Sociological Forum, Vol. 34, No.

1, March 2019
DOI: 10.1111/socf.12488
© 2018 Eastern Sociological Society

Reproducing Inequality in Sociology

Victor E. Ray1

This essay discusses some mechanisms reproducing inequality in the discipline of sociology. I argue that
credit for communally produced ideas accrues to individual and that the discipline is governed by a kind of
“racial contract” partially governing which ideas and individuals are included. As a discipline centrally con-
cerned with inequality and stratification, I argue sociologists should employ greater reflexivity when thinking
about how disciplinary practices reproduce structures we typically critique in other contexts.

KEYWORDS: academia; classism; elitism; hierarchy; racism; sociology.

INTRODUCTION

In his profound and moving A Talk to Teachers, James Baldwin (1963) said,
“Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience, you must find your-
self at war with your society. It is your responsibility to change society if you think
of yourself as an educated person.” Baldwin was, of course, writing at the height of
the civil rights movement, as activists were stripping the flesh from skeleton of
American apartheid and putting the nation’s foundational racism on national dis-
play. As one of the most important intellectuals of civil rights movement and more
generally, Baldwin saw the point of education was not to amass power and prestige
but rather to attempt to transform society to be more inclusive, egalitarian, and
open. Of course, Baldwin’s call for intellectual warfare recognized that his responsi-
bility was to acknowledge and undermine his complicity in a set of deeply oppres-
sive systems.
Sociology, when at its best as a discipline, develops exactly the type of con-
science that animated Baldwin’s writing. I know my view of sociology as an activist
vocation makes many practitioners uncomfortable (at least those preferring the
“normal science” model of feigned objectivity). Regardless, I maintain that the dis-
cipline helps to reveal the sometimes-hidden social forces that shape our lives. Soci-
ology makes plain the racial structures that partially determine where we live
(Massey and Denton 1993), go to school (Lewis and Diamond 2015), and work
(Wilson 1996). Sociology reveals the gendered rituals that push us into sports or
servitude (Connell 2002), of that shape our desires for particular types of bodies
and who we end up loving (Buggs 2017), and sociology reveals the so-called “hidden
injuries of class” (Sennett and Cobb 1972; also see Deutschlander 2017) telling us
we don’t belong inculcating imposter syndrome (Clance and Imes 1978). Many of
us join the profession precisely because sociology helped, in Baldwin’s sense,

1
Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee Knoxville, 910 McClung Tower, Knoxville,
Tennessee 37996-0490; e-mail: vray3@utk.edu

236
Reproducing Inequality in Sociology 237

awaken our conscious to our societies vast, entrenched inequalities. Indeed, scholars
of color are more likely to say that they joined the discipline with the explicit hope
of generating knowledge that can help their communities (Brunsma, Embrick, and
Shin 2017). Once we understood the world sociology was describing, our desire, like
Marx (1976 [1845]), was to change that world.
Yet, the discipline of sociology—mired in the very structures it purports to cri-
tique—is often complicit in reproducing inequalities both internal to the profession
and writ large. In this article, I offer this critique as an implicated practitioner
devoted to a more inclusive sociology. I begin with a discussion of sociology and
attribution errors (Harman 1999), arguing that much of what we consider individ-
ual academic production is actually produced through a social process that erases
the labor of academic “subordinates” along class, racial, and gendered lines. Here, I
use the idea of the “racial contract” (Mills 1997) (as opposed to the social contract),
and draw upon the work of race scholars Aldon Morris (2015) and Earl Wright II
(2016) to argue that sociology faculty have created a kind of epistemic apartheid in
our discipline, and further, that we fail to acknowledge how that apartheid affects
our daily scholarly practices. Since my argument depends on recognizing our com-
plicity in reproducing structures of disciplinary exclusion, I call for a greater reflex-
ivity when thinking about disciplinary roles. I conclude that we wrongly accept as
natural the social construction of “professionalism” and what counts as profes-
sional, the unequal distribution of resources and recognition, and fail to reflect on
hierarchical positionality in the discipline.

