The thinker must think for truth, not for fame
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903
W. E. B. Du Bois is a figure of legendary stature, with
accomplishments that run from the purely academic to the profoundly
political. In the Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on
Race, we at once memorialize and aim to continuously re-energize
one core strand of the great man's life work: namely, Du
Bois's legacy as a producer and catalyst for critical scholarship
on the global problem of race. As had no other social scientist of his
generation when he began, nor any other over his long life course, Du
Bois gazed with the most penetrating intensity into what may
figuratively be called “the soul” of the problem of race
and he saw just how central a role race would play in the future of
human affairs far into an unwritten future.
The Du Bois Review (henceforth DBR) aims to fill
what is now a large and increasingly obvious intellectual lacunae:
scholars across the social sciences are vigorously examining race but
have no common vehicle or site for mutual exchange, colloquy, and
cross-fertilization of ideas. From anthropology, economics, history,
political science, psychology, and sociology to communications,
education, law, public policy, and urban planning, scholars with a
serious empirical ethos and distinctive disciplinary approaches and
questions are interrogating the social meaning and dynamics of race. We
believe that it is imperative to establish a forum where cutting edge
work across these many fields and their unique analytical approaches
can be brought together. DBR will be that forum.
DBR will be an outlet for research and perspectives too
often silenced or marginalized in the past. To be sure, the social
sciences now embody some major changes from Du Bois's era. But
also, we believe, some telling continuities with the past linger still.
With regard to positive change, today there are more scholars of
African American, Asian American, Native American, and Latino/a
heritage than ever before in the academy. Many of these individuals, in
fact, now occupy influential statuses and positions in what were once
exclusively White intellectual enclaves of the most prestigious reaches
of the academy. The very existence of this journal and the many
distinguished scholars on our international advisory board speak to the
profound reach of this change. Yet, and reflective of a continuity with
Du Bois's time, minority scholars remain sorely under-represented
at leading research institutions and still too often find that the
critical analyses and ideas animating their work cannot find receptive
audiences at many traditional disciplinary publication outlets. Most
sadly, the turmoil of racial conflict, disadvantage, and oppression
continue to wreak havoc in our and many other societies.
Our intellectual beginning points, commitments, and presumptions in
launching this new journal importantly mirror those of Du Bois. One of
the primary goals of DBR is to provide a forum that showcases
the very best empirical scholarship and thinking on the African
American experience while providing for vigorous intellectual exchange.
But our interests are by no means exhausted by a concern with the Black
experience in the U.S. Because even to understand this experience, as
Du Bois insisted again and again, requires engagement with a host of
intersecting concerns. Thus, we are just as committed to work taking up
issues involving the entire African Diasporic milieu.
Furthermore, our understanding of race and the social dynamics
embraced and influenced by it is broad. We fully expect to publish work
that addresses issues of ethnicity, immigration, assimilation, and
nationalism in whatever context and circumstance these concepts and
categories are of utility to serious empirical social researchers. The
last twenty years of history in the United States and large areas of
the world highlight the need to examine racial conflicts and questions
which involve many other racial groups and ethnicities. In the United
States the racial terrain has become considerably more complex and
necessitates moving beyond a solely Black-White paradigm. We shall
strive to make the DBR reflect the complexity of the racial
terrain found in the world today. As a result, we expect to publish
work dealing with topics as varied as the struggles of Mexican American
day-laborers in Southern California, the increasing
“racialization” of Arab-Americans in the wake of September
11th, the rights of Native Americans and other indigenous
peoples around the world, the politics of affirmative action in Brazil,
and reactions to new immigration flows in Western Europe. What is more,
if the scholarship of the past two to three decades has taught one
thing, it is that race cannot be properly understood if de-coupled from
an understanding of class and economic dynamics, gender and sexuality
issues, or age and generational status.
Each issue of DBR opens with remarks from the editors and is
then organized in three substantive sections. The brief statement from
the editors, aside from setting the context for any given issue of
DBR, may take up an array of issues in the academy and society
at large that impinge upon race and ethno-racial dynamics.
The second section, which we call “State of the
Discipline,” is where broad gauge essays and provocative
think-pieces will appear. Many disciplines now have journals dedicated
to these types of essays, such as the American Psychologist
(from psychology), the Journal of Economic Perspectives (from
economics), Contexts (from sociology), and Perspectives on
Politics (from political science) that to a degree are models of
the types of essays we seek to publish here. Because part of our
mission is to facilitate interdisciplinary communication and
cross-fertilization these “state of the discipline” pieces
will sometimes take the form of strong, accessible treatments of major,
well established research agendas or paradigms in particular
sub-fields.
We have two exceptionally strong entries in this inaugural issue.
