Sociological Promise in an Age of Crises

Aldon Morris: Second Sight Amidst Crises

  • Aldon Morris: Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University, and ASA President-elect.

Second Sight Amidst Crises

  • Black people possess critical second sights – abilities to critically analyze structures and situations – when evaluating America.
  • Frederick Douglass's Speech:
    • 168 years ago, Douglass was asked to deliver a speech commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
    • Douglass expressed his agitation at being asked to celebrate the 4th of July while Black people remained enslaved.
    • He stated, "This Fourth of July is yours, not mine, You may rejoice, I must mourn."
    • He questioned his white audience: "What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?"
    • Douglass highlighted the gross injustice and cruelty faced by Black people in the United States.
    • He argued that no nation on earth was guiltier of more shocking and bloody practices than the United States.
    • Douglass illustrated that Black and white Americans lived in separate worlds from the beginning.
  • Kerner Commission (1968):
    • 116 years later, the Kerner Commission reached a similar conclusion: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal."
    • The separation existed since slavery and was never transcended.
  • W. E. B. Du Bois:
    • Du Bois was acutely aware of the chasm between the Black and white world.
    • He argued that Black life existed behind a white-imposed veil, locking Black people into structural inequality and truncated self-consciousness.
    • Whites, believing in racial superiority, did not see Blacks as human beings, treating them with contempt and distorting their being.
    • Blacks viewed America through a different lens, revealing white Americans' hypocrisy of preaching democracy while practicing oppression.
    • Black people gained a gifted second sight due to their painful experiences behind the veil.
    • Barriers prevent whites from benefiting from Black second sight.
  • Triple Prison:
    • Americans are currently locked inside a triple prison: Corona pandemic, an economic crisis, and civil unrest.
    • This moment may make white Americans more likely to listen to second sights from African Americans.
    • Martin Luther King, Jr. insisted, “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
    • King warned, “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
    • There is a unique historical moment that has emerged, presenting an opportunity for vital transformation.

Corona Pandemic

  • The COVID-19 pandemic has shattered life across the globe, especially in America.
  • America is the epicenter of the virus with high rates of infection, sickness, and death.
  • The country's response to the virus has been awful and unsophisticated, embarrassing the nation.
  • Less developed countries have developed more effective strategies for addressing the virus.
  • This outcome ought to humble America’s sense of its exceptional greatness.
  • We should juxtapose our human values to how we value material possessions, especially for powerful rich Americans.
  • The pandemic has exposed deep racial health disparities.
  • Sociologists, epidemiologists, and health experts have documented the health crises confronting African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and the poor for decades.
  • Black and brown bodies continued to expire in large numbers, indicating that decades of racism in health care accounts for the disproportionate numbers of fatalities.
  • Whites are beginning to express righteous indignation about racism determining access to quality health care.

The Failing Economy

  • The pandemic has wrecked the economy, with millions of jobs lost and numerous businesses closing permanently.
  • People with jobs find it difficult to work because school closings make it necessary for them to provide daycare and schooling.
  • Many whites are joining long food lines for the first time.
  • Many whites never thought they would experience unemployment and the lack of dignity it engenders.
  • They thought Black unemployment was Black’s own fault because they lacked a strong work ethic, rather than a structural problem.
  • Unemployed whites are in the same jobless boat as Blacks.
  • William Julius Wilson and Joe Biden have argued that jobs are about much more than money.
  • Wilson: jobs provide people with hope and a sense of importance.
  • Biden: “a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about dignity.”
  • Unemployed whites are experiencing this loss of dignity.
  • They may extend this structural analysis to unemployed Blacks or continue to see them as lazy welfare cheats.
  • Some whites may blame Blacks for their unemployment woes, viewing them as less qualified affirmative action hires.

Police Brutality and Civil Unrest

  • African Americans have always experienced brutal policing.
    • During slavery, practically all whites served as overseers to keep slaves subjugated.
    • Blacks were policed and lynched during the Jim Crow period to ensure compliance with the peonage system of sharecropping.
    • As Blacks migrated to cities, they confronted heavy policing to ensure racially segregated neighborhoods were maintained and Blacks stayed in “their place” within the racist industrial system.
  • By the 1960s, the relationship between Black city dwellers and the police constituted tinderboxes poised to explode into urban rebellions.
  • The Kerner Report concluded that police actions were ‘prior’ incidents that increased tensions and ultimately led to violence in almost half the cases.
  • Generally, whites have overlooked police brutality in Black communities, viewing it as necessary and fair to control Black crime.
  • Black people, utilizing their lived experiences and second sight, pleaded with police, courts, and governing elites to address police brutality.
  • Police continued to beat, murder, and imprison Black people which led to the present era of mass incarceration.
  • Repeated scenes of Black people funeralizing their unarmed children murdered by the police and white vigilantes played out like reruns of old movies.
  • George Floyd was choked to death by a white policeman, captured on video.
  • The historic second sense of Blacks informs that the criminal justice system is fundamentally racist despite white dissenting views that justice is blind.
  • Blacks organize social movements to address racism and police brutality.
  • The social movement is a grassroots effort of the oppressed to overthrow domination by disrupting society.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” summarized that the direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
  • Jim Crow collapsed because the Civil Rights Movement disrupted the roots of southern society.
  • The Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) has made a good start towards creating and sustaining “crisis-packed” situations across the United States.
  • Whether BLM creates meaningful and lasting change depends on the degree to which it disrupts regimes of racial inequalities and can sustain that disruption until the captains of white supremacy are ready to negotiate.
  • The current movement has attracted masses of whites and people from all walks of life who have joined the protests, augmenting the strength of the movement.
  • Movement participation produces second sight for whites, exposing them to the vast racial inequalities entrenched in the police and the society.
  • New voices and ideas fostered by the movement are penetrating the media and disrupting the engrained loyalty to many of the cultural practices and symbols endorsing and enforcing racism.
  • Symbolic changes include: changing flags, replacing monuments, renaming buildings and streets, amending music lyrics, and altering our vocabulary of discourse.
  • The structural changes that can reduce or eradicate systemic racism require:
    • Re-allocation of basic resources to equalize income and wealth.
    • Employment and underemployment opportunities.
    • Educational opportunities.
    • Incarceration rates.
    • Access to quality health care.
  • To dismantle white supremacy structural changes are required, are very expensive to implement, and they have a zero-sum logic.
    • Transferring money currently earmarked for police weaponry to underfunded schools in Black communities.
    • Slashing the military budget to finance low-income housing.
    • Taxing obscene levels of executive pay and bloated corporate profits to make the minimum wage a living wage.
  • To achieve these structural changes, widespread and sustained social disruptions must continue until the powerful people and institutions whose funds are needed for equalization are ready to negotiate.

Conclusions

  • As sociologists, we are challenged by this era of COVID-19, an economy on the brink of recession and mass racial unrest.
  • What is needed is a vast infusion of second sight into the body social that can guide us from the edge of disaster.
  • Sociology is key for it is a brand of second sight commonly known as the sociological imagination.
  • It provides critical understandings of the relationships among biography, history, and social structure
  • When times are bad in the world, they can be good for sociology if sociologists boldly embrace the challenge to produce and disseminate a sociological imagination that engenders social transformations enabling us to live together productively rather than perish as fools.