Black on Black: The Vilification of “Me-Search,” Tenure, and the Economic Position of Black Sociologists

Abstract

In 2019, Black sociologists are still less likely to get published in discipline-specific peer-reviewed journals, less likely to hold tenured or tenure-track positions at predominately white institutions, and less likely to be awarded tenure than white sociologists. This is, in part, because the traditional positivist approach to sociology favors an epistemology rooted in world building from a white perspective and subsequently prefers white sociologists to do that work. Overvaluing empirical research emphasizing objectivity through marked distance between researcher and participants, in the tradition of the natural sciences, also undervalues the importance of investigators’ perceived connections to marginalized communities in the reliability of collected data, and the use of qualitative methods to scientific study. This conceptual paper connects public discourse on the devaluing of “me-search” done by Black sociologists, research studying communities of which the principal investigator is also a member, to professional advancement data to explore the economic penalties for Black sociologists whose “me-search” expands the limits of what is useful and noteworthy in the production of sociological knowledge while simultaneously impacting their professional advancement in the discipline. Patricia Hill Collins’ (Soc Probl. 33: S14–32, 1986) epistemological stance laments the positivist approach and attempts to move sociological research of the oppressed away from the gaze of the oppressors. The academy’s colonial focus on “objectivity,” and subsequent third person research writing, maintains a white normative framework for the entire discipline. But in the twenty-first century, a disciplinary focus on research about marginalized identities by white sociologists inherently devalues the scientific validity of research on Black communities by Black researchers, aiding in racialized gatekeeping in sociology. Low numbers of tenured Black faculty, promotion policies focused on the number of peer-reviewed publications, and low journal publication rates for Black researchers highlight the negative impact on professional outcomes for Black sociologists and illustrates a perpetual devaluation of the perspectives of Black researchers.

Introduction

“Sociology has been – and still is – a white-led and white-dominated field and, therefore, it should not surprise anyone that the logic of analysis and methods used to investigate racial matters reflect this social fact.”

- Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Tukufu Zuberi, White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology

The institutionalization of higher education in the USA led to the perpetuation of the American achievement ideology in US culture (Dewey 2016). This belief in the positive relationship between an individual’s education, hard work and effort, and their success has never been applicable to Black people,¹ especially Black women, in the same way it is for white people (Hochschild 1984; Ford 1992) despite our continued attempts to “make it.” As a Black woman myself, I grew up being told education was the way to professional success and financial stability. But for Black scholars, especially those who, like me, write, research, and teach about race and racism, there are structural and cultural blocks to those achievements. This paper examines a specific discipline, sociology, to uncover how and why “achievement,” in terms of position, salary, and notoriety, is less attainable for Black scholars.

In sociology, Black scholars’ difficulty establishing similar financial stability as our white colleagues and peers, despite a shared level of education, means the issue of economics across the discipline is race-specific and must be addressed. Rates of Black students in higher education from bachelors to terminal degrees continues to increase annually over the last 30 years (Cottom 2017). However, higher degree completion rates have not significantly increased annual income or wealth accumulation in Black communities over the same period (Nettles and Perna 1995; Spalter-Roth et al. 2019).

Black sociology scholars logged the second fewest number of earned doctorate doctorates 2006–2012 (Fig. 1). The 701 doctorates awarded to Black people over this six-year period are less than Hispanic or Latinx, Asian, and white scholars, and second lowest overall. Our underrepresentation in the discipline suggests that the marginalization of Black scholars in higher education is unique from that of our other non-white colleagues who experience their own distinct forms of discrimination and prejudice not rooted in the same historical or disciplinary foundation. As such all raw distribution data collected as part of this analysis are broken into Black and non-Black comparisons.

Fig. 1

NSF survey of earned doctorates by race/ethnicity, sociology 2006–2012. Source: NSF/NIH/USED/USDA/NEH/NASA, 2006–2012 Survey of Earned Doctorates

The lagging economic position for Black sociologists is directly related to disciplinary evaluation of scholarship, and research agendas focused on Black communities, and the oppressions they experience. In particular, culturally perpetuated beliefs about the quality and value of research conducted by Black scholars examining Black people weakens the professional power of our work in tenure-track job searches, as well as tenure evaluations (Matthew 2016), and, in doing so, stagnates upward social mobility for Black sociologists.

Basic descriptive statistics paint a clear picture of continued marginalization of Black sociologists, especially among the top 20 ranked sociology departments in the USA (U.S. News and World Report 2017). This begins with admittance into and mentorship at well-ranked programs. Being a graduate of a top 20 program significantly increases your likelihood of landing a tenure-track job at a top research university (Emerson 2018). The remaining 120 or so programs are more likely to place graduates in “teaching schools, regional (university), or the private sector (p.1)” where research and publishing is less directly connected to a long-term financial or professional position.

