Race in the United States in Social Science History

Race in the United States in Social Science History

The idea for a special virtual issue of Social Science History (SSH) focused on race had its genesis during the 2021 meeting of the journal’s editorial board. Appropriately, the theme for the Social Science History Association’s meeting that year was “Crisis, Conjunctures, Turning Points”; the conference had been organized as a hybrid event in response to the constraints and exigencies of the public health crisis occasioned by the coronavirus pandemic. While the pandemic had radically transformed some aspects of our personal and professional lives, it had visibly and deeply reinforced others.

At the time of our meeting, we were a year into the nation’s latest “racial reckoning,” focusing renewed attention on the structural nature of racial inequities in the United States and their long historical legacies in US culture and institutions. Although often described as having been precipitated by an incident of police violence, the public protests demanding that American institutions take full stock of their complicity in sustaining structures of racial inequality had been building for nearly a decade, fueled by not only the crisis in policing, but also battles over historical monuments, rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and violent attacks committed against a range of minoritized groups.

Our general aim in assembling this issue was to curate for SSH’s readers a collection of the journal’s articles that might best represent some of the different ways that social science historians have understood, analyzed, and tried to offer insights about race. On a deeper level it was our goal, in keeping with the Social Science History Association’s intellectual mission, to try and make sense of the present racial conjuncture—to perhaps find among the journal’s previously published articles some analytic tools that might prove useful for understanding the current state of racial dynamics and their relation to the overlapping, and not unconnected, political crisis of a shift toward right-wing authoritarian populism and the economic crisis of deepening inequality under late-stage neoliberal capitalism.

To find a population of research articles and presidential addresses from which to select such representative pieces, we scoured the journal’s electronic archives, dating back to its debut issue in Fall 1976, for relevant keywords such as “race,” “racism,” or “racial.” Despite the global nature of racial inequality and parallel calls for “racial reckoning” in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, our concern with understanding racial dynamics in the United States prompted a decision to focus on gathering those pieces that analyzed the history of race in the US context. From this group of articles, we each assembled a list of favorite pieces and in a virtual meeting compared our selections in hopes of finding areas of agreement and possible areas of focus. Our group of scholars reflect the broader differences and similarities of the Social Science History Association: while we are from different disciplines, a common interest in historical processes creates connections and conversations among us. We do not claim that the selections we present here necessarily include all of the best articles that the journal has published over the decades; there are many other worthy ones that we could just as well have included, and we urge interested readers to explore the journal’s voluminous offerings on their own. Rather, we offer them as a broadly representative sample of the various themes, methods, approaches, and disciplinary perspectives that make social science history such a stimulating and necessary pursuit.

Our subsequent discussions of the journal’s published articles on race revealed both well-covered areas of study as well as important gaps. While our decision to limit our selections to analyses of the United States narrowed the scope of inquiry, it also revealed that very few of the journal’s published articles have analyzed race outside of the US context. Of those dealing with US racial dynamics, the majority have focused on the continental United States and on African Americans. This was particularly striking given the expansion in the 1980s and 1990s of a vast body of historical scholarship on Latine, Indigenous, and Asian and Pacific Islander populations in the continental United States and its territories. This pointed to the need to encourage article submissions on a range of racialized populations and in a diverse range of global settings and to think about how we might respond to the 2022 call by past SSHA president Julian Go to address the roots of racial inequality in colonialism and imperialism more fully.1

We also found markedly few published pieces that substantively addressed health as an axis of racial inequality in the United States. Freshly reminded of how a public health crisis can both disrupt everyday life while deepening existing patterns of inequality and creating new ones, we concluded this too would be an area that demands further attention among submissions.

We have organized the articles in this issue into six sections. These sections were not preordained but arose organically out of the reviewing, reading, and selection process. While we divided the articles by section, we also note that many themes cut across these sections: race, of course, cuts across them all, but other articles addressing such issues as social analysis and social policy are also relevant to more than one section. We further arranged the articles in each section in temporal order to emphasize the shifts in methodological innovations and generational debates across time. We discuss them in this introduction, however, in substantive order.

The first section of selected articles offers an overview of some of the journal’s most important interventions into the general scholarly discussion about race. These three broad conceptual essays, in different ways, make a case for race as a foundational, constitutive subject for social science history. Two are by sociologists and one by a political scientist (who was trained as a historian), so they represent some of the association’s disciplinary and intellectual range. Interestingly, they are all from the same era, suggesting that perhaps they were responding to common intellectual currents or problems in social science history as broadly understood at that moment. Ira 1999 presidential address provides a historical overview of W. E. B. Du Bois’s writing and research on race, asserting his centrality both to this area of study and to American social science more broadly. Marking an important demographic shift in the United States and supporting Du Bois’s assertion about the durability of the American color line in the face of social change, Silvia Pedraza’s article, published in 2000, identifies themes in US social science research on Latine populations, a group that by 2000 had become the nation’s largest group identified as a minority. Addressing both the cultural-linguistic turn in the social sciences and the critical intervention of intersectionality, Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s 1998 piece introduces important dimensions to the analysis of race by considering its deep and abiding links with gender and class.