PRODUCTIVITY AND ATTRIBUTION ERROR

When evaluating scholarship, we may more easily recognize how structures

influence on our own productivity than reflect on this effect in the academic lives of
others. For example, when we think about our own academic accomplishments, the
lack or abundance of resources available to balance work-life with family responsi-
bilities is probably clear. But we are often less willing to think about these things
when evaluating the work of others, although of course we all face similar structural
constraints. Psychologists call this an attribution error—the cognitive trait of
attributing personal failures to external forces while explaining other’s behavior as
dispositional (Harman 1999). For instance, we may assume that a colleague who is
late to a meeting is lazy or doesn’t take their job seriously, whereas our own lateness
is explained by bad traffic and that irritating person ahead of us who refused to
walk faster. Since sociology focuses on social structures that place external and
extra-individual constraints upon us, the idea of attribution errors might be usefully
applied to how the discipline works. The social structures that impinge on sociology
imbue its academic actors with differential agency (and thus influence one’s ability
to produce scholarship); in this way, scholarly productivity is necessarily shaped by
the differential constraints on agency.
Attribution error is often apparent when sociologists examine individual levels
of productivity or when discussing a reified job market. For instance, sociologists
studying racial differences in employment tend to recognize that black people face a
238 Ray

hiring structure that treats them in a fundamentally different (i.e., far less favorable)
way than similarly situated whites. In the broader job market of which sociology
departments are a part, racial discrimination in hiring is rampant (Pager 2003; Quil-
lian et al. 2015), and black men without a criminal record are less likely to be called
back for entry-level jobs than white men who served time. Similarly, we recognize
that labor markets are structured by gender discrimination (Acker 1990), and that
poverty greatly constrains poor people’s ability to live the lives they envision for
themselves (Sen 1999). Clearly, a central focus of sociological inquiry is the way
extra-individual factors influence individual lives. Or as C. W. Mills (2000 [1959])
famously put it, sociology is about intersection of biography and history, public
issues and personal troubles.
We treat the social structure as if it is only theoretical and external to us, and
we fail to run our departments, journals, and conferences as if we are aware of its
very real effects. It is rare that the concept of structure is consistently applied to an
understanding of so-called individual academic accomplishments.2 Specifically, the
idea that unequal structures shape individual outcomes rarely makes its way into
conversations evaluating different scholarly productivity by race, gender, or other
ascriptive identities. Here, sociologists often fall into the trap of attribution error,
rather than offer the widely recognized structural class analysis of Eric Olin Wright
(1997) or apply Bonilla-Silva’s (1997) broadly acknowledged analysis of the perva-
siveness of racial structures, or Risman’s (2004) similarly seminal analysis of gender
structures. We all know that the institutional environment of higher education is
deeply unequal. We should know that we are not exempt from the forces that create
inequality in the broader employment market. Yet we evaluate academic laborers
and institutions on so-called individual merit, presuming a fictitious level playing
field that we should know exists only in theory.
Academic hierarchies are class relationships. Yet we do not typically use class-
based language to describe academic hierarchies. More likely, we obscure the mate-
rial relationships underlying differences in scholarly productivity with reference to
Carnegie classifications or U.S. New and World Report rankings at the institutional
level. Like all class relationships, these institutionalized hierarchies allow us to
simultaneously exploit the labor of those who are subordinate in the class hierarchy,
and we ultimately reap a greater part of the benefits of that labor. Or, in Marxist
terms, using the labor power of other workers (editors, office staff) for personal
gains that do not necessarily accrue to those workers. Even more mundane, and
perhaps less exploitative aspects of intellectual production, such as helpful com-
ments from peer review, shape what gets retroactively coded as “sole authorship.”
Through these processes of labor extraction, the profoundly collective nature of
intellectual production is obscured, and we end up reifying a deeply a-sociological
notion of individuality.

