Institutional Lineages and the Making of Race: Asian Racialization Between Chicago and Fisk

• In Event: Asia and Asian American Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 9: Asia and Asian America Section Roundtable - Race and Politics

Abstract

How did institutional location shape sociological understandings of Asians in the mid-twentieth-century United States—and how do those frameworks continue to shape the field today? This paper examines how competing intellectual lineages within U.S. sociology produced divergent approaches to Asian racialization. Sociologists associated with the University of Chicago theorized “Orientals” through paradigms of migration, contact, and assimilation—frameworks that profoundly influenced how race and racism vis-à-vis Asians would be conceptualized for decades. Yet these approaches often treated Asians as marginal or transitional figures within a Black–white racial order, obscuring the structural dynamics of empire, exclusion, and racial capitalism.

Drawing on archival research at Fisk University—including materials from its sociology department, the Race Relations Institute, and institutional correspondence—this study traces the networks linking Fisk to Chicago as well as to national organizations such as the YWCA. It examines how Black sociologists, working within an institutional context shaped by Jim Crow and anti-colonial thought, developed alternative racial frameworks that foregrounded global white supremacy and structural domination. It also considers how Asian and Asian American sociological actors navigated and interpreted their own racial positioning within these competing traditions.

Rather than centering biography alone, the paper foregrounds how institutional pathways and disciplinary inheritance structured the production—and limitation—of race knowledge. I argue that the dominance of Chicago School paradigms narrowed sociological understandings of Asian racialization in ways that continue to reverberate. Recovering Black institutional approaches invites a counterfactual question: how might the sociology of race look different had these alternative frameworks become foundational?

By situating Asian racialization within Black intellectual spaces, this paper reframes mid-century sociology as a field shaped by unequal epistemic power and competing racial projects.

Author

• SunAh Marie Laybourn, University of Memphis