Black Belts and Ivory Towers: The Place of Race in U.S. Social Thought, 1892-1948

Abstract

Using the University of Chicago as a case study, this essay examines the racial foundations of sociological thought during the discipline's rising academic legitimacy and cultural authority, in the rst half of the 20 th century. Much more than critical hindsight, the basic theories and methods developed by the "Chicago School" and Robert Park in particular did not just construct racial categories, but were constructed by national anxieties about racial differences in urbanizing America. From this anxiety emerged a "second wave" of Black social scientists who both offered important and under recognized critiques of the "Chicago School" outlook, while reinforcing its industrial framework of organization and civilization in ways that marked "Black" identity as maladjustment, deviance and dysfunction. By stripping away this overarching sociological framework and resituating the "data" derived from "Black subjects" within its migrant and urban context, this essay ends with thoughts about how Chicago's Black residents theorized themselves, their neighborhoods and the larger world in ways that challenged both White and Black sociological visions.

To move forward, we must look back: White supremacy at the base of urban studies

“…The roots of modern sociology and urban sociology relate to the CS's development in the early 20th century (Abbott, 1999;Anderson in DuBois, [1899]1996; Clark and Wu, 2021;Morris, 2015;Sassen, 2010). This narrative is how scholars conceive of the rise of American Sociology (AS) and how the CS's work spearheaded the foundation of a scientific discipline (for more, see Abbott, 1999;Baldwin, 2004;Morris, 2015;Steinberg, 2007). The CS explored the city using ethnographic techniques to solidify a scientific AS grounded in empirical research.…”

Black Spatial Affordances and the Residential Ecologies of the Great Migration

“…Th e perceived queerness of Black households in the 1930s and 1940s-comprised as they were of parts or multiples of what would be considered nuclear families with many of them headed by women-threw Black migrant morality into question, as notions of rightful domestic order and "responsible intimacy" among household members were not readily ascertainable (Ferguson 2004: 36-38). Other scholars have noted the holes in the concentric circle model of modern urban settlement, particularly the inaccuracies of representing changing residential patterns in the city as natural rather than the product of de facto and de jure discrimination, as well as the role of national racial anxiety and Black populations and informants themselves in the construction of the Chicago School's theories and methods (Baldwin 2004;Loughran 2015). 2 Moreover, many years before the establishment of the Chicago School, W. E. B.…”

Cities, Racialized Poverty, and Infrastructures of Possibility

“…The Chicago sociologists’ theory of human ecology was produced through and in the racialised real estate markets, enforced by restrictive covenants that created so‐called “concentric zones”. Thus, knowledge is made in relationship to the racist organisation of space, as neighbourhoods surrounding universities are exploited as laboratories (Baldwin ). The Chicago School’s relationship to the segregated city exemplifies that though normative poverty studies may make claims to generalised knowledge, knowledge about poverty is produced from specific places and relationships (Lawson ; Roy ).…”

“…Today, Hyde Park is a paradigmatic UniverCity—and it is the Chicago School’s racial knowledge that set the table for contemporary higher education development projects across the country; as poverty knowledge rationalises the same universities’ management of urban space, markets, and governance to profit from poverty. And it is the people who live in urban neighbourhoods—Black, brown, and poor—who become the prime force of the creative underclass, as both workers and as objects of study (Baldwin ). Chicago School poverty knowledge was first wielded to make claims to the universal, and these generalisable and abstract theories continued to inform the governance of urban life, from policymaking to textbook theories, from urban renewal policies to mapmaking techniques.…”