On the Abolition of Sociology

• In Event: Rethinking Theories of Gender, Race, and Sexuality from Anti-, De-, and Postcolonial Perspectives

Abstract

Rather than fill in the gaps in an attempt to redeem sociology, this paper draws on the work of black social scientists and black studies scholars to create conceptual and methodological voids the discipline is unable to work itself out of. Through an engagement with the “sociological” works of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Turner, and Paul Gilroy—three black studies scholars that were either trained or made critical interventions in sociology—I locate few, of many instances, where they attend to blackness in ways sociology is unable to register. By reading these intellectuals together through a conceptual framework of black abolition and anarchism, I explore the disruptive power of blackness to the discipline of sociology. Du Bois’ long archived essay, “Sociology Hesitant,” is a poetic critique of positivist social science and Spencerian sociology that teases out alternative methods of inquiry that reject the need to reduce social life to formulas, variables, and laws. James Turner’s collaborative essay with W. Eric Perkins, “Towards a Critique of Social Sciences,” embodies an intellectual insurgency that not only highlights the limitations of marxism and marxist sociology, but also challenges black studies scholars to reject disciplinary dogma codified through their training in and adherence to the social sciences. Lastly, by close reading Paul Gilroy’s (2000) book, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, I ruminate on how the abolition of race as an analytical category, and categories altogether, destabilize the foundations of sociology. Paired together, these intellectual giants and their scholarship provide alternative methods rooted in black ways of knowing that attempt to liberate blackness from a perpetual state of objectification and subjugation.

Author

• Devin Z. Williams, Yale University