The continuing reality of racism

source: https://www.kff.org/key-data-on-health-and-health-care-by-race-and-ethnicity/?entry=health-status-and-outcomes-birth-risks-and-outcomes

The rightwing extremist war on DEI intensifies by the week, it appears. And the scope of its prohibitions expands as well. Universities throughout the United States are being bullied through the threat of the loss of Federal funds -- sometimes in the billions -- unless all traces of DEI programs, offices, webpages, and staff are erased. But recall what DEI signifies: it abbreviates the ideas of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. And these ideas are fundamental to the idea of a free community of equals in a multicultural society. An administration and a movement that cares nothing about racial discrimination is now of the opinion that DEI exists primarily as a form of "white exclusion". It does not. Rather, it exists to help ensure that people of all backgrounds and identities are treated fairly, respectfully, and inclusively. And regrettably, the social outcomes across the population of the United States with respect to characteristics that profoundly matter to every human being -- longevity, health status, educational status, income, job mobility, and residential freedom -- demonstrate that the US is still a great distance from welcoming diversity, ensuring fairness and equity, and creating environments that are genuinely inclusive for all groups. 

These disparities are especially pronounced with regard to race in America. It is especially timely, therefore, to welcome the publication of Race and Inequality in American Politics by Zoltan Hajnal, Vincent Hutchins, and Taeku Lee (Cambridge University Press, 2025). The book is outstanding. It is factually detailed, it makes sophisticated use of population data and public opinion studies, and it is honest in confronting the shameful realities of persistent patterns of racial discrimination, exclusion, and disadvantage that continue to exist in our country. As they put it in the opening chapter, "Our views on racial inequality and democratic politics -- whether and how they are related -- are not based on doctrinal assertions or theoretical assumptions. Rather, as social scientists, we follow the evidence" (11). As for the current realities, they believe the evidence is clear. "It is also beyond dispute that across most measures of social, economic, and political well-being America remains a nation with a clear racial hierarchy and profoundly uneven outcomes. On almost every core metric, there are sharp differences in average well-being by race with Whites and Asian Americans often falling near the top of the racial spectrum and Backs, Latinos, Native Americans, and others often residing near the bottom of that hierarchy with lower incomes, less wealth, higher rates of poverty and unemployment, more limited educational attainment, and worse health outcomes" (14). Each of these summary judgments is clearly documented in the following pages. (See also the KFF report on racial health disparities from which the graph of maternal mortality outcomes above is drawn. This graph shows that maternal mortality for the black population is about 2.6 times the rate as that for the white population.)

The book considers many aspects of racial difference in the United States today. But a central concern is about race in the politics of the US democracy. How does race affect turnout in elections? How does it affect the actions of state legislatures when redistricting occurs -- creating the possibility or likelihood of gerrymandering? How have changes in voter registration laws had differential effects on white and black voters? And how do differences in voter participation behavior seem to influence the policy preferences and choices of elected officials? In each case the authors document a pattern of disadvantage for black voters.

The war on DEI -- waged against the universities, private companies, and government health agencies like the CDC and the NIH -- is clearly intended to silence research on historical and ongoing patterns of racial discrimination and disadvantage, and to cripple the dissemination of research on these topics. This is unconscionable for multiple reasons -- reasons concerning the freedom to engage in scientific and academic research on any topic; more fundamentally, reasons concerning the truthful telling of history; and most importantly, reasons having to do with the hope that our multicultural democracy can genuinely address and eliminate the institutional and structural features of our society that continually reproduce disparities based on race and ethnicity. It is a symptom of the inclination towards white supremacy and racial antagonism within the rightwing populist movement that this war is being pursued with such fierce and unrelenting determination. Students at every level, and researchers at every level, should have the freedom and encouragement to follow the lead of Race and Inequality in American Politics, and to endeavor to understand and address the climate of racial discrimination in which we all live.

Rethinking Analytical Sociology

My current book Rethinking Analytical Sociology has now appeared in print. The book is intended to provide a sympathetic but critical review of analytical sociology as a relatively new sub-discipline within sociology. Here is a video preview of the book.

The book argues that the "generativist" approach offered by analytical sociologists is suitable to a fairly specific range of problems within sociology, and that it has achieved genuine empirical and theoretical successes within that range. However, the field is hampered by an overly rigid commitment to methodological individualism and to a fairly thin theory of the motivations and mental frameworks of the actors who make up social processes. The book also argues that the field also minimizes the "autonomous" causal role that is played in social processes by social arrangements, institutions, and cognitive schemes. Third, the generativist paradigm has led practitioners of analytical sociology to place too much explanatory reliance on agent-based modeling. 

The book generally applauds the importance given by analytical sociologists to the role played in social explanations by well-developed accounts of the causal mechanisms that bring about an outcome of interest. But their commitment to methodological individualism hampers the analytical-sociology tradition from adequately understanding the causal processes in the social world because they are led to insist that "all causal mechanisms take place ultimately at the level of individuals". This is to say, social institutions, normative systems, cultural schemes, or organizational imperatives cannot be invoked as independent social causes or included in descriptions of social mechanisms. And, crucially, it is then impossible to capture the dynamic processes through which structures influence individuals and their actions, and individuals in turn alter some of the characteristics of the structures they inhabit and constitute.

Against these methodological premises, Rethinking Analytical Sociology argues that many tasks of sociological investigation require attention to a "thick" understanding of the actor's mentality (culture, norms, ways of reasoning). Second, many social processes cannot be properly understood without recognizing the dynamic and fluid causal role played by higher-level social structures. And third, agent-based modeling unavoidably requires a level of abstraction about actors and social situations that forces the researcher to ignore important and particular features of both actors and structures. The book suggests, for example, that Doug McAdam's account of the US Civil Rights struggle and extended events like the Montgomery bus boycott cannot be explained on the basis of a fixed set of institutional-context parameters and a simple set of "desire-belief-opportunity" features of the actors. (McAdam's Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency provides an outstanding example of a comparative historical sociology analysis of an extended, complex, and multilayered social process.)

Rethinking Analytical Sociology closes with a set of problems for sociological research that would currently be difficult to handle within the strictures of existing methodological dogmas in analytical sociology, but for which the tools of analytical sociology could nonetheless contribute fruitfully if these dogmas were relaxed. The examples include -- 

• explaining racial health disparities in the United States, 
• explaining the rapid rise of radical populism in liberal democracies, 
• explaining large technology failures, 
• explaining the pathways through which new disciplines of thought emerge in academic fields, and
• explaining the worldwide surge of migration and how this has led to political and economic turmoil in numerous countries.

Each of these areas of ongoing social processes involves actors who are embedded in history and culture, social arrangements that interact with individual behavior in sometimes unexpected ways, and causal influences that operate on multiple levels of social life. There are some aspects of these problems that are very suitable to generative models, network analysis, and models of contagion from individual to individual; but there are also aspects of these problems that involve dynamic and interactive causal influences between individuals and meso-level institutions and cultural systems.

In short, Rethinking Analytical Sociology offers an appeal for a more pluralistic and collaborative approach to sociology. There are obvious points of intersection between numerous sub-fields of sociology -- for example, the study of contentious politics, comparative historical sociology, or the new institutionalism -- where collaboration would be fruitful. The social world is heterogeneous and contingent, and we need a plurality of theories and methods in order to make sense of the processes and crises we now experience.