POINT OF VIEW
From Sociological Illiteracy to Sociological Imagination
By JUDITH SHAPIRO
At one point in the mid-1980's, when I was teaching at Bryn Mawr College, I started paying attention to a common phrase, repeated like a mantra by students there and elsewhere: "Racism, sexism, and classism." I had heard the phrase so often that I had become quite used to it, but it suddenly struck me as odd.
The terms "racism" and "sexism" seemed unproblematic enough, referring to discrimination based on what we take to be physical differences of one kind or another. But what did "classism" really mean? Although my 1960's ears were expecting to hear students talk about class, instead I was hearing about classism. Had the students been talking about class, they would have discussed the structure of our society, and how socioeconomic inequalities were built into it. In fact, talk of that kind was relatively rare in students' political conversations. Rather, they seemed to be concerned about individuals -- prejudice against individuals belonging to less-privileged socioeconomic groups.
That discovery led me to wonder how the students saw race and gender. Were they also viewing racism and sexism exclusively in terms of individual identities and interpersonal relationships? If so, what did that say about the students' chances for improving the world? Had the goal of creating a more just society dwindled into a matter of sensitivity training?
I realized, however, that I was being unfair to the students. For one thing, they were living in a far more diverse community than I had known in my undergraduate days; navigating a culturally complex universe of fellow students was for them a significant task. Although some were retreating from that project and spending most of their time with those who were most like them, others were reaching out, realizing that the reason a college assembles a diverse group of students is to extend their horizons.
Moreover, our success in transforming the liberal-arts college into a kind of utopia was insulating our students from certain realities and decisions. To give them the freedom to explore intellectual, professional, and social options, we were housing and feeding them, and providing them with health care.
And yet, those students of the 1980's were missing something important, something we should have given them during their college years. Too many of them were deficient in the skills needed for analyzing society in economic, political, and structural terms. They seemed unable to move beyond their immediate experience to see how that experience was shaped by larger social and historical forces. They were suffering from a lack of what the eminent sociologist C. Wright Mills called "the sociological imagination" -- which is in short supply among today's students as well.
I have come to refer to that condition as sociological illiteracy. Just as a person may be illiterate in the most literal sense (unable to read or write), or scientifically illiterate, or innumerate (as we have come to call someone who lacks quantitative skills), so a person may be uneducated in the social sciences, and thus unable to make use of the insights and tools that those disciplines provide.
When people know nothing about quantum mechanics or medieval literature, they are generally aware of their ignorance, readily admit it, and understand that the remedy for their ignorance is serious and systematic study. When, however, the subject is how societies operate, or why people behave the way they do, the situation is different. Confusing their folk beliefs with knowledge, people typically don't realize their ignorance.
We all walk around with theories in our heads about the social world in which we move -- indeed, we could not operate without them. In that sense, we are all social scientists. But most of us are bad ones.
Furthermore, some of us aspire to be anthropologists, in the broad sense of the term. That is, we seek to understand the workings of human societies. To do that, we must engage in certain kinds of study and research, and we must be willing to question our assumptions. An obvious point, perhaps, but one that is too easily forgotten -- or suppressed -- when it comes to matters that touch upon our deepest values, desires, and interests.
Because they question familiar assumptions, and also because they sometimes seem to be making heavy weather of things we all think we understand already, social scientists are the folks whom people love to hate. Anthropologists get blamed for the fact that culture now refers not only to Paradise Lost and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but also to nose rings and televised wrestling. Sociologists generally fare even worse in public esteem, because they lack the redeeming features of being exotic and entertaining. Besides, they have a habit of trying to get us to think about unpleasant matters, like urban poverty and teenage pregnancy.
Political scientists are a mixed bag, because they can be found talking about anything from Plato's Republic to the most recent election returns. Their stock rises and falls with attitudes toward politics itself, which these days seem decidedly bearish. As for economists, although they have been seeking to pass as mathematicians for some time now, their inability to predict economic trends breeds a certain cynicism about the value of economic analysis altogether. (As the joke goes, when economists don't know your phone number, they give you an estimate.) Political science and economics especially suffer from the popular expectation that they should function as a form of divination.
Given the level of estrangement between social scientists and the public, it is not surprising that sociological illiteracy is revealed in a number of the major policy debates currently engaging our national attention -- for example, affirmative action. Whenever I hear the policy described as a form of reverse racism, I know that I am in the presence of someone who is, at best, semiliterate, sociologically speaking. There is, in fact, no form of discrimination against white people in our society that mirrors the systemic, pervasive, and often unconscious discrimination that persists against black people, despite the considerable progress we have made since the end of slavery.
Another particularly likely place to encounter sociological illiteracy is in cultural-studies programs populated by faculty members trained as literary critics, who seem to be reinventing the social-science wheel with several spokes missing. But that is a story for another day.
Returning to our students: Many undergraduates today demonstrate impressive levels of civic engagement in the form of community service. They serve meals in soup kitchens, work in homeless shelters, and staff AIDS hot lines. They work as interns in a variety of social agencies. Too few of them, however, are able to raise their eyes to the level of policy and social structure. They need the sociological imagination to see how their on-the-ground activities fit into a bigger picture, so that more of them can cross the bridge from serious moral commitment to effective political participation.
As teachers, we must admit our share of responsibility for that state of affairs. We need to adjust the focus between what we want to teach and what our students need to learn. Those of us who are faculty members in the social sciences must be sure that we are providing to all of our students, majors and nonmajors alike, basic tools of social and cultural understanding, as they have evolved over time in our various disciplines.
At Barnard College, we have taken steps in that direction. We have just revised our general-education requirements to include the following: a course in social analysis, to introduce students to theoretical, analytical, and methodological approaches to the study of society; a course in historical studies, to give students some chronological perspective and to teach them how historical understanding is constructed; and a course on cultures in comparison, to demonstrate both the diversity and the commonalities among human societies, as well as their interconnectedness. Students have some choice among courses that meet those requirements, but the courses must fulfill the general purposes I've outlined.
As faculty members, we must remember that our responsibilities extend beyond the academy. Sociologists such as Mills wrote with a force and grace that enabled them to reach a wide audience. We have not seen their like in years -- too many years. More of us must follow their example and write for the general reader. And we should encourage our students -- so full of energy, intelligence, and commitment -- to move beyond the personal to the political.
Judith Shapiro, a cultural anthropologist, is president of Barnard College.
http://chronicle.com
Section: Opinion & Arts
Page: A68
