P1: GXB

Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

Sociological Forum, Vol. 18, No. 4, December 2003 (°

C 2003)

The Use of the Conceptual Category of Race

in American Sociology, 1937–99
John Levi Martin1,2 and King-To Yeung1

We examine how mainstream sociology has used race as an explanatory factor

by examining papers in the American Sociological Review between 1937 and
1999. We find a dramatic increase in the likelihood that sociologists will take
race into account, and we suggest that methodological innovations are largely
responsible for creating an environment in which it is taken for granted that
analysts in many fields will “control for race.” This pattern of usage may
reinforce an implicit conception of racial differences that we call “broad but
shallow,” in that race is expected to matter almost everywhere, but its effect
can be neutralized by the addition of a control.
KEY WORDS: race; history of sociology; racial categories; methodology; regression.

There is an old Zen koan in which the master Shuzan Osho held up
his staff before his disciples and said, “You monks! If you call this a staff,
you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a staff, you ignore the fact. Tell
me, you monks, what will you call it?” The discomfort felt by the monks,
who had to choose between denying their insight into the fundamental one-
ness of the universe and making the absurd counterfactual denial of self-
evident fact, is also felt by many sociologists when it comes to the analysis
of race. Race, as Weber (1978:385–393) argued, is a matter of conscious-
ness, not biology; sociological analyses of the historical and social develop-
ment of racial categories make it difficult for sociologists to employ existing
racial categories as if they were unproblematic, biological terms. Yet even if
sociologists explicitly dissent from simplistic understandings of race, the re-
peated use of the conceptual category of race has the potential to restrict
1 Department of Sociology, Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey, 54 Joyce Kilmer
Avenue, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8045.
2 To whom correspondence should be addressed; e-mail: jlmartin@rci.rutgers.edu.

521

0884-8971/03/1200-0521/0 °
C 2003 Plenum Publishing Corporation
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

522 Martin and Yeung

our understanding of actual social processes, because of the implication of

homogenization within categories that is psychologically (even if not log-
ically) implied by their continual use (Williams, 1995:543; Zuberi, 2001:x,
93f, 106). Yet to use the contingent, culturally constructed, and somewhat
arbitrary nature of the boundaries between these categories as an excuse to
ignore them, when they play so great a role in American social life, would
be as absurd as refusing to call a staff a staff (see the discussion of McKee,
1993:361).
This antinomy is forced upon us, as race, racial identity, racial discrimi-
nation, and perceptions of race are key issues for contemporary sociological
analysis, especially in the United States. But while race is commonly under-
stood as a key category in American culture (and increasingly in Europe as
well; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999), there is no consensus as to whether
and how, to use the title of Cornel West’s recent book (West, 1993), “race
matters.” That is, in addition to “race matters” in the sense of issues di-
rectly pertaining to race, race may “matter” for other issues because it may
be empirically associated with other social phenomena, so that one might
reasonably be taken to task for failing to examine the “effects” of race. In
other words, even when sociologists are not particularly interested in race
as a phenomenon in its own right, they may be forced into taking a position
on the nature or depth of race differences, and hence on the nature of race
itself.
The debate over the reality of race is of course nothing new; in partic-
ular there has been a long-running argument among anthropologists as to
whether “race” should be used as a category at all (see Lieberman, 1968,
for a review), which ended in a 1998 American Anthropological Associa-
tion statement against the use of race as a set of essential categories. But
in recent years, there has been renewed critique of the widespread use of
racial categories in social scientific and medical research (e.g., see Witzig,
1996, for medicine; Senior and Bhopal, 1994, for epidemiology; Bhopal
and Donaldson, 1998; Fullilove, 1998; Wilkinson and King, 1987, for public
health).
While concerns differ somewhat by field, critics generally argue that
the social sciences’ claim to understand race as a social construct is belied
by practitioners’ repeated use of race as if it were a nonproblematic set
of categorical divisions (see Almaguer and Jung, 1999). Further, the use
of race as a term in causal models may reinforce the idea that race is it-
self a “cause” of differences in outcomes between, say, Whites and Blacks.
Not only does this invoke an idea of causality that makes little statistical
sense (Holland, 1986:954f.), but it may lead us to consider that we can
answer questions as to the reason for certain differences (say, between Blacks
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

Category of Race in Sociology 523

and Whites in terms of some prevalence of infection) simply by invoking

the “fact” of race, as opposed to considering this itself as a problem to be
explained.
Accordingly, a number of studies in related disciplines have examined
historical trends in the use of race as an explanatory factor in flagship jour-
nals. Interestingly, these studies suggest that while there have been histor-
ical changes, they have been discipline-specific as opposed to being broad
cultural trends. Cartmill (1999) examined the American Journal of Physi-
cal Anthropology between 1965 and 1996, and found a modest decrease in
the proportion of papers dealing with human variation. Since there was no
trend in the proportion of papers on human variation that used the concept
of race, there was an overall decline in the use of race.3 Jones et al. (1991)
examined the American Journal of Epidemiology (originally American Jour-
nal of Hygiene) from 1921 to 1990, and found a decline in the discussion of
race from 1921 until 1965 (when the journal changed its name), and then a
steady increase. Further, they found an increase in the proportion of studies
using “White only” samples from 1970 to 1990. Williams (1994:265) found
no trend in Health Services Research regarding the use of race, but he found
a growing tendency to look beyond simple Black/White bifurcations when
examining race; he also found that while papers using race in the 1970s had
tended to defend this use, such justification had become quite rare by the
late 1980s.
There has been, however, no comparable study in sociology, although
there have been a number of notable contributions (e.g., Gaston and
Sherohman, 1974; Ferree and Hall, 1996; Simpson, 1961). In particular,
Niemonen (1997) conducted an analysis of the use of race in an extremely
large set of papers published between 1969 and 1995 in the American So-
ciological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Social
Problems. In contrast to the sophisticated problematization of race that, he
argued, we might expect in a sociology of race and ethnic relations,4 he found
that the conception of race generally used reified commonsense relations,
reducing them to dummy variables in equations. Recently, Hartmann et al.
(in press) replicated Niemonen’s work for the years 1996–99. While they

3 Littlefield et al. (1982) found a decrease in the proportion of anthropology textbooks affirming
the fundamental reality of race.
4 Niemonen (1997:16, 35) is somewhat unclear here as to the boundaries of his study—he first
says that he compiled a database of 677 papers “on racial and ethnic relations,” but later says
that of these, only 55 “could be placed within the context of a sociology of racial and ethnic
relations.” Since not all papers that employ race appear in his sample, our interpretation
is that he picked papers that he believed had substantially to do with race, but considered
few of these to be primarily oriented toward contributing to a sociology of racial and ethnic
relations.
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