Though increases in college and graduate school enrollment among underrepresented minority students continue, such increases do not represent a diversification of higher education faculty or significant shifts in class membership for Black degree holders. Only 57 of 1056 sociology doctorates that were conferred in 2018 went to Black students (ASA 2020). In the top 20 sociology departments, Black graduate students are even more underrepresented. In June 2020 only 12 of the 213 sociology graduate students designated as “on the market” on the department website² were Black (Table 1). These numbers are important because graduate students from the top 20 departments are more likely to take jobs in similarly ranked programs (Emerson 2018) where salaries are considerable higher (Chronicle Data 2019) than other types of institutions, but sociology departments are “very male, and very white” across the discipline (Romero 2017). Such insularity within the top programs in the discipline stunt opportunities for the upward social mobility typically associated with jobs in those places (Clauset et al. 2015), especially for Black scholars.

Table 1 Racial make-up of top 20 sociology departments⁺ (including “on the market” graduate students)

Underrepresentation of Black graduate students, and subsequently Black faculty, maintain the white supremacist³ academic culture on which all US colleges and universities are founded (Harris 2019), where white people gatekeep access to tenure-track jobs, and the job security they promise, as well as the ability to publish in top journals often necessary for earning tenure if a tenure-track job is secured. Increasing numbers of Black Ph.Ds. are not translating to increases in tenure-track positions, or tenured faculty, as a result.

Instead, Black students face perpetual traumas in institutional structures and campus community cultures dedicated to our continued marginalization. The social media hashtag #BlackInTheIvory, started by two Black communications scholars in June 2020 generated more than 40,000 tweets from other Black scholars from around the world (Diep 2020) detailing individual experiences en mass to highlight, in real time, clear systems of institutional racism in higher education. Thousands of the hashtag participants discuss experiences of racism and misogynoir⁴ specifically in the discipline of sociology. Many participants revealed that this is the first time they have spoken publicly about their experiences suggesting that the undercurrent of systemic racism in the discipline is made largely invisible by fears of professional punishment. Moreover, their silence allows white sociologists to be willfully ignorant of the prevalence of racism throughout the discipline.

Academic publishing, both in presses and journals, is one mechanism used to maintain the overall whiteness of the discipline. In sociology, publication in top journals remain dominated by white scholars (Delgado 1984; Hermanowicz and Clayton 2020; Pedersen 2012), and scholarship on race, especially decisions on a project’s validity, reliability, and generalizability, are decided by the majority white editorial force who review the work. Moreover, there is a direct connection between Black scholars’ representation in top departments and publication in these journals. Through this process, white sociologists develop and decide, almost singularly, what is relevant or innovative in research on race; Black sociologists are perpetually disadvantaged in the discipline, as a result.

But much of what blocks Black sociologists from developing a critical mass of representation in ranked departments, and subsequently become widely published and cited, is cultural and structural rather than explicitly empirical (Clemente 1974). This is not a widely researched topic because it benefits the discipline to ignore the lack of representation among sociology programs and academic journals when the majority of scholars are white people. Instead, crowd-sourced stories of Black graduate students being advised against race-focused research agendas, difficulty placing race-focused academic articles, and tenure and promotion denials based on the “rigor” of their research agendas (Sullivan 2020; Flaherty 2020) when focused on Black communities span decades.

Continued attempts by white social scientists to undermine research done by Black sociologists on social issues within the Black community, pejoratively dubbed “me-search” or “me-studies” (Gordon 2002; Creswell 2003; McMillan and Schumacher 2010; Heath 2015; Ayoub and Rose 2016), as too subjective, and therefore unscientific, negatively impacts Black sociologists’ professional position, and their economic position among scholars at large. Minimizing “me-search” in favor of “objective” race research undertaken by white sociologists instigates difficulties Black sociologists have making professional progress in the discipline. The continued invalidation of research conducted by Black sociologists studying Black oppressions maintains disparities in salary, rank, and tenure decisions between Black and white sociologists across the discipline. This is not a new phenomenon; rather, it is reflective of a discipline whose American origins are built on urban research made famous by white sociologists in Chicago while actively ignoring the scholarship of Black sociologists, including W.E.B. Du Bois, in Atlanta.

Atlanta or Chicago?

Higher education was founded on exclusion. More specifically, colleges and universities were defined for more than a century by who could not attend, Black people—and to a lesser extent women (Harris 2019). Though explicit policies against the admittance of Black people no longer exist, we are less than 50 years removed from the national integration of American colleges and universities (Savage 1992). This social fact also impacts how academic disciplines were formed, and by extension the perpetuation of discipline-specific methodological and topical foci (Steinmetz 2013; Bhambra 2014).

Since its inception, the discipline of sociology has focused on the work of white scientists, first in Europe, and then, as American sociology got its start, in Chicago. The University of Chicago Department of Sociology, established in 1892, rose to prominence in the 1920s as the epicenter of ethnographic fieldwork in urban sociology led by Robert E. Park, George Herbert Mead, and later, Nels Anderson and Herbert Blumer (Fine 1995). Their work helped pioneer participant observation as a valid and reliable research method, and made members of “The Chicago School,” as it is known colloquially, thought leaders in the discipline, and the institution itself ground zero for urban ethnography. The only problem with this is that Black scholars in the “sociological laboratory” at Atlanta University, a historically Black college and university (HBCU), led by Du Bois, were conducting urban ethnographic research starting in 1895, 20 years before The Chicago School’s rise to prominence.

