Alternative View of Modernity: The Subaltern Speaks

Abstract

This article derives from my 2021 ASA presidential address. I examine how sociologists including Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and white American sociologists have omitted key determinants of modernity in their accounts of this pivotal development in world history. Those determinants are white supremacy, western empires, racial hierarchies, colonization, slavery, Jim Crow, patriarchy, and resistance movements. This article demonstrates that any accounts omitting these determinants will only produce an anemic and misleading analysis of modernity. The central argument maintains that the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois developed a superior analysis of modernity by analytically centering these determinants. I conclude by making a case for the development of an emancipatory sociology in the tradition of Du Boisian critical sociological thought.

Subjective dignity and self-reported health: Results from the United States before and during the Covid-19 pandemic

“…These pre- and during-pandemic epidemiological findings add to ethnographic research into dignity as an intellectual, theoretical concept, which is separate from lay understandings of dignity within individual lives. While current conditions certainly can uphold a sense that one is in fact a whole or deserving person in society, it also is possible that dignity carries origins in a deeper, firsthand knowledge about systemic oppressions, gained by women, Blacks, and other marginalized individuals through continued dealings with discrimination or injustice ( Oeur, 2016 ; Morris, 2022 ). Shifts in dignity could indicate dynamic shifts in political, economic, or social circumstances, which can be difficult to measure.…”

The Soils of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theories of Environmental Racialization

“…Environmental sociologists call for a disciplinary reckoning with the climate crisis (Dietz, Shwom, and Whitley 2020;Elliott 2018;Klinenberg, Araos, and Koslov 2020;Norgaard 2019). Sociologists of race and colonialism call for the reflexive transformation and "decolonization" of the discipline's theories, methods, and questions to reckon with enduring racial violence and domination (Bhambra and Holmwood 2021;Burawoy 2021;Connell 2018;Go 2013;Itzigsohn and Brown 2020;Morris 2017Morris , 2022Patterson 2019;Steinmetz 2013).…”

Racecraft as a Challenge to the Sociology of Race

“…Bonilla-Silva (1997) is also quite explicit in adopting the “takes on a life of its own” framing, noting with reference to slavery that “the motivation for racializing human relations may have originated in the interests of powerful actors, but after social systems are racialized, all members of the dominant race participate in defending and reproducing the racial structure” (p. 473n16). Similarly, Aldon Morris (2022), in his call for a more Du Boisian sociology, argues that “the ideology that the white race was inherently superior was developed meticulously by elite whites and intellectuals to justify brutal white rule” (p. 4). Here, White supremacy is developed to justify an already-racialized system of rule, exemplifying the kind of circularity the Fieldses criticize.…”