524 Martin and Yeung

found substantial continuity with the patterns found by Niemonen, they

also found an increased tendency for sociologists to problematize race. This
suggests that we would do well to examine historical changes in the use of
race.
There are, however, very few systematic studies of such changes in soci-
ology. Pettigrew (1980:xxix) examined papers in the American Sociological
Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, and Social Problems,
and found what seemed to be a decrease in the number of papers dealing with
race in the 1950s, although this did not control for changes in the number of
papers per volume. Recently, Zuberi (2001:94) examined papers published
in the 1990s in the American Sociological Review, Demography, American
Journal of Sociology, and Population Studies that used race as a causal vari-
able in regression analysis; he presented three examples of how such practice
leads to reifying and essentializing race as a category. In addition, there has
been one noteworthy analysis of how sociologists understand the category
of race.5
In sum, we have little information regarding historical trends in the use
of race in sociological research. Further, most studies that have been carried
out (as well as the exemplary history of McKee, 1993) have been concerned
with the sociology of race itself, while if the arguments made by Zuberi (2001)
are correct, the practice of treating race as a cause of other phenomena may
be crucial to the ways in which sociological practice constructs the category
of race. Accordingly, we set out to investigate how race was used in American
sociology by examining the American Sociological Review (ASR) from its
inception in 1936 to the end of the millennium.
The papers published in the American Sociological Review are not a
representative cross-section of all sociological research, but they are unrep-
resentative only in that they bear the highest mark of approval of main-
stream sociology. For this reason, they are likely to understate the concep-
tual and methodological diversity among practicing sociologists, but to do
so in a way that favors the standards most likely to be normatively en-
forced by mainstream sociological gatekeepers. Furthermore, unlike text-
books, the selection processes that lead the papers in the ASR to enter the

5 Reynolds (1992) has demonstrated that among sociologists there are predictable social corre-
lates of whether one sees race as a social construct as opposed to an intrinsic category. Thus
women fall strongly into the former category, while men are more evenly divided. This pattern
also holds among anthropologists, where “overdogs” (those with dominant status) are more
likely to emphasize racial differences than “underdogs” (Lieberman and Reynolds, 1978; Stark
et al., 1979). Among anthropologists, however, these differences are strongly mediated by one’s
training (physical vs. cultural anthropology). There was also a study of papers in the subfield
of sociology of occupations (Smigel, 1954) that found a decreasing attention to race from the
late 1940s to the early 1950s.
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

Category of Race in Sociology 525

sample have only to do with the evaluation of professional sociologists, as

opposed to a publisher’s concern with the reaction of potential customers
(see Littlefield et al., 1982:646). Thus, papers in the ASR are a good site
for the study of change in the conceptual map of mainstream professional
sociology.
Of course, there are limitations to this source, one being that the ASR
only goes back to 1936. However, other analyses of earlier papers suggest
that attention to race was not great in the preceding years. Phelan’s (1989;
cf. Pettigrew, 1980:3; McKee, 1993: 29) analysis of the American Journal of
Sociology (AJS) from 1895 to 1935 found that race only assumed a position
of great importance toward the end of this period and that, far from being
normalized as a possible “confounding” factor, race was discussed largely in
terms of a debate over White claims to racial superiority (arguments both
pro and con), or “analyses” based on the assumption of such superiority
(e.g., California State Senator Edwin Grant’s article, “Scum from the Melt-
ing Pot”). In an article in the ASR in the first period in our sample, Davis
(1940) also analyzed the AJS and argued that there had been a decreasing in-
terest in “race relations” (along with other social action concerns) in the past
“30 years.” Even Social Forces, which has historically given greater attention
to race than the AJS or ASR, had relatively few papers on race before 1936
(see Gaston and Sherohman, 1974:79). Thus, even though we miss some
of twentieth-century sociology, we are probably capturing any important
changes that have occurred in how sociologists use race as an explanatory
concept.
Because we were unable to read every article, we took a 31% sample
consisting of 20 volumes out of 64. We chose five distinct periods of 4 years
each, so as to achieve a better estimate of relations within a particular “era”
of sociology (as opposed to evenly spread papers or years). We began with
the second volume, as the first included an unusually large number of posi-
tion papers, reviews, and commentary. We took 4-year periods separated by
12-year intervals; thus, our five periods went from 1937 to 1940, from 1952
to 1955, from 1967 to 1970, from 1982 to 1985, and 1996–1999 (all dates in-
clusive), and included a total of 1152 papers. We also coded the single year
1975 to check our ability to interpolate between periods three and four; we
do not analyze these papers here, as they only confirm the interpretations
we will present.
Every article or research report falling into one of the five periods was
coded as to its treatment of race: whether race was the focus (as independent
or dependent variable), and if not, whether it was “taken into account,” and
how. (More information about coding is presented in the Appendix.) Other
aspects of the article’s substantive question, data, methods, and authorship
were also coded.
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

526 Martin and Yeung

Table I. Mention of Race by Period

Period Analyzed Race-specific Other mention No mention Total
1937–40 7.7% 11.0% 10.5% 70.7% 181
1952–55 11.6% 14.9% 7.9% 65.7% 242
1967–70 11.3% 14.4% 11.3% 63.1% 160
1982–85 27.6% 14.3% 7.6% 50.5% 210
1996–99 39.0% 5.2% 2.3% 53.5% 172
Total 19.2% 12.2% 7.9% 60.7% 965
Note. (χ)2 = 97.5 at 12 df ( p < 0.001).

TRENDS IN THE PROPENSITY TO TAKE RACE INTO ACCOUNT

We go on to analyze trends in American sociology regarding chang-

ing tendencies to analyze race, which has until recently meant Black vs.
White (Lavender and Forsyth, 1976; Pettigrew, 1980:xxiv). For ease of ex-
position, we do not put the words “race,” “Black,” and “White” in inverted
commas, though we do not mean our repeated use of these terms to con-
stitute an endorsement of any presumption that they refer to clearly de-
limited and ontologically stable conceptual categories. We begin by exclud-
ing purely theoretical contributions and works of pure methodology and
restricting our attention to empirically minded papers, which we can con-
sider to be “at risk” of taking race into account as an explanatory factor.
We divide papers into those that analyze race or take it into account em-
pirically in some fashion, those that have a race-specific research design
(e.g., only look at Whites), those that mention race in some other way (e.g.,
note that it might make a difference, or defend inattention to race), and
those that do not mention race at all. As Table I makes clear, the attention
paid to race by sociologists has been steadily increasing over the twenti-
eth century; the number of papers that analyze race has grown steadily,
especially over the last three periods (see column 1). Conversely, the num-
ber of papers making no mention of race has decreased over the time in
question.6
For several reasons, however, we expect that such a comparison over
time may be misleading, for sociology as a discipline has changed, and the
American Sociological Review with it. The types of papers written, the sub-
jects, and the analytic methods have all been in flux. Further, the number of
papers per journal volume has also changed, giving certain periods dispro-
portionate weight if papers are treated as the unit of analysis. To make a fair
comparison, we must take as many of these factors into account as we can.