2
When I talk about “structure,” I adopt a Sewellian (1992) understanding that includes the combination
of cultural scripts and access to social and material resources that are combined in such a way that they
produce, on average, relatively predictable outcomes. We should recognize that when people individu-
alize productivity, skill, and intelligence, they are often implicitly invoking the way structures enable or
curtail personal aspirations.
Reproducing Inequality in Sociology 239

The advantages of one’s position in the class (and raced, and gendered) struc-
tures of the academic hierarchy are then naturalized and legitimated through
bureaucratic processes that seemed neutral when viewed from within the evaluation
process, but is anything but neutral when considered from a class analysis stand-
point that considers resource inputs. Take, for instance, two researchers at differ-
ently ranked universities who are both applying for a grant. At the higher ranked
organization, the researcher may have access to research assistance, a grants office
that provides editorial assistance with arcane formatting requests and checks that
submission requirements are met, and a research account. None of these conditions
may hold at the lower-ranked institution. Yet, the reviewers of these two separate
grant applications will evaluate the “merit” of these two applications in the absence
of any knowledge about the conditions under which they were produced. And the
scored derived from this evaluation will be considered an objective measure of qual-
ity. Institutionally mediated resource differences are attributed to the abilities of
individual researchers.
Similar processes influence differences in graduate funding that allow students
at wealthy institutions to spend a greater amount of their time on research when
compared to, to the number of students we evaluate at differently ranked institu-
tions, to difference in available conference funding and related networking opportu-
nities, and teaching loads. And a large body of literature shows that women and
people of color (and the intersection of those categories) are more likely to bear the
burdens of unequal advising loads. In each of these cases, the benefits of collective
labor can end up being monopolized by an individual as responsibilities are out-
sourced to those lower in the academic hierarchy. Through a legitimizing organiza-
tional alchemy, group production becomes personal merit.
Typically, these institutionalized inequalities are reinforced by conferring of
ever-greater privileges to those already at the top of the higher education hierarchy
once the degree is achieved. The sociological job market clearly benefits those from
a small handful of prestigious schools as they dominate hiring across the field.
These schools pay more and afford more resources to professors at all levels of the
tenure track. These resources, which enable the ability to afford editors, travel for
research and conferences, or even pay graduate students, all contribute to what
Merton (1968) memorably called the Matthew Effect wherein he outlined how
inequalities compound over the course of a researcher’s career. Merton saw that
those who received early scientific accolades benefitted from a cumulative advan-
tage process, where they receive compounding returns to early successes. Clearly,
part of what I argue here has long been recognized in mainstream sociological the-
ory! Merton was concerned with the productivity of individual scientists through-
out their careers and framed his discussion accordingly. I take his analysis a step
further to argue that every “individual career” is ultimately a collective endeavor.
Scholarship only exists within a community of thinkers working on group-based
problems and toward a shared understanding of the social world. Individual merit
is socially constructed.
Ultimately, sociologists who neglect to take structural factors into account
when evaluating individual careers are being fundamentally a-sociological. When
we examine the influence of structures on a given set of outcomes, we typically
240 Ray

attempt to control for influence of omitted variables, employ experiments that mini-
mize potential external causes (Bertrand and Mullainathan 2004), or recruit demo-
graphically similar comparison groups in comparative qualitative work (Royster
2003). When it comes to evaluating status in the discipline, none of these typical
sociological practices apply. We could easily control for university prestige or grad-
uate school rank when discussing productivity, but we usually fail to do so. The
inability to acknowledge the centrality of social structure in shaping individual
careers is strange and at best belies an intellectual inconsistency in the application
of sociological theory. At worst, downplaying structure shows we lack the courage
of our sociological convictions.