Distinguished sociologist and demographer Douglas S. Massey provides a
tightly argued specification of how racial discrimination in the
housing market results in exposure to greater levels of neighborhood
disorder and violence. This exposure to disorder and violence, he
argues, exacerbates “allostatic load”—the bodily,
physiological responses to stress—experienced by African
Americans, thereby triggering a series of health and other performance
and behavioral problems. This provocative essay, like the piece by
noted political scientist and feminist scholar Cathy Cohen, sets the
tone for grounded empirical social science that moves to bold
reformulations of ideas that we expect for “state of the
discipline” articles.
The second section, which we call “State of the Art,” is
where new empirical research appears. On the one hand, work in this
section should be appropriate for submission to the American
Economic Review, the American Political Science Review,
or the American Sociological Review, or similar journals. On
the other hand, we fully expect to publish articles that many
disciplinary-based journals will not, either because of the
marginalization of racial research within their fields or due to the
multi-disciplinary nature of the research. We should stress that work
spanning a number of systematic research methodologies and topical
concerns are welcome. Ethnography, participant observation, in-depth
interviews, comparative historical work, content and media analyses, as
well as systematic laboratory experiments, social survey analyses, and
census type analyses are all welcomed. In this inaugural issue of
DBR we publish four state of the art pieces that strongly
underscore a number of the goals we have for the journal. All of the
pieces, of course, report original empirical research. Dawson and
Popoff explore the politics of reparations using newly designed and
collected national sample survey data. Mark Sawyer and his colleagues
exemplify the diasporic reach of DBR in carrying tests of
basic social psychological identity processes using samples from Cuba,
the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Kimberly Torres and Camille
Charles provide a richly textured and detailed qualitative examination
of how negative racial stereotypes affect life on elite college
campuses. And Bobo and Johnson use a series of innovative survey-based
experiments to test the limits of punitive thinking and the apparently
insatiable “taste for punishment” that characterizes public
opinion about criminal justice policy in the U.S.
The third regular section, which we call “State of the
Discourse,” is where expansive book reviews, special feature
essays, and occasional debates will appear. Again, this inaugural issue
highlights key intellectual commitments of this journal. The essays
themselves are more detailed, rigorous, and fulsome than the typical
scholarly journal book review. The subject matter ranges from
interactions between Asian Americans, Jews, and Blacks in major cities
(Fox), to global perspectives on the dynamics of race and racism
(Bonilla-Silva), to assessment of traditional normal science
quantitative research on Black-White relations (Sanders and Hutchings).
Future issues will set an even broader topical agenda and aim to
stimulate at least as much controversy as does this first strong set of
essays. Future issues will include critical examinations of the work of
John McWhorter, Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom, and Dinesh
D'Souza.
This journal will carry forward three abiding commitments typified by
W. E. B. Du Bois. First, DBR is fundamentally committed to the
publication of new empirical research and innovative theory development
that involves direct colloquy with the best empirical research. We
share Du Bois's early conviction that theory detached from
systematic and careful research results in “vast generalizations
… but actual scientific accomplishment lags (Du Bois 1940 [1995], p. 51).”
Second, if there is a value-presumption that the editors of
DBR should declare at the outset it is that we accept and
presume the full humanity of all those who have been trapped in various
parts of the world on the wrong side of the color line (or caste,
class, or gender system of inequality). Such a presumption does not
dictate any particular conclusion or approach or rule out any field or
line or research, but it does immediately problematize and challenge a
longstanding bias in the social sciences toward “othering”
and “pathologizing” the conditions and attributes of those
struggling against systems of inequality and oppression. In this, we
echo the position Du Bois declared in the preface to his magisterial
work Black Reconstruction in America: “I am going to
tell this story as though Negroes were ordinary human beings, realizing
that this attitude will from the first seriously curtail my
audience” (Du Bois 1935, p. xix).
In this regard, DBR will not shy away from either
controversy or from strong work which presents a normative perspective.
Du Bois insisted that his scholarship be both of the highest quality
and serve the needs of the disadvantaged of society (Du Bois 1898, 1899). While
insisting on the highest intellectual standards, we will also embrace
work that in addition seeks to address the burning political, social,
and cultural debates on race that roil the nation and indeed the
world.
Third, DBR insists upon high and rigorous standards of
review for scholarship, as rigorous as those applied in any other major
social science outlet. Du Bois reminds us that great scholarly
accomplishments, minds, and ideas rise above the many impositions of
“the veil” of race. As he wrote in The Souls of Black
Folk:
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color
line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and
welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening
that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the
stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they
all come graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with
Truth, I dwell above the Veil (Du Bois 1903,
p. 102).
DBR and the community of social science scholars it serves
and represents will develop new knowledge, re-shape ideas, and
influence society not by succumbing to one partial set of experiences
or perspectives, or by lowering the bar for judging scholarship. Our
distinctive contribution to advancing knowledge and improving society
will stem from always bringing the best that social science has to
offer to fashioning a deeper understanding of when, how, where, and why
race matters.