6 It is important to distinguish this from the number of papers about race. Simpson (1961) found
that the number of papers in the ASR about race or ethnicity decreased from 1945 to 1959,
but during this same time, we find the number of papers mentioning race increased.
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

Category of Race in Sociology 527

First of all, we have been looking at what we have generously (by cur-
rent standards) called “empirically minded” papers. Many papers in the first
period did not have a clearly identifiable source of data, but were forceful
statements of opinion peppered with references to facts collected by others
or to things generally believed to be true by educated persons of that time.
These papers may be unlikely to be coded as “analyzing” race, if only be-
cause they do not really analyze anything. This would inflate the apparent
increase in number of papers analyzing race, as there has been a steady in-
crease in the proportion of all papers that are based on data analysis, from
42% in the first period to 84% in the last.
Second, it may be irrelevant to include cases where the data to be an-
alyzed come from a country other than the United States, where either the
emphasis on, or presence of, racial divisions is absent. Third, it may be that
numerical methods make it easier to measure and analyze race. If there were
changes in the proportion of studies looking at data from the United States,
or using numerical methods, this would also affect our temporal compar-
isons. Further, since there has been a change in the type of data sets used
(in particular, fewer U.S., White-only, individual-level data sets), we might
expect changes if only because some types of data make it easier to analyze
race.
If we then restrict our attention to those papers that analyzed U.S. sam-
ples, including individual-level data from both Whites and Blacks—those
that could actually analyze race—we find that the increase in the propor-
tion actually carrying out such analyses is quite extraordinary (see Table II).
While three fourths of the papers in the first period using such data would
fail to bring up race (quite possibly because the data came in tabular form,
and hence authors were unable to analyze it further), only one quarter do
not mention race in the last period.
Thus we see an increase both in the proportion of papers that are at
risk for examining race because they contain individual-level U.S. data from
more than one race, and in the proportion of those papers at risk that actually

Table II. Mention of Race by Period, Numerical Analyses of U.S. Data, Including
Blacks and Whites Only
Period Analyzed Race-specific Other mention No mention Total
1937–40 15.9% 4.5% 6.8% 72.7% 44
1952–55 19.6% 1.0% 11.3% 68.0% 97
1967–70 19.4% 13.9% 66.7% 72
1982–85 51.6% 1.1% 6.5% 40.9% 93
1996–99 74.6% 1.4% 23.9% 71
Total 37.4% 1.1% 8.2% 53.3% 377
Note. (χ)2 = 89.9 at 12 df ( p < 0.001).
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

528 Martin and Yeung

do analyze race. However, it could also be that there has simply been a
shift in attention such that certain problems more likely to be associated
with race occupy a position of greater importance, explaining the seeming
increase in attention to race. We coded every article in terms of the main
disciplinary area into which it fell; each article was coded on two areas if (as
was frequently the case) an article straddled areas. (See the Appendix for
information on this coding and others.) Of course, the meanings of certain
topics have shifted over the course of the century—for example, comparisons
of international development that were couched in evolutionary theory in
1937 were more likely to be couched in world-systems theory in 1999—but
our analysis allows for such change.
To examine whether any topic was associated with the treatment of
race, we entered each in a multinomial regression with treatment of race
as the independent variable. (Since each article was coded 1 as opposed
to 0 for at most two topics, we could examine one topic at a time without
danger of bias; we were unable to identify parameters when examining all
topics together.) We then controlled for the changing composition of the
ASR in terms of topics of interest by entering these terms (and interac-
tions with period when necessary) into a multinomial logistic regression,
with our four-category division used in Tables I and II as the dependent
variable. Thus Table II can be restated as the parameters resulting from
such a regression on “period” (considered a categorical variable). Figure 1
presents the results (here we look at all analyses of U.S. data, not only those
with Whites and Blacks in the sample, so as to facilitate an examination of
changes in the proportion of race-specific studies; this only decreases the
size of the change in the proportion of studies analyzing race.)7 Each line
gives the logarithm of the relative odds that an article analyzes race, includes
a race-specific question, or mentions race in some other fashion, all relative
to not mentioning race (the excluded category). The results can be inter-
preted as follows: the odds of analyzing race have increased from period 3
to period 4, and then again from period 4 to period 5 (relative to not men-
tioning race), while the odds of collecting data from a race-specific sample
have basically declined, although there was a small increase from period 3 to
period 4.8
Figure 2 presents the same parameters when we take the substantive
composition of papers in each period into account by subtracting the effect
of each of the topics found to be related to race (and allowing this effect

7 The −2LL for this model was 66.6 in comparison to a model with only an intercept having
a −2LL of 143.1, leading to a chi-square test of fit of 76.5 at 12 df, p < .001, indicating the
significant effect of period on treatment of race.
8 This increase appears in Table II not as an increase in the number of race-specific papers, but
as a decrease in the number of papers in which race was not mentioned.
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

Category of Race in Sociology 529

Fig. 1. Changing propensity to analyze race (N = 674).

to vary by period for some).9 The results are changed somewhat—there is

a surprising increase in the number of race-specific studies in the fourth
period, given the topics studied. However, the main finding—the increased
probability of analyzing race over the last three periods—remains. The pat-
tern is unchanged when each article is weighted by the proportion of the
period’s total pages that it occupies (to avoid giving disproportionate weight
to periods with many brief papers). By the last period in question, the odds
of analyzing race have increased dramatically.
We do not present all the other controls we examined. We looked at the
type of data used, the type of dependent variable, the unit of analysis, and
the sample size, as well as characteristics of the author: institutional position,
type of department, type of university, nation, and sex. In no case were our
conclusions changed. Yet there is one thing that does predict whether an ar-
ticle analyzes race and, statistically though not substantively, makes period
“insignificant,” and this has to do with the methods used. We divided the

