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C H A P T E R O N E Still at the Margins The Persistence of Neglect of African American Issues in Political Science, 1986–2003 ERNEST J. WILSON III AND LORRIE A. FRASURE A CADEMIC DISCIPLINES are grids that provide scholars a way to divide up the world and to impose order and consistency on unruly reality. Each discipline presents a slightly different grid such that the “same” topic—for example, family, power, or equality—will be defined and situated differently relative to other topics and relative to its centrality or distance from core disciplinary concerns. For political scientists power, choice, and the state are given pride of place at the center of the field (Katznelson and Milner, 2002), whereas the study of families is more peripheral. The structure and behavior of families are far more central to sociology and anthropology. Disciplines also guide their members to study some topics more than others by providing varying constraints and rewards. In this chapter, we examine the differential treatment of race and ethnicity by the discipline of political science, comparing and contrasting it to its sister disciplines of sociology, history, and economics, with a specific focus on topics related to black issues.1 This chapter revisits and extends an earlier examination by one of the authors for the time period 1970–1985 (Wilson 1985), which was published in the political science journal PS. Wilson found that political science ranked third after sociology and history in its treatment of black topics, and the original essay offered several explanations for this hierarchy across disciplines.2 In this more comprehensive review, we extend the analysis to cover the 1986–2003 period and add the discipline of economics to determine whether the relative rankings of the disciplines have changed or largely remained the same. Our evidence, drawn from JSTOR computer-generated evaluations of mainstream journal citations covering more than three decades in each of the four disciplines , still finds significant differences across the fields in their treatment of black issues. The extent of these differences raises sharp questions about our understandings of the varying disciplinary frameworks used to study race in America , particularly as they relate to the investigation of African American issues in political science. In the third edition of Political Science: The State of the Discipline, Katznelson and Milner (2002) observe these concerns broadly and their effect on the discipline: The character of the founding of political science further helped shape its contours by pushing certain areas of inquiry into the margins. Demarcating itself from history, political science showed a greater concern for current events. To differentiate itself from sociology, it became relatively disinterested in the social basis of political action and inequality. In distinguishing itself from economics, it mainly left issues of political economy to other scholars, at least until recent decades. Further, born in the heyday of segregation, political science initially treated race as mainly beyond its ken. Later, each of these areas became contentious inside the discipline, as dissatisfied scholars sought to bring history, social analysis, political economy, and the studies of race into its core (2002, 4–5). As Katznelson and Milner point out above, political science has been relatively apathetic toward topics like the politics of race and inequality (and arguably the politics of gender and sexuality as well). Long before Katznelson and Milner’s assessment, numerous scholars in the field have examined the implications of this “disciplinary factionalism” related to the study of racial politics (see Dawson and Cohen 2002; Dawson and Wilson 1991; Prestage 1979; Walton and McCormick 1997; Walton, Miller, and McCormick 1994; Warren 2005 ; Wilson 1985). For example, Dawson and Wilson (1991) examined how different social science paradigms address African American politics. They refer to the study of African American politics as the “step child of the discipline” (1991, 192). They further contend, “The major journals usually do not feature articles on the subject . Black politics is marginalized in graduate studies programs, in American politics textbooks, and in the research priorities of agencies like the National Science Foundation” (Dawson and Wilson 1991, 190–91). Walton and McCormick (1997) examined the marginalization of black topics in the political science discipline as a form of “social danger,” arguing that “the study of the black experience is seen by the larger culture as socially unacceptable and therefore socially dangerous” (1997, 230). They draw on extensive empirical evidence from the review of materials in two journals, Political Science Quarterly and The American Political...

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