Though twentieth-century knowledge of Du Bois is limited to his conceptual tome, Souls of Black Folk, his contributions to the foundations of empirical sociological research remained buried under the work of white sociologists for almost 100 years. The scholarship completed by Du Bois and the other Black sociologists at “The Atlanta School,” a moniker just now being used in the twenty-first century (Wright 2002, 2006), focused on social, mental, and physical examination of Black lives in American cities.

Even before Du Bois’ arrival, Atlanta University President, Horace Brumstead oversaw empirical research on Black social life post-Emancipation (Wright 2002). Two empirical studies, “Mortality among Negroes in Cities,” and “Social and Physical Condition of Negroes” were conducted 1896–1897 under Brumstead’s watch, the same time that the University of Chicago Sociology Department is being formed, and almost twenty years before the department would become well-known for its own urban research. Du Bois was hired in 1897 with aims to expand the institution’s sociological analysis (Wright 2002). By 1899 Du Bois, and other Atlanta school sociologists, including Monroe Nathan Work, and Mary Church Terrell (Wright 2002, 2006), were actively examining Black urban life using participant observations, surveys, historical records, and census data. Du Bois encouraged scientists in The Atlanta School to utilize mixed-methodological approaches to their research, believing that triangulation is the best way to study social life (Wright 2002, 2006; Morris 2015).

Nuanced analysis of the discipline’s foundation by Black scholars in the last 10 years has led to more widespread discussion of the sociological contributions of Du Bois and The Atlanta School (Wright 2017; Morris 2015). But the relative invisibility of their contributions was not by accident or innocent omission, rather a result of collective understandings among white scholars of whom was and was not human, and therefore worthy of deep social scientific study at all (Myrdal 1944; Davidson 1977; Key 1978). The work of early twentieth-century Black sociologists, “proceeded on the assumption…that the negro in America and in general is an average ordinary human being (Gorman 1950, p.1);” an assumption it would take white scholars another 20 years to admit. In seeking to systematically examine Black life, Du Bois and company also engaged in methodological innovation unparalleled by their white peers (Gorman 1950).

The Atlanta School was the first university laboratory in the discipline to use theory triangulation as a method for ensuring reliability and generalizability, and the first to collect data with “insider” investigators, a choice Patricia Hill Collins (Collins 1986) would argue almost a century later, deepens the quality of data collected from underrepresented minority communities who have been inundated since the popularization of The Chicago School with white, usually male, sociologists attempting to study Black urban life. The Philadelphia Negro, the first academic research study published by Du Bois while part of Atlanta University, and commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania, was first published in 1899. This mixed-methodological study of Black life in Philadelphia collected interview and survey data from 5000 Black people living in the Seventh Ward neighborhood of Philadelphia where a majority of Black Philadelphians resided during that period (Du Bois and Eaton 1996). In 1950, journalist William Gorman wrote for Fourth International, “there is not a single body of American sociology on any subject during that period which, for seriousness, thoroughness, and explosiveness, can compare to Du Bois’ Philadelphia Negro…Du Bois therefore extended the whole range of social inequity in America (Gorman 1950, p.1).”

Four years later, Du Bois published what would become the seminal phenomenological analysis of Black life in white supremacy,⁵The Souls of Black Folk, first published in 1903 (Du Bois 1994), while leading The Atlanta School. His work, however, as well as the work of the Black sociologists researching alongside him was mostly ignored by white scholars (Wright 2002, 2006, Morris 2015). So when, white sociologists at The Chicago School began studying the urbanization of Chicago and its impact on contemporary social issues in 1915 (Fine 1995) their work was lauded across academia as innovative and foundational to the future of the discipline, even though Black sociologists had been conducting similar research for almost two decades. Because they were Black people, their work was unworthy of attention, and because they were studying Black people, and therefore unreliably subjective, their research was viewed inherently unscientific.

This erasure goes beyond simple ignorance of or disinterest in the work simply because it was produced by Black people. It was the innovative scientific focus on Black communities that had heretofore only been studied superficially and with a focus on “biological” outcomes (Connell 2007; Jeynes 2011), which directly contributed to “the growth of institutional racism and the teaching of scientifically-based racist thought (Jeynes 2011, p.535),” that led white sociologists to first dismiss, then copy the research techniques and focus championed by Black sociologists at The Atlanta School (Bonilla-Silva 2017).

If Black men scholars like Du Bois and Nathan Work’s early contributions to the discipline were largely ignored, Black women’s scholarship was rendered completely invisible. Ida B. Wells’ first book, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases, first published in 1892, uses content analysis of white newspaper coverage of the lynching of Black men in the South to argue the role of lynching to maintain the political and economic dominance of white people (Giddings 2009). Likewise, sociologist Anna Julia Cooper’s first book, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South, also published in 1892, is one of the first sociological analyses of the complex relationship between race and gender in the experiences of Black women post-Reconstruction (May 2007). These Black women “framed social theory under conditions of radical social change which they personally experienced and places in socio-historical contexts…[and] provide a sociological analysis of society as a dynamic of power and difference, a theory as complete and critical as any achieved in American social science (p.viii, Aldridge 2009).” The historical disciplinary favoritism of scholarship completed by white scholars and ignorance or disregard of scholarship by Black people, especially Black women, through the twentieth century created an “apartheid of knowledge” in the discipline where “legitimate knowledge” was historically defined by the whiteness, and then maleness, of its producers and, ostensibly, that of their home institutions (Bernal and Villalpando 2010). You may know these women’s names, but not their explicit contributions to sociology, and that is the point. They could conduct an endless stream of sociological research, and publish sociological work, but they would never be deemed sociologists.