9 Thismodel fits with −2LL = 570.1 in comparison to a model with only the intercept −2LL
= 1020.7; this chi-square difference of 450.6 at 138 df was significant: p < .001. If we nest the
former model in this one by ignoring all factors other than period, we get −2LL = 944.1; since
126 additional parameters were identified in the former case, we have a test of a chi-square
of 374.0 at 126 df, p < .001. (Thus the contribution of the coefficients for the topic areas are
jointly important.) Because most of the parameters for these models could not be identified
because of the many a priori zeros in the data matrix, we do not present them, but only
present the crucial (and identifiable) period parameters. While the use of parameters from
incompletely identified models is suspect, this is the single most rigorous way of demonstrating
that our results do not depend on changing composition; analyses of particular fields support
our interpretation.
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

530 Martin and Yeung

Fig. 2. Changing propensity to analyze race, controlling for composition (N = 664).

data-analytic papers into three categories. The first included what we call
“informal” analyses of qualitative data, such as might be based on historical,
ethnographic, or in-depth interview data. If some formal analysis was applied
to such qualitative data (e.g., Ragin’s procedure Ragin, 1987), we placed the
article in the second category, “formal” approaches, which also included sta-
tistical models. (Early formal approaches tended to involve mathematically
derived models for diffusion or other specific social processes.) Analyses
that were mainly numerical but simply involved the presentation of “raw”
numbers in tables or unprocessed correlation coefficients were placed in our
third category, “numerical” but not formal.
While qualitative work specifically focused on race might present the
most complex treatment of race, qualitative analyses of other topics tended
not to “take race into account” other than by selecting a race-specific sample;
we accordingly turn our attention to the quantitative analyses. If we look at
only papers using U.S. data, we find that the proportion of numerical or
formal papers analyzing race increased markedly over the last three periods
(see Fig. 3). There were only four formal analyses of U.S. data in the first
period, one of which analyzed race; hence, the 25% for the first period should
not be given too much weight. After this, however, we see a pattern of
monotonic increase: 11% of the formal papers analyzed race in the second
period, 13% in the third, 35% in the fourth, and 54% in the fifth.
Yet the “formal” category includes a number of approaches. Some ap-
proaches (for example, loglinear modeling) can make it difficult to incorpo-
rate additional variables into the model; adding a dichotomy for race doubles
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

Category of Race in Sociology 531

Fig. 3. Proportion of papers using U.S. data analyzing race by method (N = 136).
Note. (χ)2 = 64.4 at 2 df ( p = 0.002) for effect of methods on proportion analyz-
ing; χ 2 = 91.3 at 4 df ( p < 0.001) for effect of period on proportion analyzing; both
from multinomial regression with analysis as dependent variable and independent
variables treated categorically; chi-square compares models with and without inde-
pendent variable in question.

the number of cells and makes it less likely that the statistics used to deter-
mine fit will be applicable. Other formal approaches, most notably those
based on linear models with continuous covariates, allow one to take addi-
tional factors into account at a minor loss of 1 degree of freedom per covari-
ate. We call all such models that make a single dependent variable a function
of a set of other variables including continuous covariates “regression-type
models,” or “regression analyses” for short. Such regression analyses, to be
blunt, make it easy to take race into account, and they are strongly corre-
lated with the analysis of race. Indeed, they are so strongly associated with
the analysis of race that the period effect becomes insignificant when the use
of regression models is taken into account.
But of course the use of such models is itself a period effect, and so
examining the relation between these models and race analysis restricts us to
the last three of our five periods. Given this curtailed sample, and restricting
attention to analyses of U.S. data that includes Blacks and Whites, we find
that regression analyses were no more likely to include race as a variable
than were other quantitative analyses in the third period (21% as opposed to
20%, respectively). But in the fourth period, 62% of the regression analyses
took race into account, as opposed to 25% of the other quantitative analyses,
and in the last period, an overwhelming 78% of regression analyses used
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

532 Martin and Yeung

race, as opposed to 25% of the other quantitative methods. This does not
mean that formal methods in general have been increasingly likely to lead
to the analysis of race. If we look at papers that use formal analyses other
than regression-type models, we find the proportion of papers that take race
into account shrinks precipitously, from 20% in the third period to 14% in
the fourth period, and in the last period we find none. But this decreasing
tendency of nonregression formal analyses to take race into account makes
little difference for the overall trend, as such models were rapidly becoming
extinct. While there were 26 such models used in the third period, their
number decreased to 14 in the fourth period, and there was only 1 formal
nonregression model of U.S. data on Blacks and Whites in the last period.
In sum, the hegemony of regression-type models that make it easy to add
covariates corresponds closely to the increasing attention to race in sociology,
and this methodological change better explains the increase in attention than
do shifts in substantive concern. Yet it is not that the increase in regression
models led to an increase in the analysis of race simply because the new
technique made it easier to do so. That is, there is no reason to assume that
there was a constant propensity to include race. While regression analysis is
indeed associated with analyzing race, the degree of this association increases
with time. The decreased costs of taking race into account may have helped
legitimate a standard procedure in which race tended to be examined, thus
increasing the general propensity to take race into account even further.

ANALYTIC APPROACHES

Given that race is analyzed, precisely how it is taken into account may
have serious, if subtle, implications for the working theory of race held by
sociologists. To simply add race as a control variable in a regression model
(or to do the equivalent with simpler numerical methods) implies that, while
race makes a difference, it is not a very profound one, in that race does
not affect the relationships between other variables. For example, if one is
looking at the relationship between education and socioeconomic status, one
may “take race into account” by adding it as a control to better estimate what
we may call a “deracialized” coefficient for education on status. This is in
effect to say that, while there are compositional differences between Blacks
and Whites, on average, in terms of their education and socioeconomic status,
the basic process of status attainment is the same.
But it is also possible for the researcher to add an interaction, allowing
the coefficient of education to vary by race, which is in effect to say that
the fundamental processes of status attainment among Whites and Blacks
are somewhat different. This seems to assert a greater degree of difference
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

