A Bridge Over Troubled Urban Waters

Abstract

Generating new understandings of the contributions of W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro (1899) for sociology and social science more generally, this article posits that the urban analysis provided in the book demonstrates how interwoven cultural and economic factors undergird the social organization of urban communities more so than any pragmatic economic pattern or logic. It is the interwoven nature of these factors (defined in this article as the counterintuitive economic logics of the study) that have been insufficiently acknowledged in recent decades of social scientific urban studies research. Exploring the interwoven nature of cultural and economic factors in the sustenance of Philadelphia's Black Seventh Ward, this article suggests that the agency of African Americans is a critical, yet undervalued, aspect of their urban living. This article situates W. E. B. Du Bois as the first of some later voices (mostly within urban ethnography) that offer a corrective and alternative to urban spatial conceptual frameworks that did not and do not fully account for the persistent influence of race and the agency of racial minorities on the landscape of American cities.

Royalty, Racism, and Risk

“…Scholars are already engaged in such inquiry by examining or reexamining Du Bois's origins and foundations as a scholar/activist (Wright II 2002, 2006; often contradictory racial, gender, and sexual politics (Carby 2007;Elam and Taylor, 2007); place as one of the originators of intersectionality (Hancock 2005); work on race, place, and space (Hunter 2013); and, centrality in the formation of the discipline of sociology (Morris 2017;Morris and Ghaziani, 2005). This scholarly list is not exhaustive and bodes well for a NMDMI.…”

W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Book History

“…For example, Marcus Hunter considers the sociological concept of heterogeneity-assessing and evaluating the variability of social conditions and experiences-to contextualize Du Bois's "Black heterogeneity," an analytical framework that accounts for the multilayered, diverse complexity of Black lives on their own terms (M. A. Hunter 2013Hunter , 2015aHunter , 2015b. In addition to Hunter's studies, scholars have explored The Philadelphia Negro's other sociological and historical contents, along with the wider sociological research he continued during his career.…”

“…Scholars often highlight The Philadelphia Negro ’s academic interventions that over a century after its publication remain germane to the study of cities and multiethnic populations in urban settings. For example, Marcus Hunter considers the sociological concept of heterogeneity—assessing and evaluating the variability of social conditions and experiences—to contextualize Du Bois’s “Black heterogeneity,” an analytical framework that accounts for the multilayered, diverse complexity of Black lives on their own terms (M. A.…”