Abstract
Classic theoretical arguments by seven Black and Jewish sociologists—informed by their experience of “double-consciousness”—comprise an important legacy in sociology. Approaches that ignore the role of racism and slavery in the rise of Western societies suppress and distort this legacy in favor of a White Christian Hero narrative. By contrast, Durkheim, a Jewish sociologist, took Roman enslaved and immigrant guild-workers as a starting point, positing the “constitutive practices” of their occupations as media of cooperation for achieving solidarity across diversity. His argument marks a transition from the treatment of social facts as durable symbolic residue in homogeneous cultures, to the qualitative study of constitutive social fact making in interaction in diverse social situations. Because making social facts in interaction requires mutual reciprocity, troubles occur frequently in contexts of inequality. Like W.E.B. DuBois, who first theorized double consciousness as a heightened awareness produced by racial exclusion, Harold Garfinkel looked to troubles experienced by the marginalized as clues to the taken-for-granted practices for making social order, calling them “ethno-methods.” Together with other Black and Jewish sociologists—Eric Williams, Oliver Cromwell Cox, Erving Goffman, and Harvey Sacks—they challenge popular interpretations of classical social theory, center Race and marginality, and explain how features of practice that unite/divide can be both interactional and institutionalized.
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Notes
In this and all of our publications, we capitalize the names for key social facts such as Race, Black, Gender, Individual, etc. as a reminder that these are not natural categories. The irritation that follows from such a breach of practice hopefully serves as a reminder of the point.
In this case the friend, who identified himself as German and not Jewish, clearly “looked Jewish” such that he had experience being mistaken for Jewish. Such mistaken identifications can also lead to double consciousness if they occur frequently enough and lead the person who experiences them to understand the category of person they are being mistaken for, rather than hating that category of person as a way of distancing themselves from the category. It can go both ways. Hatred can lead to something like Franz Fanon’s “colonial mentality,” which can involve both self-hatred and the hatred of others like yourself.
The question of whether this experience leads to a solidarity among the oppressed which DuBois associates with double consciousness, or to attempts to “pass” as one of the majority, as Garfinkel’s Agnes did, matters a great deal. In the case of “passing” a solidarity of the oppressed does not emerge, and the effect of trouble is more likely to be the kind of self-hatred Fanon describes than the confidence-building insight that double consciousness can confer.
DuBois mentions the Dreyfus affair twice in Dusk of Dawn pages 15 and 24 (DuBois [1940]1983).
Media of Cooperation is the name of a Center at the University of Siegen in Germany that has supported research on the Garfinkel Archive since 2015.
Somehow in rebelling against the idea that the “founding fathers” of sociology were all men (Marx, Weber and Durkheim) and calling them “Dead White men,” feminist scholars managed to overlook the fact that Marx and Durkheim were Jewish, and that Weber was stigmatized by Mental Illness. That all of the most important European sociological theorists had been marginalized matters a great deal. It also explains significant differences between European and American sociological theory, centering on the fact that the Europeans developed fragile social fact positions oriented toward social change while the U.S. sociologists continued to emphasize consensus and durable social facts.
In his autobiography, Inward Hunger (1971), Williams described the many racial barriers he faced, which included a widespread refusal to support his early work. As a student at Oxford University in the 1930s he experienced both poverty and racism, and as a professor at Howard University in the 1940s he found himself in the middle of Jim Crow. His experiences with racism were legion, but one event that stands out from the others is that when the University of North Carolina agreed to publish his famous book, they made the unusual demand that he pay the publications costs (around $700 in 1944 money, which Williams had to borrow), even though the book had received excellent reviews from prominent scholars.
While preparing this article for copyediting we discovered an important article on DuBois by James M. Thomas (2020) that also considers the connection between double consciousness and DuBois’ understanding of the Jewish experience of racism in Germany. The article adds many details to the understanding of DuBois on double consciousness. Titled “DuBois, double consciousness, and the “Jewish question””, it was unfortunately published while our paper was under review, and we missed it. Thomas both provides support for the argument that Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness developed during his time in Germany while witnessing and examining the “Jewish Question,” and for our claim that it was of enduring importance to DuBois – as we argue it also was for our founding Jewish sociologists. Of particular interest to us are passages from DuBois in which Thomas emphasizes ways double consciousness seems similar to the problem of “passing” into White society, which we consider in this paper with regard to Goffman and Garfinkel as Jewish scholars and also in a previous paper (Rawls forthcoming). In both cases the emphasis is on the problem of seeing oneself through the eyes of the “Other” who is the oppressor – and as Garfinkel concluded – not being able to trust one’s own judgment (noted with regard to “Agnes” Garfinkel 1967). In our paper we distinguished the problems associated with “passing” from those involved in what we call “the full” experience of double consciousness, which comes from having no possibility of passing and finding a sense of community among those who are similarly blocked. One of the differences between the Black and Jewish experience, one that Goffman and Garfinkel discussed in their work on “passing,” was the ever-present temptation to “pass” and the conflicts in the Self which result from that temptation.