Category of Race in Sociology 533

between Whites and Blacks (and other races, should these be taken into
account), and here race has a qualitatively privileged position over the other
independent variables. If interactions with race are added for all coefficients,
this is equivalent to splitting the sample by race and conducting parallel
analyses. Despite the mathematical equivalence of these approaches, there
is still an important difference between the use of interaction coefficients
and separate analyses. The former facilitates the statistical test of significant
difference between the Black and White coefficients, while the latter facili-
tates the examination of the effects in each subgroup considered separately.
Thus the choice of mode of presentation seems to suggest a preexisting sense
of how great the racial differences will be: The former suggests that one is
not already convinced that racial differences are important, while the latter
suggests that the basic issue of racial difference is settled. Finally, an even
more radical assertion of difference would follow if different variables were
used to predict the same outcomes among Whites and Blacks.
We coded every numerical article analyzing race according to how race
was treated—as a control, as a crucial independent variable (when race itself
was of interest), whether interactions between race and other independent
variables were included, or whether separate analyses were presented for
different races. (No analyses ever introduced wholly different models for
Whites and Blacks.) As Table III shows (looking only at papers using U.S.
data from both Blacks and Whites), the increasing use of regression-type
methods allowed analysts to increasingly enter race as a control variable, as
opposed to dividing the sample by race. Indeed, the proportion of papers
dividing the sample by race decreased dramatically. While there has been an
increasing use of interaction terms in the last two periods, this is still a rela-
tively rare strategy, and does not make up for the decrease in the percentage
of analyses consisting of separate treatment of Whites and Blacks.
In sum, we seem to see a widespread normalization of race—if one is
analyzing the United States, one is probably going to collect data on all races,
and if one does so, one is very likely to use a regression model and enter

Table III. Use of Race by Period, U.S. Analyses With Black and White Data Only
Simple Crucial Control Crucial Separate
Period control term interaction interaction interaction by race Total
1937–40 42.9% 14.3% 42.9% 7
1952–55 5.3% 21.1% 73.7% 19
1967–70 28.6% 71.4% 14
1982–85 26.5% 36.7% 2.0% 4.1% 30.6% 49
1996–99 46.9% 24.5% 4.1% 8.2% 16.3% 49
Total 26.8% 29.7% 2.2% 5.1% 36.2% 138
Note. (χ)2 = 42.1 at 16 df ( p < 0.001).
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

534 Martin and Yeung

race as a control variable. Thus the pattern here differs dramatically from
epidemiology, where an increasing focus on race coincided with a decreasing
propensity to collect data on nonwhites (Jones et al., 1991:1081f.). While
race is generally seen as irrelevant in some fields (e.g., science) and is widely
considered relevant in others (e.g., demography), there has been an across-
the-board increase in the propensity to “control” for race. As far as we can
impute a prototheory to most sociologists on the basis of the results, we might
say that there is a widespread presumption that race makes a difference,
and the difference it makes is “broad but shallow.” Racial differences are
expected in many substantive areas, and these differences are not assumed to
be orthogonal to other causes that are of interest (and hence simply ignored).
But these racial differences are only differences in degree, not in kind, and
they can more or less be compensated for by controls (as opposed to parallel
analyses or even different sets of variables). Entering race as a control with
an effect, as Zuberi (2001) stresses, may then imply that it is a “cause” of the
phenomenon in question, and not itself a phenomenon to be explained.

CONCLUSION

The Racialization of Analyses and Analytic Deracialization

In a debate in the ASR—coincidentally at the end of the last issue in our

sample—Loveman (1999:891) argued against Bonilla-Silva’s earlier call for
a more structural understanding of racism by proposing that race simply “be
abandoned as a category of analysis. This would increase analytical leverage
for the study of ‘race’ as a category of practice.” Bonilla-Silva (1999:899, 901)
replied that it is wrong to assume that simply because race is a constructed
category, it is a “lesser, colligated, and ultimately contingent phenomenon.”
While race may be contingent, he argued, it “is also socially real.”10
Our results cannot resolve this debate, but they do, we think, caution
us that while we may believe that race captures enough of lived experi-
ence to warrant its use, our reliance on it may at times extend past that
warrant. It may be impossible or pointless to try to avoid using racial dis-
tinctions when examining the effect of such divisions where these are the-
oretically crucial (see, for one example, Forman and Neighbors, in press).

10 Contra the proposal to replace “race” with “ethnicity,” Bonilla-Silva argues that the historical
constructions of the two concepts are different, the former in the colonial encounters and the
latter in the process of the formation of nation states, and that “the conceptual elimination of
race and the utilization of ethnicity as the mantra for interpreting ethnic, racial, and national
phenomena are usually associated with the unwillingness of members of the dominant race
‘to accept responsibility for the problem of racism.”
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

Category of Race in Sociology 535

Indeed, doing so may even, as Bonilla-Silva suggests, be tantamount to re-

fusing to listen to news one does not want to hear (cf. Zuberi, 2001:119 f.).
But consensus as to the need for critical scrutiny of the results of the colo-
nial encounter does not lie behind the current treatment of race as one of
the “usual suspects.” We instead found evidence that sociologists are more
likely to take race into account because regression models have made this
easier.11
We have thus argued that the change we see can best be explained by
the internal dynamics of the sociological field, as opposed to general societal
trends. While social movements or broader societal trends may well have
changed the way sociologists think about race, it is far from apparent a
priori what the implications of social change for sociological concepts might
be and how this would translate to practice. One could certainly make a case
that the rise of the civil rights movement, memorialized for liberal America
in Martin Luther King’s “dream that my four children will one day live in
a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the
content of their character,” would imply a decreasing attention to race. But
this is not what we see.12
Our bracketing of societal trends is supported by the fact that changes in
the use of race in other related disciplines (reviewed above) do not follow the
pattern we find in sociology. Given this, any post facto claim that the patterns
we have seen are due to shifts in the national mood would be extremely
doubtful. It is difficult to say whether “American society” has become more
or less race conscious over the past 70 years; it is even difficult to determine
whether the social sciences have become more or less race conscious. But
we do know mainstream sociologists writing analytic pieces for the flagship
journal of their professional association have become more likely to take
race into account, and the easier it was to do so, the more likely they were
to do it. As Fujimura (1987, 1988) has stressed, science often produces such
“bandwagons” whereby researchers deliberately adopt a common model of
how to go about their work; further, the kinds of questions they have tools
for are the kinds of questions that get asked.

