RacIaL exPLoItatIoN ( 115 )warrant the development of a new tool kit and, accordingly, a new paradigm
is doubly ruled out. To the extent that race is not ignored altogether, it is
naturalized or marginalized.
The results can be seen in the typical silences and evasions of these disci-
plines. In an article giving a historical overview of American sociology, for
example, Stanford Lyman argues that from the very start the discipline has
had a “resistance to a civil rights orientation”:
Race relations has been conceived of as a social problem within the domain of sociol-
ogy ever since that discipline gained prominence in the United States; however, the self-
proclaimed science of society did not focus its attention on the problem of how the civil
rights of racial minorities might be recognized, legitimated, and enforced.... Indeed,
tracing the history of the race problem in sociology is tantamount to tracing the history
and the central problem of the discipline itself— namely, its avoidance of the issue of
the significance of civil rights for a democratic society.... Sociology, in this respect, has
been part of the problem and not part of the solution.^7In political science, similarly, Rogers Smith’s important and prizewinning
book, Civic Ideals, outlines the various ways in which the most important
theorists of American political culture, Alexis de Tocqueville, Gunnar
Myrdal, and Louis Hartz, managed to represent racism as an “anomaly”
within a polity conceived of as basically egalitarian:
When restrictions on voting rights, naturalization, and immigration are taken into
account, it turns out that for over 80 percent of U.S. history, American laws declared
most people in the world legally ineligible to become full U.S. citizens solely because
of their race, original nationality, or gender. For at least two- thirds of American history,
the majority of the domestic adult population was also ineligible for full citizenship for
the same reasons.... Although such facts are hardly unknown, they have been ignored,
minimized, or dismissed in several major interpretations of American civic identity that
have massively influenced modern scholarship.... All these Tocquevillian accounts fal-
ter because they center on relationships among a minority of Americans— white men,
largely of northern European ancestry— analyzed in terms of categories derived from
the hierarchy of political and economic status such men held in Europe.... [Writers in
the Tocquevillian tradition] believe ... that the cause of human equality is best served
by reading egalitarian principles as America’s true principles, while treating the massive
inequalities in American life as products of prejudice, not rival principles.^8Finally in philosophy, it is notorious— at least among black philosophers—
that racial justice has been a major theme or sub- theme of hardly a single one
of the numerous books on justice by white political philosophers written
in the four decades- plus since the revival of political philosophy following