Historical Foundations of Black Reflective Sociology by John H Stanfield II

Author:John H Stanfield II [Stanfield, John H II]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9781315427355
Google: qLNJDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-06-03T03:22:59+00:00

Amenable Racial Differences

Major race relations researchers assumed the "Negro problem" could be resolved through moral assimilation, e.g., "proper" education, family organization, and personality development, and through marginal economic integration. This conventional wisdom was rooted in beliefs about the origins of Black-White differences and the conceptual tools used to describe problematic empirical attributes of black social life. The common premise was: Black-White differences were not products of fixed racial differences. To assume otherwise would have discouraged the optimistic belief that the resolution of the "Negro problem" was a matter of disintegrating features of black social life which hindered moral assimilation and marginal economic integration.

Although the above explains why dominant presuppositions underlying race relations research between the World Wars emphasized amenable human differences, i.e., environmental and structural attributes rather than fixed attributes., i.e., biological or instinctual, this is not to say there were no interwar race relations researchers who used evolutionary perspectives to explain racial differences in cultural development or environment. Most of the few who did so differed from pre-World War I evolutionary proponents in moving away from biological, i.e., "blood" arguments. Those researchers who used biological referents in their publications did not use Social Darwinian or race antipathetic conceptions. Contrary to the pre-1930 years, especially before World War I, the interwar biological theme included the issues of passing, the possible disappearance of "Negro traits," and the influence of skin color in the social stratification and personality development.14

The disdain for arguments which stressed inherent racial differences was exemplified in a controversy between Louis Wirth, the major race relations sociologist at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s and Gustav Ichheiser, a Gestalt psychologist. In an article entitled "Sociopsychological and Cultural Factors in Race Relations," in the 1949 volume of the American Journal of Sociology, Ichheiser claimed that:

Since members of different racial groups, like white people and Negroes, look significantly different, they have a very strong tendency to consider each other not only as looking but also as being different and, consequently, as belonging to two different groups. The degree of disparity between the bodily appearance plays, as experience shows, an important role. They have this very strong, possibly irresistibly (sic) strong, tendency, whether they were explicitly aware of it or not, whether they honestly admit it or hypocritically deny it, whether they would be able to define what this "being different" means or not. This means that this basic socio-sensory perception of difference in physique plays a powerful role in the unconscious, group identification.15

Additionally, in a footnote, Ichheiser criticized comments Wirth made which implied racial prejudice was a social construct rather than "instinctuals" and hence could be modified or even eliminated.

Whereas Dr. Wirth ... wants to unmake what he, in a confused way, defines as "prejudice," I, in this footnote, am trying to unmake the man-made misconceptions of Dr. Wirth about prejudices ... the statement by Wirth is, to my mind, socially harmful because, instead of promoting a realistic understanding of the basic problems, it rather increases the confusion by

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