups around the globe. The editors trace contemporary patterns of inequality back to the history of imperial and colonial power so as to reintroduce into the scholarly dialogue on inequality a broader understanding of ascriptive hierarchies of race, gender, caste, and national citizenship and their relationship to colonial conquest, enslavement, and labor migrations as interrelated contexts of the global production and reproduction of inequality patterns.

If we take the time to look at the academy writ large and sociology as a discipline specifically, we can readily find the evidence to confirm a long-standing exclusion of certain scholars from the academic mainstream. This exclusion is especially evident in the case of scholars of color, but also includes women, nonelites (e.g., college and graduate students who lack academic social capital from elders who have been through it and could help), and those who wish to push for a more humanist scientific agenda over purist positivist science. Sexism and racism keep us from seeing the best of our ideas emerge to bring the discipline forward. As if the pursuit of good work and good works are mutually exclusive, an embrace of purist positivism leads us to shun antiracist, antisexist, nonhumanist science, labeling it "advocacy" or worse, "activist," and conversely, ceding ground to those who wrap themselves in "objectivity" even as they may further regressive agendas. This article makes a case for the existence of an "outsider scholar," and outlines sociology's outsider problem. I argue that this problem endures at all levels of the academic endeavor, from undergraduate education all the way through to the ranks of administration. I conclude by offering remedies to lead us toward a more inclusive and social justice-oriented sociology.

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