11 And this increased use of race in a causal model, despite the point stressed by Zuberi (2001:95,
129; cf. 2000) that since race cannot be experimentally altered, it cannot be considered a
“cause” that has an “effect” as opposed to a difference to be explained.
12 Further, we do not see a decreasing attention to race in the fourth period, the heart of the
Reagan years; we doubt any simple mapping between general social trends and sociological
practice would be at all revealing. Orr (1997:33–38) argues on principled theoretical grounds
that dominant as opposed to subordinate classes will always de-emphasize the starkness or
conflictual nature of divisions between rulers and ruled; he then applies this idea to changes in
the treatment of race in sociology. We find this general sociology of knowledge quite doubtful:
One can think of any number of cases where dominant groups deliberately foment conflict
with subaltern ones, and adopt a general philosophy accordingly.
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

536 Martin and Yeung

For the case at hand, sociologists had a rather good tool for partialing
out the variance associated with different independent variables and hence
avoiding spurious causal claims, which increased their tendency to “take
race into account.” The shared belief that taking race into account is the
standard thing to do then may have reinforced this practice, since scientific
publications are largely preemptive responses to imagined critiques (see
Latour, 1987). Indeed, there is reason to suspect that the threshold at which
researchers decide to take race into account has dropped. We coded each
article, as noted earlier, regarding the degree to which the topic in question
implied attention to race; we have collapsed this into three categories: race
the focus or central subject; race peripheral but potentially related; and race
not clearly related or irrelevant.13 While there is room for disagreement in
such a coding, if there is any change in the direction of nonrandom error
over time, it would seem likely that we would understate the relevance of
race in earlier periods, not having the same sense as to what themes naturally
“hung together,” which would lead to an apparent increase over time in the
association between the relevance of race and the likelihood of analyzing
it. But quite the contrary, we find that the recent periods show a dramatic
increase in the proportion of cases in which race was not really central to
the question at hand but was taken into account anyway, perhaps simply
because it was there (see Fig. 4, which presents data for analyses of U.S. data
on Whites and Blacks).
To make this more concrete, consider the subfield of the family. While
only 0–33% of papers in this field analyzed race in the first three periods,
80% did so in the last two periods. This increase has to do largely with the
integration of data sets—as more data sets included Whites and Blacks (from
52% in the first period to 88% in the final), there was a greater tendency
for analysts to take race into account. Table IV demonstrates that race has
been increasingly treated as a control in family studies, especially in the
most recent period, which includes an unusually large number of analyses
that separated Whites and Blacks.
Studies of the family might well encapsulate the changes we have seen
in sociology as a whole. The questions with which this research field is
concerned—marriage formation and dissolution, for example—are gener-
ally not intrinsically related to race. At least they are not obviously more
closely related to race than they are to other characteristics of individuals
such as religion, size of the city they live in, or region, though these are less
widely employed as generic controls. Yet there may indeed be differences of

13 While this is a somewhat subjective matter, the correlation between both coders’ initial ratings
was .763 before collapsing, which is not bad for a 5-point scale. This would (after collapsing)
lead to agreement on 75.4% of the cases.
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

Category of Race in Sociology 537

Fig. 4. Percentage of papers analyzing race by the centrality of race to the ques-
tion, U.S. data from blacks and whites only (N = 337). Note. (χ )2 = 52.0 at 2 df
( p < 0.001) for effect of degree of relation of race to question on proportion ana-
lyzing; (χ)2 = 77.9 at 4 df ( p < 0.001) for effect of period on proportion analyzing;
both from multinomial regression with analysis as dependent variable and indepen-
dent variables treated categorically; chi-square compares models with and without
independent variable in question.

degree between Whites and Blacks, and in the clear majority of cases, when
race is taken into account, it is statistically significant (this was true in 11
of 14 cases of family research employing race as a control, a higher rate of
significance than in nonfamily research, where the figure is 37 out of 55).
Taking race into account in the sociology of the family is certainly de-
fensible according to statistical criteria, yet the dramatic increase in the
proportion of papers that do so provides food for thought. Are we simply
realizing that previous findings were incorrect because of a failure to ad-
just for differences between Blacks and Whites (and perhaps Hispanics and

Table IV. Use of Race by Period, U.S. Analyses With Black and White Data, Family and
Marriage Analyses Only
Simple Crucial Control Crucial Separate
Period control term interaction interaction interaction by race Total
1937–40 50.0% 50.0% 2
1952–55 10.0% 10.0% 80.0% 10
1967–70 0
1982–85 37.5% 37.5% 12.5% 12.5% 8
1996–99 58.3% 16.7% 25.0% 12
Total 34.4% 21.9% 3.1% 0% 40.6% 32
Note. (χ)2 = 16.0 at 9 df ( p < 0.067).
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

538 Martin and Yeung

Asians)? Are we taking race into account even though not doing so would
leave our conclusions unaltered? Or are we emphasizing those aspects of
family life that are most intrinsically racialized, and ignoring those that do
not distinguish between Whites and Blacks?
Whatever the reason, in some sense, sociology has become more “racial-
ized,” as analysts are more likely to take race into account whatever the ques-
tion they ask. And yet the implicit theory of race that guides this approach
emphasizes that racial differences are not so great that analyses must be car-
ried out separately, or interaction terms added. We called this the “broad but
shallow” understanding of race (cf. Hartmann et al., in press). Race is just
one of many “variables” that affects whatever is of interest, and data can be
“deracialized” without substantially changing the character of whatever is of
interest. Further, we see a greater tendency in the last period to see race as
something beyond the White/Black dichotomy, as well as other ways of cod-
ing race which tend not to emphasize the normality of whites.14 If we were
simply to extrapolate recent trends indefinitely, we might expect a sociology
consisting largely of regression-type analyses with a set of dummy variables
for an ever-increasing number of racial–ethnic categories that would join the
usual suspects for sociological investigation.

Final Remarks

In sum, we hypothesize that the “broad but shallow” conception has be-
come dominant because of the combination of three elements: first, the im-
portance of race in American lived experience; second, the ease with which
controls may be added in regression models; third, the nature of the selective
mechanisms (gatekeeping such as peer review) in the social sciences, which
leads researchers to neutralize as many possible alternative explanations as
possible. This led to an implicit understanding that the goal of sociological
research in a racialized society is to “deracialize” its findings. That is, main-
stream sociologists seem to assume that most sociological phenomena come
to us in a racialized form, and that it is our task to take this into account
and present a final version that reflects how various causal processes would
appear were there no racial differences.
14 Technically, we may say that most schemes treated Blacks as “marked,” a term from struc-
turalist linguistics that denotes which side of an opposition (originally, between phonemes) is
actively highlighted; this term has been applied to social identities such as race (e.g., Brekhus,
1996:528; Williams, 1997:13). In this case, the “marked” identity in an opposition such as
Black/White is one that brings the fact of the opposition to the fore, while the “unmarked”
identity—the one assumed to be present in the absence of other information, the one that is
somehow seen as “normal”—is not, in the dominant culture, felt to be intrinsically related to
this opposition.
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

