The Personal Is Political: Eminent Sociologists Recount How Racism Impacted Their Lives

A new collection from Margaret L. Andersen and Maxine Baca Zinn brings together intersectional accounts of how race, class, and gender influenced the authors' contributions to sociological research.

Posted on February 27, 2025 in Featured Review

Moving from the Margins: Life Histories on Transforming the Study of Racism, ed. by Margaret L. Andersen and Maxine Baca Zinn. Stanford, 2024. 212p, 9781503633490 $105.00, 9781503637429 $26.00, 9781503637436

Today in the United States, many states are banning the teaching of critical race theory in schools as presumably divisive, and many universities are ending their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, supposedly to conform with the 2023 US Supreme Court ruling against the use of race as a criterion for diversity in admissions. Against that backdrop, this volume is an important reminder of the value of sociological knowledge to understand and even break down racist, sexist, and imperialist exclusions in society.

This collection comprises fifteen contributions by eminent scholars who tell fascinating accounts of their experiences of racism and how that awareness shaped their contributions to sociology as leading scholars from less privileged backgrounds. Editors Margaret L. Andersen (emer., Univ. of Delaware) and Maxine Baca Zinn (emer., Michigan State Univ.) make it clear in their introduction that these life histories are intersectional accounts of how race, class, and gender have collectively impacted the authors’ lives, although the focus throughout remains on “how racial inequality is felt and experienced” by the contributors (p. 4).

Contributors were invited to reflect on the experiences that have influenced their work, how social structures have impacted their scholarship, and whether different identities have affected their careers. The editors summarize the findings to highlight the importance of sponsorship and mentorship for emerging sociologists, the influence of social movements and activism on their professional training, and their contributions to transforming understandings of intersectionality.

Curiously, for a book about “transforming the study of racism,” the editors chose to adopt the methodology of the classic study The Sociological Imagination (1959) by C. Wright Mills as the theoretical framework for this book’s autobiographical approach. This is a curious choice given that Mills had little or nothing to say about racism, sexism, or imperialism in his work. Surely, the editors had better authorities on racism to choose from when framing questions about the life experiences of sociologists from minority and less privileged backgrounds.

This choice begs the question of whether Mills’s insistence on studying white men’s individual biographies in his own research may blind sociologists to the intersectional experiences of racism, sexism, and imperialism of others, which are not always fully evident through individual biographies but must be sociologically studied through group relationships and world systems. Mills’s omission of such topics is especially glaring given that he was writing at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the movement for women’s liberation, and decolonization movements around the world in the 1950s. Instead, his book The Power Elite (1956) suggested that only military, corporate, and political elites had any power to bring about significant social change. To Mills, the masses were manipulated and dominated by the elites and thus unable to bring about major changes in so-called over-developed economies. This indicates an apparent ignorance of the aforementioned mass movements that mobilized against racism, sexism, and imperialism to deepen democracy around the world. As a consequence of using Mills’s work as a model, readers may wonder whether the individual biographies profiled in this book are representative enough for the conclusions to be generalizable to the grand theories in sociology.

… [S]ociety loses overall when it upholds what Du Bois called the color line in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) at the expense of promoting marginalized scholars.

Sociologist Aldon Morris contributes the first chapter to this volume, “Doing Sociology While Black,” in which he poignantly “recalls his experience as a six-year-old African American boy living in rural Mississippi in 1955 just a few miles from where fourteen-year-old Emmett Till … was brutally murdered” (p. 6). He is also the author of The Scholar Denied (CH, May’16, 53-4185), which examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s contributions to the field of sociology. Arguing that racism robs society of progress for all by marginalizing certain people’s talents, Morris’s biographical study might have served as a more natural framework for this volume. For example, in chapter 2, “The Praxis of Being Black in America,” Enobong Hannah Branch reflects on how equal opportunities are denied to Black women in ways unique to them. Documenting her own experience, Branch recounts how she chose to study sociology in graduate school to focus on this topic, motivated by the racial discrimination her family experienced when she was a child. The fact that she eventually rose to become the vice president for equity and a professor of sociology at a research university is a testament to the argument that society loses overall when it upholds what Du Bois called the color line in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) at the expense of promoting marginalized scholars. Nevertheless, Branch is optimistic that sociology can contribute to improving equity in higher education.

