Public Forum

Sociology and the Politics of Fear

This [Homeland Security grant to the University of Maryland] may be the social science equivalent of the Manhattan Project . . . . We’ll be a kind of academic rapid-response team . . . our job will involve getting timely advice to homeland and national security professionals in government. — Gary LaFree (February 2005 Footnotes, p. 1, 5).

LaFree’s quote is emblematic of our nation’s current state of affairs, which challenges the sociological imagination and is defined by the politics of fear, or decision-makers’ promotion and use of audience beliefs and assumptions about danger, risk, and fear in order to achieve certain goals. The recent $12-million grant to the University of Maryland to join the “battle against terrorism” would not have surprised Alvin Gouldner, who warned that the continued attraction of the “welfare state” could override sociological autonomy in the pursuit of legitimacy and financial gain (Gouldner 1970). Indeed, nearly 100 colleges and universities have established programs in security and terrorism (often under the rubric of “disaster planning”) (Hoffman 2004). I was proud that sociology was not directly implicated in the current administration’s deadly reign of terror throughout the Middle East—over 10,000 Americans are dead and injured, 100,000 Iraqis are dead—and the greatest attack on civil liberties and academic freedom in the last 50 years. This has now changed.

Many sociologists have addressed how professionals and organizations can contribute to horror and oppression. Everett Hughes taught that “dirty work” often requires the help of a lot of “good people” (Hughes 1970). And there is a lot of dirty work being done in the name of freedom, security, and the War on Terror. Consider just a few examples: The passage and implementation of the Patriot Act; harassment of students and foreign visitors; the imprisonment of American citizens without charge; systematic torture of prisoners; kidnapping of suspects and sending them aboard C.I.A. aircraft to brutal regimes to be “interrogated” (known as “extreme rendition”).

My teachers stressed C. Wright Mills’ essay, “The Promise,” and as a teacher, I offer it to my students. Perhaps we could all benefit from re-reading a bit of sociological wisdom: “Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’ . . . . Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others; they have to do with his self and with those limited areas of social life of which he is directly and personally aware. Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieu into the institutions of an historical society as a whole . . . Consider war. The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive it or how to die in it with honor; how to make money out of it; how to climb into the higher safety of the military apparatus; or how to contribute to the war’s termination . . . . But the structural issues of war have to do with its causes; with what types of men it throws up into command; with its effects upon economic and political, family and religious institutions, with the unorganized irresponsibility of a world of nation-states.” (Mills 1959, p. 9).

Another reason to not chase Defense Department funding was the uncovering of the infamous Project Camelot in the mid 1960s, when social scientists joined U.S. operatives to spy on resisters in Chile in order to unsettle their plans and pave the way for the eventual overthrow of President Allende (Horowitz 1974). Let us learn from the past. Let us be teachers who keep the” promise.” I call on the ASA and sociologists everywhere to condemn dirty work and not participate in it.

References
Gouldner, Alvin Ward. 1970. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology. New York,: Basic Books.
Hoffman, Claire. 2004. “As Anxiety Grows, So Does Field of Terror Study.” The New York Times. September 1, Section B, p. 6.
Horowitz, Irving Louis. 1974. The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship Between Social Science and Practical Politics. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.
Hughes, Everett Cherrington. 1970. “Good People and Dirty Work.” Pp. 87-97 in The Sociological Eye. Chicago: Aldine.
Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Grove Press.

David L. Altheide, Arizona State University, David.Altheide@asu.edu

Complications of “Hispanic”: Race or Ethnicity?

In 2002 the ASA issued a carefully worded statement about “The importance of Collecting Data and Doing Social Scientific Research on Race.” The statement supports the position that data about race should be collected and provides a detailed academic and social rationale for continuing to do so. The statement, however, does not deal with the question of how Hispanics should be classified, a major issue as Hispanics are now the largest and most rapidly growing American minority. The question is particularly acute as the Census Bureau is currently testing various ways of wording the race and ethnicity questions in the 2010 census.

In the 2000 Census race and ethnicity questions were separate. Respondents were first asked whether or not they were of Hispanic origin and then asked to check off a box identifying their race. Forty-eight percent of Hispanics checked off white, 2% black, 6% checked more than one race, and 42% checked “some other race.” The resulting data raises considerable difficulties for comparative studies.

Some researchers deal with the challenge by divvying up Hispanics among various racial groups, resulting in a typology of Whites, Blacks, Asians, and a sizeable group of “others.” As a result, one cannot gain information about the status of Hispanics compared to other groups or about the group by itself. Others compare Whites, Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics, and in effect treat the latter as a racial group, indeed they sometimes refer to them as “brown” Americans. This approach results in the awkward comparisons of “non-Hispanic Whites” to Hispanics—which includes numerous people who consider themselves white but the researchers lump together with others, who have different racial self-categorizations. Many social scientists use a classification that is labeled “racial/ethnic” but looks very similar to the racial one because it simply adds Hispanics to Whites, Blacks, etc. Very few researchers separate different kinds of Hispanics and collect data on each sub-category, such as white-Hispanics, black-Hispanics and what they call Hispanic-Hispanics. Clearly the matter deserves additional deliberation and the time is now.