Category of Race in Sociology 539

This is not necessarily a poor operating model, although of course diffi-

culties arise in how one interprets a model of American society that “controls
for” race (see the general discussion in Lieberson, 1985; for a critique of the
de-contextualizing approach to race, see Zuberi, 2001: 97). But there are
several possible alternatives. First of all, sociologists might ignore race when
they examine questions that are not inherently about race, just as they fre-
quently ignore other factors, to avoid reinforcing a presumption that races
are intrinsically different. Second, sociologists might decide that differences
in lived experience are sufficiently great that no effort should be made to
deracialize findings; instead, findings should be clearly situated in the recog-
nizable landscape of a racially divided society (see Zuberi, 2001:106). Third,
sociologists might consider racial differences as something to be explained
analytically, as opposed to being taken into account (and implicitly taken for
granted).
Some sympathetic readers have been disappointed in our refusal to
provide a clear prescription as to what should be done. We began by not-
ing the antinomy facing sociologists: Employing racial categories may lead
to a presupposition of their nonproblematic reality (Almaguer and Jung,
1999; Fullilove, 1998; Loveman, 1999; Niemonen, 1997: especially 22; Zuberi,
2001). But ignoring them may lead to a denial of crucial aspects of lived ex-
perience (Bashi, 1998; Bonilla-Silva, 1999). It is tempting to propose (some-
what along the lines of the ASA’s recent statement15 ) that we should resolve
this antinomy by continuing to use race in our analyses, while emphasiz-
ing that we do not subscribe to simple, essentialist, biological theories of
race.
We are not quite so sanguine that the antinomy can be resolved this
simply. There are four reasons behind this caution. First of all, the contem-
porary sense of the “proper” way to treat race is by no means guaranteed
to be any better or worse than previous senses. What one generation sees as
both morally and scientifically sound (fortuitously, sociologists rarely seem
to be forced to choose between these) is pilloried by the next as simply foolish
and wrong. Second, as perhaps Duster (1990) more than others has stressed,
research has its own potential for social misuse, however researchers may
think of and qualify their own interpretations. Third, we have found that
the institutional and methodological techniques of everyday social science
affect research practices independently (as far as we can tell) of consciously
held theories. What we do may be more important than what we think and
what we say.
Finally, no necessary relation exists between the ability to understand
the history of sociology’s prototheory of race and the ability to say how, in

15 This statement may be read at http://www.asanet.org/media/race.html.

P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

540 Martin and Yeung

general, race should be treated. Indeed, there may not be any general answer
independent of specific research questions and social contexts. Our research
cannot imply the superiority of any particular approach, but it does strongly
suggest that our choice should now be a deliberate and reflexive one, not an
unintended consequence of methodological innovations.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project was supported by funding from a Research Council Grant

from the Office of Sponsored Research Projects of Rutgers University. An
earlier version was presented at the 2002 ASA session on race and ethnicity.
We thank the participants, especially Tukufu Zuberi, for comments. We also
thank Charles Kurzman and Leonard Lieberman for probing comments on
an earlier draft of this paper, Richard Williams for comments when start-
ing the project, and especially four anonymous reviewers for criticisms and
suggestions.

APPENDIX: ON CODING

We coded every article and research report, with two exceptions. First,
we did not code the ASA president’s yearly speech when this was printed.
Second, we did not code the equivalent of research reports from the Volume
17–20 period, although they existed, because they tended to be less formal
than the later reports; they fell into the category “Notes on Research and
Teaching,” and did not necessarily purport to be reports on primary research.
Each paper was read through; the JSTOR system was also searched
for the words Black, white, race, Negro, ethnic, colored, African, and racial
to make sure that we did not overlook any discussions of race. The second
author coded every paper, and the first author coded every paper for 1 of the
20 volumes so that consistency could be checked. It turned out that consis-
tency was high across coders with one exception, the “area” of the research.
The inconsistency arose because many papers span two areas; paradigmati-
cally, research would be of interest to researchers in two fields, one pertaining
to the dependent variable and another to the independent variable. (One of
us tended to code on the dependent variable and the other on the indepen-
dent variable.) As a result, the first author then recoded every paper, adding
the second area, and checking the coding regarding the treatment of race,
the methods used, and the presence of a regression-type model.
When coding areas, we attempted to code what subarea of sociology
would actually be concerned with the analyses in question, as opposed to
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003 19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002

Category of Race in Sociology 541

using a logical derivation. Thus, if an analysis focused on the income returns

to years of education, we would consider this squarely in the area of “status
attainment,” even though the “independent variable” was education. Edu-
cation is a classic independent variable in the status-attainment literature,
and sociologists of education are not as interested in returns to each ad-
ditional year of education. But if the analysis focused on the independent
effect on later income of being in a certain educational “track”—tracking
and its effects being a very important issue in the sociology of education—we
would code it as having an independent variable in the education field and
a dependent variable in the status attainment field.
Regarding the coding of the samples and methods, certain early papers
reported that attitude questionnaires were distributed regarding perceptions
of minorities; we assume that the sample is all White even if this is not explic-
itly indicated. We considered the analysis “Formal” if any of the following
were true:

1. An explicit mathematical model (e.g., regression) was used to fit the

data, with the exception of a null model of independence.
2. A method was used that produced new parameters that had meaning
only in relation to the whole (e.g., multidimensional scaling, factor
analysis).
3. A method was used that was formally equivalent to regression and
was used in a similar manner (e.g., partial correlation coefficients
used to successively add controls).
4. A method was used to approximate regression-type logic with at
least two levels of controls in addition to independent variables.