SOCIOLOGY’S RACIAL CONTRACT

In his now classic book The Racial Contract, Charles Mills (2007) argues that
Western philosophy in general, and contract theory in particular, ignored race as
both an intellectual project and an empirical (although socially constructed) reality.
As an intellectual project, Western philosophy wrote racialized others out of the
basic protections provided by inclusion in the human family. The right to life, lib-
erty, and the pursuit of happiness was extended only to those whites whose life was
considered fully human. Mills argued that Western philosophy also ignored race as
a fundamental axis of social inequality, shaping empirical reality as it provided a
scientific (or at least philosophical) justification for the parade of atrocities—colo-
nization, chattel slavery, the several holocausts—that the West has visited upon the
world in the name of an allegedly superior culture and the inevitable progress of
said culture (Seamster and Ray 2018).
Sociology is also been structured by a racial contract that has both downplayed
the role of race as a central organizing principle of the discipline and obscured the
many ways that race currently shapes the distribution of intellectual and material
resources in the discipline. What does it mean to say race is a central organizing
principle of the discipline? First, as several scholars have pointed out, sociology
arose partially as a colonial project aimed at explaining racial difference and to
facilitate imperialist racial management (Connell 1997; Go 2013). The discipline
was founded on a kind of epistemological apartheid where the white mainstream
shaped what counted as legitimate knowledge and who gets to produce sociological
knowledge. In this understanding of how the world works, people of color were to
be studied, prodded, and experimented upon so as to better control them. In a pat-
tern all too familiar, the benefits of the knowledge produced by this episteme
accrued to whites and shored up whiteness, and the costs were often born by those
racialized and studied as racial objects (Washington 2006). In this context, ethnog-
raphy arose as a colonial project (Ralph 2015) and social statistics were developed
as part of eugenicist project aimed at proving non-white intellectual inferiority
(Zuberi 2001; Kendi 2016). In these ways, the very discipline we practice is rooted in
hierarchy and racialism. I point to these examples not to say we should abandon
these research methods, but simply to make the point that methods are never neu-
tral, they are always deployed in relation to theory, and during the foundational his-
tory of sociology non-white inferiority was the reigning theory.
Reproducing Inequality in Sociology 241

By no means have subtle assumptions of non-white inferiority been removed

from the theoretical mainstream of the discipline. This assumption may account for
the popularity of assimilationist theoretical paradigms that assume acceptance into
white supremacist society as the ultimate goal (Jung 2009; Treitler 2015). Similarly,
the prevalence of narratives that simultaneously pathologizes black culture (Patter-
son and Fosse 2015) and ignore or minimize the impact of white racist culture
(Fleming 2016) still have a strong presence in the discipline. For example, education
scholars such as Fordham and Ogbu (1986) advanced a thesis that basically asserts
that black children teasing each other for “acting white” is responsible for the test-
score gap, and others still embrace it despite its repeatedly being empirically discon-
firmed (Tyson, Darity, and Castellino 2005; Lewis and Diamond 2015). All this is
to say that at least when it comes to race, the discipline routinely entertains victim-
blaming arguments.
One of the most cherished myths of social science is that it is progressive in the
sense that better theories are supposed to replace inferior ones (Kuhn 1970 [1962]).
But sociology is itself a social product, embroiled in a political economy of knowl-
edge production. Thus, our theories are by no means immune to racial biases of
social scientists, or the agendas of funders. These theoretical paradigms, with a sub-
tle racism at their core, attract a lot of resources and have not been abandoned in
favor of uniformly structural arguments that avoid attribution errors.
The recent turn to Du Bois (Morris 2015) and the Atlanta school more broadly
(Wright 2016) has drawn more attention to the racial contract and the ways it has
helped constrain knowledge production in sociology in favor of white actors and
their scholarly output and suppressed the knowledge of people of color. For
instance, as Morris (2015) shows, Du Bois never received his rightful place in the
canon as the founder of American scientific sociology. But the work of recuperating
the legacy of these black scholars is incomplete if we continue to deny scholars who
challenge contemporary bounds of disciplinary respectability politics. These politics
often entail a “professionalism,” in terms of interactional styles, grooming choices,
and that masquerade as race neutral but is in reality an unmarked whiteness (Car-
bado, Fisk, and Gulati 2008). The unequal opportunity structure extends to gradu-
ate students of color who suffer with high degrees of attrition and lodge numerous
complaints about inadequate mentorship (Brunsma et al. 2017). In sum, whose
work gets promoted at conferences and through informal networks is shaped by
racialized, gendered, and class processes.