As evidence, in 1998 the International Sociological Association (ISA) created a list of the 100 most important and influential sociological books of the twentieth century using a survey of ISA members. The list, developed from a survey sent to all ISA members who, based on the number of doctorates conferred to Black sociologists over the last 50 years (ASA 2020), are non-Black,⁶ is still used as evidence of worthwhile theories and methods across several social science disciplines (Pedersen 2012). This list features only one Black person, philosopher, Frantz Fanon, and only one woman, political scientist Hannah Ardent, who is white. Fanon’s book, The Wretched of the Earth, first published in 1963, listed at 85, is also the only book on the list which deals explicitly with race and racism (Fanon and Philcox 2004). The 98 other authors are all white men writing on culture, religion, class, performance, and methodology as though they exist in a vacuum devoid of race and its consequences. Many were either members of the original Chicago School department or mentored by one of them. Du Bois and his fellow Atlanta School members are noticeably absent, but their white peers from Chicago, Mead and Blumer, were both represented. There were no Black women on the list. These absences are a tangible signal of white supremacy in disciplines where white researchers are taken seriously and Black researchers are not.

The “Rise” of “Me-Search”

In 2015, Joseph Heath, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto wrote a critique of the academy’s acceptance of what he called “me-studies,” calling higher education overly politically correct for allowing such research, that which examines oppressions of groups with which the scholar shares identities, as serious scholarship (Heath 2015). His critique absolves whiteness and maleness as identities to be shared, and therefore focuses his ire on underrepresented minority scholars studying underrepresented communities. Heath claims sharing oppressions potentially dissuades participants with opposing viewpoints to voice them during data collection (Heath 2015), which assumes that the scholars in question are unable to collect valid data from communities with which they share identities without letting personal opinions or individual experiences, their own and that of their participants distort data collection and analysis.

Heath is just one of a growing chorus of white academics working to discredit “me-search” and invalidate the careers of scholars doing “me-studies” as rooted in poor training, lack of professionalism, and producing low quality work (Gordon 2002; Creswell 2003; McMillan and Schumacher 2010; Heath 2015; Ayoub and Rose 2016). Their opinions are lasting vestiges of the same willful ignorance that relegated research conducted by Black scholars at The Atlanta School to the margins in favor of “objective” and “scientific” research produced by white men at The Chicago School at the very beginnings of institutional scholarship in American higher education. Du Bois concluded during his research for The Philadelphia Negro, “I became painfully aware that merely being born in a group does not necessarily make one possessed of complete knowledge concerning it (Du Bois 1968, p. 98).”

This “preference” for “objective research is embedded in disciplinary beliefs about scholarship quality by race and gender rather than the work itself. American Philosopher, Lewis R. Gordon asserts,” how one lives in a community is not identical with the sort of knowledge involved in how one studies a community (Gordon 2002, p. 120).” Yet, cultural assumption that shared identity reduces the quality of the work also impacts scholars’ financial stability because “…scholarly publication in sociology is not only the key to career success, but also the route by which feminist analyses and perspectives become known to others in the discipline (Grant and Ward 1991, p. 207).” As such, in the perpetuation of these “preferences” white sociologists engage in race research from perspectives where whiteness is an assumed norm, and therefore social scientific research is deeply racialized across the discipline. That the rates of publication in peer-reviewed journals in the social sciences continue to skew to the benefit of white men (Delgado 1984; Bernal and Villalpando 2002; Wright 2017, 2020), even in race-focused research, highlight this fact.

In sociology, centering urban research on the work done by white sociologists instigated a disciplinary culture that privileges scholarship from white researchers and ignores scholarship from Black researchers, or writes it off as too subjective to be scientific. More than that, the focus on “objectivity” in sociological research, relegates the scholarship of Black researchers studying urban communities, with which we share identities, to the margins. It maintains an academic culture where Black researchers are found guilty of producing invalid and unreliable data in perpetuity before their research is ever made public. In stripping credit and visibility from Du Bois and The Atlanta School scholars almost a hundred years ago, social science was inherently racialized.

In 2020, much of the racial discourse coming out of the top 20 sociology departments comes from non-Black scholars. Basic scans of department websites show 75.3%. of faculty whose specialization is listed as “race/ethnicity” are non-Black. More telling is how prevalent this specialization is among Black faculty in these departments. Eighty percent of Black faculty listed “race/ethnicity” as their specialization, but that’s still less than 25% of all faculty in the top 20 sociology programs (Table 2).⁷ This suggests two things, (1) most Black scholars study race is some way, and (2) despite this topical saturation among Black sociologists, the study of race in sociology is dominated by non-Black scholars.