Presenting differences in frequencies or means, however, was considered

numerical but nonformal. The first formal techniques to be used were largely
factor analyses; regression-type models then followed. Regression analysis
that is restricted to bivariate regressions (e.g., Vol. 19:541ff.) is not counted
as regression.
In earlier periods, the only way to examine race was to consider dif-
ferent races separately, in tabular form. We count this as “splitting the
analysis by race” only when race is not itself the question of interest but
is used to examine the same question in parallel subsamples. Finally, we
counted as regression models path models and other linear models that
make a dependent variable a function of estimated parameters. Thus event-
hazard models and MCA would be scored as regression models, but gen-
eral loglinear analysis or most mobility tables would not. Factor analyses
are not counted as regression models unless embedded in a LISREL-type
model.
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003
542
REFERENCES
Almaguer, Tomás, and Moon-Kie Jung
1999 “The enduring ambiguities of race
in the United States.” In Janet L.
Abu-Lughod (ed.), Sociology for
the Twenty-First Century: 213–239.
Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Bashi, Vilna
1998 “Racial categories matter because
racial hierarchies matter: A com-
mentary.” Ethnic and Racial Studies
21:959–968.
Bhopal, Raj, and Liam Donladson
1998 “White, European, Western,
Caucasian, or what? Inappropriate
labeling in research on race, ethnic-
ity, and health.” American Journal of
Public Health 88:1303–1307.
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo
1999 “The essential social fact of race.”
American Sociological Review
64:899–906.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loı̈c Wacquant
1999 “The cunning of imperialist reason.”
Theory, Culture, and Society 16:41–57.
Brekhus, Wayne
1996 “Social marking and the mental col-
oring of identity: Sexual identity con-
struction and maintenance in the
United States.” Sociological Forum
11:497–522.
Cartmill, Matt
1999 “The status of the race concept in phys-
ical anthropology.” American Anthro-
pologist 100:651–660.
Davis, Jerome
1940 “The sociologist and social action.”
American Sociological Review 5:171–
176.
Duster, Troy
1990 Backdoor to Eugenics. New York:
Routledge.
Ferree, Myra Marx, and Elaine J. Hall
1996 “Rethinking stratification from a
feminist perspective: Gender, race,
and class in mainstream textbooks.”
American Sociological Review
61:929–950.
Forman, Tyrone, and Harold Neighbors
In press “Race, John Henryism, and men-
tal health.” In David Williams and James
Jackson (eds.), Coping With Racial Dis-
crimination. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002
Martin and Yeung
Fujimura, Joan H.
1987 “Constructing ‘do-able’ problems in
cancer research: Articulating align-
ment.” Social Studies of Science
17:257–293.
1988 “The molecular biology bandwagon in
cancer research: Where social worlds
meet.” Social Problems 35:261–283.
Fullilove, Mindy Thompson
1998 “Abandoning ‘race’ as a variable
in public health research—An idea
whose time has come.” American
Journal of Public Health 88:1297–
1298.
Gaston, Jerry, and James Sherohman
1974 “Origins of researchers on Black
Americans.” American Sociologist
9:75–82.
Hartmann, Douglas, Paul Croll, and Katja
Guenther
In press “The race relations ‘problem-
atic’ in American sociology: Revisiting
Niemonen’s case study and critique.” The
American Sociologist.
Holland, Paul W.
1986 “Statistics and causal inference.” Jour-
nal of the American Statistical Associ-
ation 81:945–960.
Jones, Camara Phyllis, Thomas A. LaVeist,
and Marsha Lillie-Blanton
1991 “Race in the epidemiologic litera-
ture: An examination of the American
Journal of Epidemiology, 1921–1990.”
American Journal of Epidemiology
134:1079–1084.
Latour, Bruno
1987 Science in Action. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Lavender, Abraham D., and John M. Forsyth
1976 “The sociological study of minority
groups as reflected by leading so-
ciological journals.” Ethnicity 3:388–
398.
Lieberman, Leonard
1968 “The debate over race.” Phylon
29:127–241.
Lieberman, Leonard, and Larry T. Reynolds
1978 “The debate over race revisited:
An empirical investigation.” Phylon
39:333–343.
Lieberson, Stanley
1985 Making It Count. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
P1: GXB
Sociological Forum [sofo] pp1028-sofo-475161 October 22, 2003
Category of Race in Sociology
Littlefield, Alice, Leonard Lieberman, and
Larry T. Reynolds
1982 “Redefining race: The potential
demise of a concept in physical an-
thropology.” Current Anthropology
23:641–655.
Loveman, Mara
1999 “Is ‘race’ essential?” American Socio-
logical Review 64:891–898.
McKee, James B.
1993 Sociology and the Race Problem: The
Failure of a Perspective. Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press.
Niemonen, Jack
1997 “The race relations problematic in
American sociology: A case study and
critique.” The American Sociologist
(Spring): 15–40.
Orr, Martin
1997 “Sociological analyses of race and eth-
nicity since the 1950s: A sociology of
sociology explanation for metatheo-
retical shift.” Sociological Focus 30:31–
47.
Pettigrew, Thomas F.
1980 The Sociology of Race Relations: Re-
flection and Reform. New York: Free
Press.
Phelan, Thomas James
1989 “From the attic of the American Jour-
nal of Sociology: Unusual contribu-
tions to American sociology, 1895–
1935.” Sociological Forum 4:71–86.
Ragin, Charles C.
1987 The Comparative Method. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Reynolds, Larry T.
1992 “A retrospective on ‘race’: The career
of a concept.” Sociological Focus 25:1–
14.
Senior, Peter A., and Raj Bhopal
1994 “Ethnicity as a variable in epi-
demiological research.” BMJ 309:327–
330.
Simpson, Richard L.
1961 “Expanding and declining fields in
American sociology.” American Soci-
ological Review 26:458–466.
19:0 Style file version June 4th, 2002
543
Smigel, Erwin O.
1954 “Trends in occupational sociology in
the United States: A survey of post-
war research.” American Sociological
Review 19:398–404.
Stark, Jerry A., Larry T. Reynolds, and
Leonard Lieberman
1979 “The social basis of conceptual di-
versity: A case study of the concept
of ‘race’ in physical anthropology.”
Research in Sociology of Knowledge,
Sciences and Art 2:87–99.
Weber, Max
1978 Economy and Society. Vol. 1.
Berkeley: University of California
Press.
West, Cornel
1993 Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press.
Wilkinson, Doris Y., and Gary King
1987 “Conceptual and methodological is-
sues in the use of race as a variable: Pol-
icy implications.” Milbank Quarterly
65, (Suppl 1):56–71.
Williams, David R.
1994 “The concept of race in Health Services
Research: 1966 to 1990.” Health Ser-
vices Research 29:261–274.
Williams, Richard
1995 “Challenges to the homogenization of
‘African American’.” Sociological Fo-
rum 10:535–546.
1997 “O. C. Cox and the comparative histor-
ical method.” Paper presented at the
1997 Meeting of the American Socio-
logical Association, San Francisco.
Witzig, Ritchie
1996 “The medicalization of race: Scientific
legitimation of a flawed concept.” An-
nals of Internal Medicine 128:675–679.
Zuberi, Tukufu
2000 “Deracializing social statistics: Prob-
lems in the quantification of race.”
Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Sciences 568:
172–185.
2001 Thicker Than Blood: How Racial
Statistics Lie. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Copyright of Sociological Forum is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or
emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission.
However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.