REFLEXIVITY AND CRITIQUE

Any critique like the one put forward thus far should involve reflexivity
on the part of the writer. To say that a problem is “structural” is to accept
that all participants in the structure are partially complicit in the reproduction
of that structure. Theorists have used a variety of different concepts to
describe this complicity. In the Marxist tradition, “hegemony” describes actors
supporting social processes that are against their objective interests (Hall 1986)
—for instance, voting for politicians who work to decimate unions or lower
242 Ray

wages. Similarly, Bourdieu’s (2007 [1994]:273) concept of habitus is similarly

concerned with how those in subjugated social categories adopt and accept
widespread “symbolic violence—according to which dominated lifestyles are
almost always perceived, even by those who live them, from the destructive
and reductive point of view of the dominant aesthetics.” Each of these theo-
rists is concerned with how those who do not benefit nonetheless act in ways
that legitimate their own domination. Thus, reflexivity should require us to be
cognizant of how we benefit from sociology’s governing structures while engag-
ing in critique.
Quantitative researchers in particular are likely to ignore reflexivity, but it in
no way follows that they are likely to be less influenced by their personal back-
ground. The choice of research question, the attention to racialized or gendered
processes, or even an understanding of the reification of socially constructed cate-
gories that make up the “race” variable (Sen and Wasow 2016) are likely to be influ-
enced by one’s position in the social structure. Indeed, that one’s position in the
social structure influences their ability to understand aspects of the world may be a
sociological maxim. This differential attention to the need for reflexivity may bolster
the claims of objectivity and neutrality that are typically afforded to quant research-
ers. But, one is reminded here, of Fanon’s (1963) famous quote, “for the native,
objectivity is always directed against him.”
Reflexivity in the research process is often based on an understanding of how
one’s identity (conceptualized as a position in a structural field) shapes the knowl-
edge projects they are drawn to. What we find intellectually interesting, or a valu-
able research question, is partially determined by the structures that partially
formed our thinking. For instance, my own background as a light-skinned black
person has shaped my understanding of the racial structure. The police were repeat-
edly called on my father and uncle for playing with me as a child, and I have wit-
nessed my brothers being followed around stores while I was left in peace. All this
has alerted me to the “property interest in whiteness” (Harris 1993) and provided
me protection despite my racial identity. The privilege afforded by the genetic quirk
of my phenotype likely facilitated my passage from a community college in New
York, through Vassar, and onto graduate school at Duke. Although my research is
highly critical of racial structures and the ideology of racism (Ray and Seamster
2016), reflexivity requires an acknowledgment of my own (relatively) unique posi-
tion in that structure.
Reflexivity has become a buzzword in some areas of the discipline but
wholly ignored or seen as unimportant in other areas. Qualitative scholars are
often expected to discuss how their subject position influenced their ability to
enter the field, their interactions with respondents, or even their data analysis.
Each of these expectations points to the somewhat obvious fact that our per-
sonal identities may impart biases or cloud our analytic vision. Inversely, these
identities can provide access to hard-to-reach populations or, as scholars such
as Du Bois (1903) and Patricia Hill Collins (1986) have argued, insight into
social processes that mainstream scholar, by dint of their relative privilege, are
likely to overlook.
Reproducing Inequality in Sociology 243

CONCLUSION

In this essay, I have argued that sociologists, typically concerned with how
inequalities shape the social world, should be similarly concerned with cleaning up
inequalities in our own sociological house. Returning to the Baldwin quote that
frames this article, applying sociological theory to the discipline should put us at
war with the inequalities that we (sometimes unknowingly) reproduce. I outlined
three concrete ways this inequality is reproduced: through the misattribution to
individuals of communal labor, via a “racial contract” that governs both the pro-
duction of knowledge and race relations, and through poor attention to reflexivity.
Each of the processes I outlined is well known by sociologists studying processes
external to the discipline. At a minimum, intellectual consistency requires that soci-
ologists apply these same analyses to how we reproduce inequality in our own
discipline.

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