Table 2 Racial breakdown of “race/ethnicity” research focus among all faculty at top 20 sociology departments

In his study of the racialized history of the sociology discipline, Aldon Morris (2015) argues that the preponderance of white male scholars in social science means that the discipline is “numerically, logically, and methodologically” constructed by them. This is as true is the sociological study of race and racism, as anywhere. In Sadiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiences (2019), she argues that sociologists do not just describe race, our research makes race. It legitimizes the social saliency of the meaning of race. Therefore, the racial make-up of race/ethnicity specialists working within the top 20 sociology programs and editorial boards of the top 25 academic journals in the discipline are important mechanisms in the process of creating the study of race across the discipline.

The overrepresentation of non-Black faculty in the discipline, and more importantly, in the make-up of “race/ethnicity” specializations in the top 20 sociology departments creates cultural problems as well as the clear structural issues. Journal editorial staffs across the discipline are overwhelmingly white, even at journals focused specifically on issues of race and racism, like the journal of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. A simple survey of the top 25 sociology journals (including the aforementioned) finds only one Black co-editor-in-chief out of the 43 people currently holding those positions (Table 3). Likewise, Black scholars only make up 6.5% of editorial board members at these same journals (Table 4). Together, people in these positions control the production of knowledge across the entire discipline.

Table 3 Black vs. Non-Black Editor(s)-in-Chief at Top 25 Sociology Journals

Table 4 Black vs. Non-Black Editorial Board Members at Top 25 Sociology Journal Publications

To illustrate this point, take a look at any single sociology department in the top 20 and compare the “impact” of the journals in which scholars published by race. For example, at New York University, the non-Black “race/ethnicity” specialists published in multiple top 25 sociology journals, while the Black “race/ethnicity” scholars have no publications in those journals. It is not just about who is published, what they are publishing—methodological, pedagogical, and empirical knowledge coupled with a critical mass of publications is decided by a group of less than 1100, mostly white, scholars. Their decisions, given the higher profile nature of the journals in question, create the foundation for sociological thinking.

Critiques of research on “me-studies” focus on subjectivity as a way to simultaneously critique qualitative methods and by extension the underrepresented minority scholars most likely to undertake them (Sumerau 2016; Grollman 2016). Though scholars across the social sciences have repeatedly stressed the methodological power of shared identities in qualitative research (Collins 1986; Haraway 1988; Brown 2010; Davenport 2013), pejorative opinions on this type of research continues. Rooted in racialized epistemic structures (Go 2020), the weaponizing of “neutrality” in social science research (Delgado 1984; Heath 2015; Go 2020) also perpetuates normative identities as naturally unbiased, and therefore inherently disconnected from the data collection process. Moreover, positioning whiteness as inherently neutral means only data collected and analyzed by white researchers can have macro, meso, and micro-level applications in the general social world.

“Me-studies” by comparison critics argue, can only be applied to micro-level analysis, interpreting behaviors and experiences as unique anecdotes among statistical outliers, rather than evidence of patterns. This willful ignorance of the potential for biased perspectives in data collection both empirical and narrative, maintains the privileged position of white male, cis-het social scientists whose identity is thus the gold standard for scientific research. And as we have seen since the public coronation of The Chicago School, the work produced by white researchers, perhaps especially those entering urban sites to study oppressed and underrepresented communities,⁸ is widely read, cited, and positioned as well-done research, while research conducted by non-white social scientists is not (Pedersen 2012). Integration of the academy did not invite a transformation of the disciplinary foundations. As Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi (2008) assert, “Most post-integration scholarship that passed as objective study, under the guise of ethnographic excerpts or statistical analysis, was in fact ideologically white supremacist (p.16).”

The real problem, which most critiques of “me-search” fail to recognize is the impact of lack of extensive methodological training among scholars. Most graduate programs require only one or two methods courses as part of coursework; otherwise, students are left to train themselves or seek out mentors to train them in specific methods. What results is almost 100 years of the “top journals in sociology routinely publish[ing] articles in which the authors discuss the ‘effect of race’…In almost all of the articles in these journals race is viewed as an unalterable characteristic on an individual. This social construction of race as an unalterable characteristic, places a conceptual limitation on the researcher’s ability to understand racial dynamics (Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi 2008, p.16).”Social scientists, because we study social problems in the same social world from which we are a part, all engage in various forms of “me-search” (Rothman 2005). We likely share at least one identity with our research participants even if not by choice, and that may not be a bad thing for social scientific research. Collins (1986) suggests an “outsider-within” approach where social scientists engage in reflexivity about their personal positions of privilege or oppression in relationship to their participants. In this way, shared oppressions do not impinge on either the researcher or the participants. Instead, reflexivity acknowledges potential similarities and differences and includes examinations of how those things may be impacting the data throughout data collection and analysis. Published research that does not meet this standard tells us more about the value of research methods which prioritize white perspectives, and the continued vilification of research that complicates static notions of race and objectivity, rather than the usefulness of “me-studies” in the social sciences.