I suggest that the task force that prepared the 2002 ASA statement reconvene to address the issue, adding a number of scholars who have conducted major studies of Hispanics. Or my colleagues could express their views individually, both by writing in these pages and in addressing the Census Bureau.

I see considerable merit in the criticisms of the prevailing racial classifications by scholars like Richard Alba, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, and Clara Rodriguez. (I spelled out my reasons in The Monochrome Society). Most recently, our colleague Kenneth Prewitt, director of the U.S. Census Bureau from 1998-2000, has argued that America’s current color-coded racial categorization is anachronistic. He suggests that in the future we ought to collect data on the basis of ethnic origin rather than race. Such a classification scheme might include Native Americans, Asians, African Americans (but not Haitians and those from the West Indies included in the Black racial category), Hispanics, and Europeans.

Much larger changes have been made in the past. Jews, Poles, and Irish used to be popularly considered members of non-White races, but are now thought of as ethnic groups. On Census forms, people of Indian or Pakistani origin used to be classed as white and are now classed as Asian. The Census listed “Hispanic” as a race in 1930 and only reintroduced the term in 1980, this time as an ethnicity.

A classification by ethnic origin rather than by race would not impede the objectives set forth in ASA’s 2002 race statement and would not harm affirmative action set aside for minorities or other societal remedies that takes into account the social background of the groups involved. Such a classification would acknowledge that race is a significant social category that is used to discriminate against many people in the past and today. It would seek to influence societal groupings by moving toward categories that are less discriminatory, ethnic rather than racial ones.

One excellent place to start would be the Census categories that greatly affect the categories used by others, the ways social data are collected, and the ways we see each other and ourselves.

Amitai Etzioni, George Washington University

New Orleans Hurricane Katrina: Natural or Social Disaster?

As special committees begin investigating Hurricane Katrina, and the Bush Administration moves on its post-Katrina redevelopment plan for the Gulf, we urge consideration of sociological insights about disaster. We argue that without recognizing the pre-Katrina social realities of grinding poverty and discrimination when developing Bush’s “goodwill” plan, there will be no protection against future threats to “homeland security” in the form of natural disasters. Take into consideration the following:

1. The human scope of disaster is influenced as much by pre-existing social and economic conditions as by the physical disaster itself. In New Orleans, on the eve of Katrina, a long-standing and long-neglected human and social disaster already existed. New Orleans’ poor, primarily Black, lacked safe affordable housing and were without the means to evacuate. Not surprisingly, these same persons were greatly over-represented among those who had to take refuge in unfit and unsafe “shelters of last resort.”
2. A natural disaster begins with political conditions and human consequences, rather than causing disastrous human consequences. The social groups most disadvantaged in pre-Katrina New Orleans were dependent on a (literally) bankrupt public education system. Fiduciary responsibility of the Orleans Parish schools had recently been taken over by the state and schools, and were being monitored by an outside auditing firm. The Parish public school system student body was 94 percent Black, and 70 percent of Parish schools were rated “the worst” in Louisiana. The social neglect of Black youth, reflected in the quality of their education, is mirrored by their vulnerability in post-Katrina shelters and other relocation facilities.
3. The racial component of disaster cannot be ignored. African Americans, among the most disadvantaged in pre-disaster New Orleans, disproportionately felt Hurricane Katrina’s wrath. Whether a person or administration actually manifests prejudice or subconsciously discriminates is less important for the life chances of poor people of color than the structural dynamics that systemically foster discrimination and exclusion. The human crisis of pre-Katrina New Orleans set the stage for the overall destruction.
4. Social exclusion breeds government inaction. Without a doubt, post-Katrina suffering could have been greatly reduced if all levels of government had acted swiftly and effectively before, during, and immediately after Katrina’s land fall, especially after New Orleans’s levees were breached. However, where social exclusion renders large sections of a population and their human problems invisible to outsiders—as in pre-Katrina New Orleans—a sluggish government response to natural disaster is predictable.
5. Natural disasters provide opportunities to make things better or worse:
   • Armed with knowledge of New Orleans’s long-standing human crisis, Congress must take steps to eliminate the structural causes that place our country’s poor at peril.
   • Only social, economic, and political participation by those most disadvantaged will restore New Orleans to a better city.
   • A wide-reaching Marshal Plan-type development initiative is needed if we are to decrease the vulnerability of America’s poor.
   • Poverty and exclusion more seriously threaten “homeland security” than any imagined or real outside threat.

We would like to let President Bush know that if the joy and redemption of a Second Line New Orleans parade is to be restored in that city, America must not allow another disaster anywhere to drive home the real axis of evil: poverty, injustice, and discrimination.