Racial Justice in the Marketplace of Ideas

    Forty acres and a mule.   Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work. A March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

For African Americans, economic security has always been the ticket to the promised land. But, for all its considerable progress, the black freedom struggle has never managed to punch that ticket. Why has economic justice for black people proved so elusive? Why are black Americans in 2017 twice as likely to be unemployed as white Americans—as they have been almost every year on record? Why does the median black family possess one-tenth the wealth of their white analog? The three books under review here provide fresh insight into these questions.

For Leah Gordon, a key part of the answer lies in how the social scientific establishment came to define “the race question” in the years after World War II. From Power to Prejudice reminds us that antiracist thought flourished in the 1920s and 1930s. Borrowing Charles Tilly’s useful heuristic, Gordon organizes this diverse intellectual ecosystem into “dispositional” analyses that focused on individual psychology, “systemic” frameworks that pointed to group conflict and hierarchies, and “relational” interpretations that centered on political economy. Fed by the upwelling of leftist thought during the New Deal era, this ecosystem nurtured some of the most incisive and durable analyses of racism in the United States.

As Gordon shows, however, the climate that gave rise to this intellectual ferment turned increasingly hostile through the 1940s. Gordon disentangles the factors that drove this change, including external political threats like the targeting of leftist academics by McCarthyites as well as pressures internal to the social sciences, such as the revival of scientism, which eschewed the entanglement of intellectual life with politics. Smartly, by focusing on a handful of institutions, Gordon gauges how these “diverse causal pressures” impinged upon the production of knowledge about racism (p. 4). The Rockefeller Foundation, for instance, a vital source of funding for social science research, came under investigation for “subversive activities” in the 1950s, leading it to shift support away from controversial research projects (pp. 22–23). They wanted “data and not trouble,” as one critic put it (p. 51). At the University of Chicago–based Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations, advances in attitude-survey methods along with the interests of local activists combined to promote research that they hoped would reduce urban “racial tensions” by targeting individual prejudice (p. 23).

Although these financial, methodological, and political forces pressed against specific institutions differently, the overall effect was uniform. They shifted research toward “dispositional” types of analysis, narrowing the range of antiracist thought to what Gordon calls “racial individualism.” By privileging interpretations of racism that focused on prejudice and discrimination, “racial individualism” channeled the struggle for racial justice toward “changing white minds and protecting African American rights” (p. 2). Moreover, it supported reforms central to the political project of postwar racial liberalism, namely anti-prejudice education, antidiscrimination laws, and legal challenges to segregation.

“Racial individualism” held clear appeal to institutions that sought to avoid highly charged social issues, such as the Rockefeller Foundation or the National Conference of Christians and Jews, an ecumenical organization dedicated to the anodyne goal of “social harmony.” But, interestingly, Gordon finds that this paradigm also made headway in unlikely places such as Fisk University’s Race Relations Institute and The Journal of Negro Education. These redoubts of black intellectual life continued to develop more radical “relational” or “systemic” analyses through the 1950s. Sensitive to the challenges of translating such ideas into viable reforms, however, intellectuals at these institutions felt the...