Professional Punishment in Peer Review

Du Bois warned in The Philadelphia Negro (1899) that as simultaneous members of the social world and social researchers, social scientists, “convictions on all great matters of human interest one must have to a greater or less degree, and they will enter to some extent into the most cold-blooded scientific research as a disturbing factor (Du Bois and Eaton 1996).” By contrast, instead of acknowledging that all scientists have perspectives and related biases which impact our research, the founding white male gatekeepers of the discipline only critique the potential for bias as it pertains to “me-studies.” Black sociologists, from Du Bois to the present, are disproportionately subjected to appraisals of our research⁹ throughout the peer review process where shared identities with the communities under study are met with accusations of subjective bias, and questions about comparisons to similar white people to “ensure” generalizability.

Racial reasoning was developed alongside the logic of statistical analysis in scientific study (Zuberi 2001), and early social scientific research was focused on the racial inferiority of non-white people in American communities. Du Bois’ research, and that of other social scientists at The Atlanta School, focused squarely on examining Black life in white America were written off as unimportant and invalid, as a result.¹⁰ This social fact cannot be separated from the white supremacy in the discipline. It is not just that, numerically speaking, white people dominate sociological scholarship, it is also that their numbers translate to ideological dominance.

In modern higher education this invalidation perpetuates the racialized politics of citations (Delgado 1984; Ray 2016) where white scholars dominate senior and leadership positions in both peer-reviewed publishing and tenure decisions across the academy (Delgado 1984), and use that power to limit the publication of scholars of color, particularly Black scholars. White males are the overwhelming majority of social science publications in communications (Chakravartty et al. 2018), anthropology (Baker 1998), and political science (Dion et al. 2018). Moreover, race scholarship published by white social scientists is more likely to be viewed as central to the discipline despite the communities under study, or the prevalence of non-white, non-male scholars conducting similar, and often more thorough research projects (Pedersen 2012). Such research therefore is also more likely to be published.

The connections between a scholar’s race and gender identities, and popularity of their citations is not new. Critical Race Theory (CRT) presupposes the maintenance of racialized power across institutions and categorizations of power (Crenshaw et al. 1995; Bell 1995). Originally focused on the cross-section between critical legal studies and civil rights activism, today CRT is used to study the institutional racism of higher education (Yosso 2005; Hiraldo 2010; McCoy and Rodricks 2015) which starts with the racial demographics of graduate departments and makes it all the way to class membership and economic stability of scholars by race and gender. Only 14 of the 127 untenured faculty in top 20 departments are Black, and only 6.6% of tenured faculty of faculty are Black, a mere 31 of 459 (Table 1). Sociologist Jennifer Mueller argues that the perpetual whiteness of social life is reproduced using an “epistemology of ignorance… a process of knowing designed to produce not-knowing” about white privilege and the structures of white supremacy they create. This “unknowing” allows white people to take for granted their own social privileges and reinforce the racial contract (Mills 1997) which permits the oppression and exploitation of Black people in perpetuity.

Sociology is not removed from this process simply because we study the formation and proliferation of social relationships. Underrepresentation of Black scholars in “high impact” journals lead to low citation rates, and by extension maintains our professional marginalization in the discipline, despite declarations of colorblindness (Bonilla-Silva 2003). Moreover, there is a lack of discipline-specific accounting of the social hierarchy we perpetuate while simultaneously purporting to “study.”

Black sociologist Joyce A. Ladner argued in her 1973 book, The Death of White Sociology, that because sociologists explicitly theorize, and in some cases instigate, social change, Black sociologists have a duty to make sure the experiences of Black people, and their desire for freedom and justice, are represented across the discipline. In the almost 50 years since little has changed in the representation of Black scholarship. Ladner’s ideas highlight how dominant understandings of race and race relations remain squarely focused on whiteness and shape the foundations of the discipline (Wilson 2006; Collins 2007; Saint-Arnaud and Feldstein 2009). Black women, because we exist amid intersecting systems of discrimination and domination (Crenshaw 1989), experience further marginalization. Patricia Hill Collins’ introduction of Black feminist thought in 1990 adds to Ladner’s discussion by clarifying the standpoint of and for Black women in the production of knowledge about our lives, a position generally dominated by whiteness (Collins 1990). The racial make-up of “race/ethnicity” specialists among sociology scholars illustrates the continued necessity of this methodological approach.

Across academia, the quantity of citations and the selectiveness of the publications in which scholarship is published continues to be a major factor in the awarding of tenure. However, the continued dominance of white male scholarship as foundational, even within topics like Critical Race Theory, or feminist epistemologies, limits publication opportunities and therefore professional advancement for Black scholars, especially in the social sciences where race studies are more prevalent. This remains true even as the percentage of Black students awarded doctorates increased 43% in the last two decades (NSF 2017). Still, only 2% of Black men scholars and 1% of Black women scholars hold tenured positions on college campuses in the USA, highlighting the permanence of white supremacy within the higher education engine.

