Chicago sociology framed racial inequality as civil society rather than state policy

Evidence

In its early days, ethnicitybased theory concentrated on problems of migration and what Park called “culture contact.”!! The approach was largely ethnographic and tended to downplay conflict, not to mention racial politics. This limited the early work in numerous ways and reflected a largescale neglect of black scholarship, notably that of W.E.B. Du Bois but also work by Alain Locke, William Monroe Trotter, Kelly Miller, Anna Julia Cooper, Monroe Work, and numerous others. Park’s aversion to political sociology and insistence on valuefree methodology -always a chimera in social scientific research- inhibited the effectiveness of Chicago sociology as racial critique. Racial inequality and injustice were not seen as outcomes or objects of state policy, but as phenomena of civil society. Lacking a focus on the racial state, Park (and to varied extents the Chicago researchers he mentored) argued that racial conflict itself would gener- since blacks were ceived their degrees acknowledged to under Park (Steinhave the ability to berg 2007). — Michael Omi, Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 41

Categorization

• XREF: Directly prefigures the ‘racial state’ claim that anchors Omi & Winant’s own thesis — the vault’s existing racial-formation claims can cite this as the genealogy of the concept.