In chapter 3, “From Clueless to Critical,” Andersen shares how she went from being clueless about race, like “many white kids [her] age,” to developing a critical awareness of racism after she began studying sociology in university (p. 40). Born into a working-class Norwegian family in Oakland, California, which was predominantly white at the time, she often enjoyed sitting on the far back seat of a bus. However, when she rushed to such a vacant seat during a visit to her grandparents in Jim Crow Georgia, they admonished her to stay in the whites-only front seats. She narrates this story from the perspective of an outsider becoming aware of race for the first time. This is where another theoretical framework may have aided the text. In Stuart Hall’s theorization of “societies structured in dominance” (e.g., the United States), as articulated in his well-known essay, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance” (1980), there is no such outsider because in such societies everyone is already racialized, gendered, or classed according to specific articulations. In fact, Andersen’s anthology, Race, Class, and Gender (1992), co-edited with Patricia Hill Collins and now in its eleventh edition, affirms this view.

Hill Collins’s work makes its own appearance in the collection in Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s chapter (the book’s final), “An Outsider Within,” which borrows its conceptual framing from Hill Collins’s essay “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought” (1986). Glenn uses Hill Collin’s concept of the “outsider within” to describe her own experiences as a Japanese American sociologist whose studies of race and gender are shaped by having come of age after the internment of Japanese Americans and having attended college as a first-generation student at the conjuncture of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements.

[Michael Omi’s] experience of attending three different elementary schools in San Francisco, each one predominated by a different racial or ethnic group (e.g., white, Asian, or Black), taught him that ‘racial identities are fluid and situationally defined.’

p. 54

Chapter 4, “Thinking through Race,” by Michael Omi, co-author of Racial Formation in the US (1986), now in its third edition, illustrates how he came to understand race by referring to Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn (1940), “an autobiography of the race concept.” His experience of attending three different elementary schools in San Francisco, each one predominated by a different racial or ethnic group (e.g., white, Asian, or Black), taught him that “racial identities are fluid and situationally defined” (p. 54).

C.  Matthew Snipp, a sociologist of Oklahoma Cherokee and Choctaw background, considers affirmative action policies in chapter 8, “An Affirmative Action Confession,” in which he “confesses” that he benefitted from such policies but admits that it was his exposure to critical consciousness about racism that improved his academic achievements. He might have also added that the people who have typically benefitted the most from affirmative action are white women.

In their individual chapters, Chicano/a contributors Denise A. Segura, Rogelio Sáenz, Mary Romero, and co-editor Zinn reflect on how they struggled against racism, sexism, and classism to become top sociologists. Meanwhile, Bonnie Thornton Dill, the first director of a graduate program on the intersection of race, class, and gender, revives the notion of global sisterhood among women sociologists in chapter 9, “The Sandbox, Sisterhood, and a Sociological Journey,” despite differences in ideologies of race and class.

Today, Bonilla-Silva is well known for his original contributions to the study of color-blind racism, particularly through his seminal book Racism without Racists (CH, Jan’04, 41-3121), now in its sixth edition (CH, Aug’23, 60-3666).

Noted sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva recounts how he was told by guidance counselors that, as a minority student, he was better off pursuing sports than aspiring to become an intellectual, reflecting on how this may have motivated him to become an eminent sociologist in chapter 5, “Killing Me Softly.” Today, Bonilla-Silva is well known for his original contributions to the study of color-blind racism, particularly through his seminal book Racism without Racists (CH, Jan’04, 41-3121), now in its sixth edition (CH, Aug’23, 60-3666). The ironic miracle is that many of those discouraged from academic excellence based on race-class-gender dominance also go on to achieve uncommon excellence in other fields of life, but the masses remain marginalized.

The penultimate chapter by Elijah Anderson encourages sociologists to be “always observant” in a world where some administrators still believe that elite institutions remain “white spaces,” which are inherently hostile to Black people (p. 179), as articulated in his book Black in White Space (CH, Feb’23, 60-1871). The fact that, despite the odds, “Black people now occupy all levels of American class and occupational structures” is further proof that the exclusions enforced by racism rob the entire world of the benefits of inclusive excellence (p.180).

Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Women’s & Gender Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – Sociology

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Biko Agozino is a professor of sociology and Africana studies at Virginia Tech. His books include Black Women and the Criminal Justice System (2018) and Counter-Colonial Criminology (2003).

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