Race and the Making of American Political Science by Jessica Blatt (review)

The history of political science as a discipline has been an established field of scholarly examination for a long time. As Blatt notes in this thoroughly engrossing and provocative book, leaders in this field, especially Gunnell, have recently shifted its focus from "events in the history of political science" to treatments of that history."¹ The history of political science eventually began to put the discipline into historical perspective, mapping its evolution and assessing its status as it changed over time. Blatt uniquely places that mapping under a microscope to examine the role of racism and racialized thinking in that evolution. What she finds is a devastating indictment of the discipline's failure to examine and overcome the embedded racial biases in its approaches to the study of politics.

Highlighting the historical role of race in U.S. institutions and politics is a little like shooting fish in a barrow, except for the fact that people are often reluctant to pick up the gun and start shooting. Everyone knows that the U.S. Constitution was constructed in no small part to accommodate those who wished to perpetuate the institution of slavery. Reluctantly or not, the framers to varying degrees acceded to the task, building a political society simultaneously and contradictorily committed to both equality and inequality in the most profound way possible. Slavery marked the U.S. political system as founded on racism—a stain that persists as the nation struggles to adapt its political institutions to a world that seeks to overcome that legacy. Blatt joins with Gunnell and others to show that American political science, instituted during the late nineteenth century by white people, included out-and-out racists in their ranks, most prominently John W. Burgess, a constitutional theorist who famously characterized Reconstruction as "the most soul-sickening spectacle that Americans had ever been called upon to behold" (13). Blatt reminds us that racism did not stop Woodrow Wilson, the most politically prominent American political scientist in history, from becoming president of the American Political Science Association, let alone president of the United States.

Even though people like Burgess and Wilson were eventually to become a distinct minority, embedded racism in the thinking and analytical approaches of political scientists still significantly shaped how the study of politics unfolded. Blatt joins Smith to underscore that by the 1920s, explicit consideration of race had become basically verboten in American political science, the topic consigned to the category of the "pre-political," which unfortunately made it seem natural and immutable rather than an artifact of political practice.² The race making of the state, via the census and its Jim Crow policies, was exempted from political analysis. In this context, Blatt's argument is at its strongest: American political science as a discipline had racist roots (much like the American politics it so often examined), but its legacy was sustained in large part by its denial to examine race as a political phenomenon. "Explicit disciplinary racism" gave rise over time to a latent racism sustained by denying the need to examine how racialized thinking had infiltrated political analysis. As Blatt shows, this racism haunted political scientists when they turned to the study of international relations and how the United States should interact with other countries, peoples, and states. The extended example of note in the book is about the now long-forgotten Journal of Racial Development, which re-inscribed notions of the white man's burden and racial uplift.

Blatt follows this formative period in detail by tracking closely how Charles Merriam, the leader of the pioneering Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, sought to find a way to make political science both a science and an area of study that could better realize the ideals of American democracy. Blatt notes Gunnell's observation that Merriam joined with others to emphasize "pluralism" as the focus for the study of politics centered on the examination of intergroup relations and...