Because white scientists, and by extension, white perspectives, dominate the sociological study of urban life and the experiences of Black communities, cultural misunderstandings limit the data’s reliability. When many of these white social scientists discuss in their findings the “effect of race” (Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi 2008) rather than incorporating the perpetually changing dynamics of racial boundaries, cultures, and racialized experiences, race is positioned as a static variable rather than culturally and structurally bound (Garcia 2017). White researchers’ propensity for this treatment of race in the social sciences highlights the biases imbedded in white perspectives on race, rooted in lifelong socialization which is not easily side-stepped in the name of scientific “objectivity,” but potentially more damaging to scientific study of race that which “me-search” instead pushes forward. As a result, application and analysis of race as a variable in most so-called “objective” research is at best incomplete, and at worst, flat out wrong. Race does not cause social inequities, racism creates them. But this kind of deep.

race theory is rarely undertaken by white researchers, further solidifying the inferiority of scholarship from Black sociologists which examines race with more nuance.

Control over the narrative of the “race variable” in social science research reflects a history of white supremacy in social science research. Ignorance of The Atlanta School in favor of The Chicago School was deliberate, and a tool for ensuring white supremacist frameworks of race and racism ruled the evaluation of social science research across disciplines. As such, racial integration of the academy did not also lead to transformations in the practice of data collection or publication, but rather made plain Black sociologists’ existence on the margins of the discipline.

On average, the majority of published research in the top sociology journal is produced by white men year after year (Delgado 1984; Pedersen 2012), making them the ideal candidates for most tenured and tenure-track positions in American sociology departments. White male overrepresentation as scholars creates a pipeline of hiring, publishing, and promoting which upholds the perpetual racialization of the entire discipline, and limits the ability of Black sociologists to be upwardly mobile despite their educational attainment. If research centered on race, and conducted by Black sociologists, is inherently invalid, then the likelihood our scholarship is published in peer-reviewed journals is small compared to our peers. And if we cannot publish at the same rates, then we cannot be promoted, or earn leadership positions to spark cultural and structural changes necessary to improve opinions on “me-studies.”

Lagging Behind

The invalidation of “me-search” conducted by Black social scientists extends beyond marginalization in the field. It also impacts their overall economic position and the potential for upward social mobility as a tangible benefit to completing a doctorate. It limits our representation in top 20 sociology programs – the most likely route to higher salaries and professional prestige because Black people are already overrepresented as adjunct, and other contingent faculty, and make up smaller percentages of tenure-track faculty (Finklestein et al. 2020).

Coupled with the observation that tenure denials seem to happen more frequently to faculty of color, and for more nebulous reasons than our white counterparts (Matthew 2016) a picture of social science disciplines where race, both as a research variable, and the racial identity of Black scholars impacts our potential for professional success. So, Black faculty are under more pressure to publish, frequently, and in high-status journals to maintain our place in higher education, however precarious and unsecure. Contingent faculty have to publish to stay marketable in preparation for the ever-impending job market season, and tenure-track faculty have to publish to solidify their case for promotion. None of these things are easy however, in a field that invalidates a larger swath of scholarship produced by Black scholars as “me-search” it’s almost impossible to be successful.

There are clear gender dynamics to the make-up of the top 20 sociology programs impacting the economic position of Black scholars. Non-Black men are more than 50% of all department faculty and non-Black women are less represented, but still the majority at 42.2%. By comparison, Black women are only 3.3% of tenured faculty in these departments, and Black men a little more than 4% (Table 5). The gender differences may seem small in percentage, but end up with significant financial ramifications when coupled with existing salary gaps in faculty salary across race and gender (Li and Koedel 2017). Race and gender-focused data drawn from the discipline is not collected by the American Sociological Association (ASA) further clouding the exact size of pay gaps in sociology though they clearly exist.

Table 5 Race and gender⁺ breakdown among all faculty at top 20 sociology departments

More than 50% of all sociology doctorates were awarded to women since 1994. Since 1999, that number is more than 60% overall (Nelson and Cheng 2017), but none of the top 20 sociology programs had at least 50% women faculty. The marginalization of Black women sociologists in the discipline is even more acute. In 2016, more than 400 sociology doctorates were awarded to non-Black women, only 31 went to Black women (Wingfield 2020; ASA 2020).

The impact of low rates of publications, or publication in “lower impact” journals for Black scholars on their average economic position is even more damaging when one considers that we also enter academia as faculty with more existing “bad debt” like high-interest loans and credit cards (Seamster 2019) than the white faculty we work alongside, and who often review our work. Almost 80% of Black graduate students take out loans to complete their degrees, and more than 90% of those Black graduate students who took out loans, already owed undergraduate loans (Cottom 2017). After graduation, the median student loan debt for Black advanced degree holders is 25% higher than their white counterparts (Cottom 2017). It does not help that federal graduate loans have interest rates 2.5% higher than undergraduate loans (Miller 2020).

The median cumulative federal loan debt for doctor of philosophy students is more than undergraduate and master’s programs regardless of race (Fig. 2). Likewise, Black Ph.D. students are half as likely as our white peers to receive fellowships or assistantships to help fund our study (Fig. 3), and Black scholars’ overall borrowing rate in AY 2015–2016 was 80%. Receipt of fellowships or assistantships only lowered their borrowing rate by 12%, but 26% for white students (Miller 2020).

