America’s Experts: Race and the Fictions of Sociology (review)

In her compelling book, America’s Experts: Race and the Fictions of Sociology, Cynthia H. Tolentino observes that in the middle of the twentieth century, “the field of sociology had become the authoritative discourse on race in the United States” and consequently, “the academic sociologist of race offered a powerful model of a professional knowledge producer” (61). While the white social scientist was thus constructed as the preeminent expert on racial reform, African American, Filipino, and Asian American writers struggled to reconcile opposing roles as both racial problems and professionalized subjects. Focusing on texts by Richard Wright, Gunnar Myrdal, Carlos Bulosan, and Jade Snow Wong, Tolentino presents “a genealogy of the modern, professional racialized class of color” (x), exploring the tensions inherent to belonging to marked identity groups that threaten to undermine the “objectivity” deemed necessary for scholarly production. This approach reveals sociology as “a nationalist discourse that calls into being a nationalist epistemology” (xi). By examining how intellectuals of color navigated the related discourses of benevolent integration, immigrant assimilation, and racial reform, Tolentino provides key insight into the intersecting processes of racialization, objectification, and professionalization within a transnational context. Efforts to professionalize minority communities generated the ideology of the “model minority” which requires internal cultural change while denying conditions of inequality between social groups. Such tensions produced the fraught movement between subject and object that Tolentino characterizes as emblematic of intellectuals of various ethnic communities. Exploring how African American, Filipino, and Asian American histories contribute to an understanding of the intellectual and political foundations of racial formations, America’s Experts demonstrates the vital importance of comparative ethnic studies.

Tolentino begins with an engaging study of Wright’s affiliation with the Communist Party which, she argues, provided him with an escape from sociology’s mandate for economic and cultural assimilation. Communism allowed Wright to evaluate prevailing racial paradigms even as he came to understand that the Party also conceived of African Americans as social problems. Wright’s conception of the writer of color contextualizes discourses on the professionalized subject by highlighting concerns about the nation’s ultimate ambitions and the institutionalization of race experts. In a persuasive close reading of Native Son (1939), Tolentino demonstrates how Wright exposes the contradictions of universalism and particularism by showcasing that racial difference is already embedded in Bigger Thomas’s relationship to society. Chapter Two critiques one of the central concerns of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944)—namely, the notion that professionalizing black subjects was a necessary component of domestic national reform and the promotion of America’s authority abroad. According to Tolentino, Myrdal envisions “a U.S.-trained professional class of color that could be exported as U.S. representatives and agents to developing nations” (32). By situating Myrdal’s project in a global context, Tolentino’s analysis relates African American knowledge production to the model of tutelary assimilation adopted by US colonial policy in the Philippines. This conceptual shift sheds new light on Myrdal’s influential text, which has most often been read through the dynamic of white/black US race relations while also expanding conventional understandings of forms of US imperialism pre- and post-World War II. This fresh examination of a foundational text in US liberal discourse on race provides a much-needed discussion of the interrelated projects of domestic racial reform, social engineering through education, and American interventions abroad.

In Chapter Three, this discussion is extended to the ways in which Filipinos and Filipino Americans were constructed as experts on the processes involved in Americanization. Referencing texts by Bulosan, Bienvenido Santos, and F. Sionil José through their collective emphasis on professional Filipinos, Tolentino explores how these writers engage with contested historic and representational conventions in a neocolonialist context. This approach provides an intriguing perspective on Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), which has been typically conceived as a story of identity formation through the development...