Fig. 2

Federal loan debt, graduate vs. undergraduate (2010–2011, 2017–2018)

Fig. 3

Median undergraduate vs graduate federal loan debt by race/ethnicity

These statistics are more important when coupled with citation rates for Black social scientists, especially those in “me-studies.” Reduced visibility of our scholarship based on journal “quality” means fewer citations of scholars’ work mean less competitiveness on the job market, and in the field as a whole. And finally, the overrepresentation of Black faculty in contingent positions, in part, a culmination of low citation rates, and disciplinary invalidation of research they may conduct in Black communities, makes upward social mobility for Black sociologists very difficult.

That for Black people the tenure process is “bitter and traumatic (Brown-Collins and Bronstein 2007)” reflects the structures and culture of higher education as perpetually penal for non-Black faculty. In hiring and firing, universities reify their willingness to ignore Black scholars “‘as sites of vital knowledge production in the academy” (Davis 2019, p.2), a position that is solidified in disproportionate salaries for Black scholars, both on and off the tenure-track. The average salary for a new assistant professor of sociology in the 2018–2019 academic year was $66,000, $78,000 for associate professors, and $104,000 for full professors (CUP-HR 2019). Black faculty earned on average $10,000 - $15,000 less annually at every level in comparison to these average salaries (Li and Koedel 2017). Moreover, because we are more likely saddled with bad debt (Seamster 2019), six-figure student loans, and financial obligations to extended family than white scholars, what may seem like a small difference in monthly take-home pay becomes a wide gulf in potential wealth accumulation and therefore upward social mobility.

In 2016, the median net worth of white families was four times greater than Black families. In comparison to other minorities’ relationship to rates of white wealth, Black families have the lowest (Dettling et al. 2017). When considering educational attainment, the numbers are even worse. White families headed by an individual who completed a bachelor’s degree or higher have a median net worth of $397,000, almost six times as much as Black families headed by someone with the same level of education (Dettling et al. 2017). Considering that Black scholars’ contributions to the field have been downplayed for over 100 years, that we enter higher education with more debt, less wealth, and are more likely to work in contingent positions, or be denied tenure for subjective, sometimes non-sensical reasons, that our economic position is severely damaged by participation in higher education should not be a surprise.

There are continual modest increases in the number of doctorates awarded to Black scholars, up to 5.4% in 2017, but there were also more than 12 fields which did not graduate a single Black Ph.D. in the same year (Kang 2017). Across the discipline tenure rates for Black scholars are relatively unchanged over the last 50 years (ASA 2018). For those of us who complete doctorates, the payoff is also greatly diminished (Harris 2019), a reflection of our hierarchal position in higher education. The figure below (Fig. 4) details how the vilification of “me-search” leads to low publication rates, low tenure-track job placement, and low tenure rates of Black faculty, and ultimately the diminished economic position that results. “Me-search” is discounted and marginalized because it does not center whiteness, which leads to difficulties in academic job placement, and in publishing that directly affect tenure potential and decisions, especially in the top 20 sociology programs. Likewise, the inability to benefit from all the financial benefits that come from being cited widely and in “high impact” journals, including paid speaking and writing gigs, as well as placement in high paying (read: top 20) departments negatively impacts our economic outcomes compared to our non-Black scholar peers.

Fig. 4

The impact on “me-search” attacks for Black social scholars

Conclusions

In many ways, the diminished position of Black social scientists across the discipline clearly illustrates how much perceived “fit” in academic departments, in academic positions, and across top academic journals unfairly punishes Black race scholars, both professionally and economically. The likelihood that Black sociologists focus their research on issues of race and racism make us less desirable candidates for jobs at predominately white institutions (PWIs) that are the majority of colleges and universities. In fact, that Black scholars are found in greatest concentrations at HBCUs (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 2009) reifies how little our scholarship and pedagogy is valued at PWIs.

What results instead, is a culture of predatory inclusion in higher education where Black faculty are awarded doctorates and hired into PWIs without establishing the necessary supports important to our professional success. Lack of clear and consistent training in qualitative methodology, reflexivity, and identity perpetuates the superficial study of race and ethnicity in the discipline, even though there has been considerable expansion of the study of race in sociology over the last 50 years (Niemonen 1997; Hartmann et al. 2003). Subsequently, Black scholars are exposed to psychological, professional, and economic traumas where judgments of our work are rarely objective themselves and have little control over what and who can be “objective.”

The racial demographics of journal editorial boards, sociology departments, and “race/ethnicity” specialists in the discipline are not merely suggestive of racial bias. Taken together they show the dominance of whiteness in the discipline, but also the perpetual marginalization of Black scholars. Race scholarship has long been defined via the white male gaze of scientists whose perceived objectivity is innate. The impact of this racial dominance in the discipline extends beyond visibility into hiring, impact on the field, and most importantly, income and wealth accumulation of its scholars. It is not by accident that Black scholars make less, are published less, and focus our research on Black communities more. Our diminished position in higher education is a product of the invalidation of the research most important to Black scholars. It is a deliberate and perpetual choice by the gatekeepers of the discipline to limit our potential for professional success.