Whereas as Thomas notes, others like Robert Park, saw the Jew as a pathological marginal man, DuBois did not. Goffman and Garfinkel similarly argued that the pathology is a consequence of “passing” and happens to anyone who passes. Thomas (1350) points out that for DuBois the problem shifted from the psyche to the nation, i.e., what is wrong with the US that Black people are forced to experience this? In attributing the problem to the society, rather than to the marginalized, we also find DuBois sharing common ground with the Jewish founders. Durkheim, in 1893 had posited a lack of justice and equality as a trouble that would prevent the success of “constitutive practices” in modern sciences and occupations, leading to the downfall of the whole society, while Garfinkel emphasizes passing as both a trouble and the solution – because it offers the sociologist a way in to see what the problem is – e.g., a lack of the ability to meet Trust Conditions grounded in his famous argument that making sense requires a mutual commitment to underlying conditions. And – as Thomas asserts is also the case for DuBois – the trouble redounds onto White society and becomes a lack that holds it back.
Znaniecki and Simmel would seem to be obvious additions to our list. Certainly, both have been more popular than all but Durkheim. The problem is that neither Simmel nor Znaniecki managed to overcome Individualism or recognize Individualism as a social construction. Nor did either conceptualize double consciousness. Simmel’s description of the Stranger for instance, portraying the experiences of a permanent outsider, rather an insider whose membership is blocked. We maintain that this made their work easier to incorporate into the mainstream. When Garfinkel wrote that even social interactionists overlooked social interaction, he had Znaniecki’ s Social Actions in mind. This were part of the problem that Parsons (1938) was complaining would bring about the downfall of sociology.
DuBois’s conception of the “Veil” that is part of the experience of exclusion is not the same as double consciousness. It characterizes the experience of being separated, and as such is more like Simmel’s conception of “The Stranger” who is always a stranger, and while they may have some insight into how the society they do not belong to works, the stranger never has the insight a member who has double consciousness develops.
Southern folklore contains narratives about the difficulty of responding to a master when some answers are required, and the truth might cost a life. Similar stories are told about the British in India. The focus of many such narratives is on how difficult it is to get any answer from a slave except “yes”, no matter what the facts may be.
Interaction Orders (Goffman 1983, Rawls 1987) are sets of locally situated rules and expectations that members of a group/society use to coordinate their daily sense making in the form of tacit, taken-for-granted practices that are not normally available to consciousness unless the person has a frequent experience with trouble and exclusion.
While Black Feminist research on “intersectionality,” i.e., managing identity at the intersection of more than one stigmatized social category (Black, Female, Gay, Criminal, etc.), has made an important contribution that is also inspired by DuBois’s conception of double consciousness, approaching the issue interactionally, as we do, adds another dimension. To the awareness of the troubles involved in handling multiple identities within a single social framework, taking an Interaction Order approach adds the need to perform conflicting social identities while also complying with contradictory social frameworks that have contradictory interactional expectations. It is a more like three-dimensional chess than an additional intersection.
Members of most societies learn to distinguish members of populations that their own group distinguishes itself from. Because the details of how this is done, and the groups that are distinguished varies between populations – it can seem mysterious to some how anyone would identify a person as Jewish. But that same person might not have any difficulty identifying someone as Arab or Latinx – if that distinction was important to their own group. These are fine cultural distinctions that people learn to make when they are important to the society they grow up in.
This is why, as cognitive psychologists have noted, we are consciously aware of very little of what we do. Cognitive psychologists have recently been able to measure activity in various parts of the brain while people are doing specific tasks. Some estimate that we are only consciously aware of 2 percent of what goes on.
This research project involved Jerome Bruner, the famous psychologist, and according to Bruner (personal communication with Anne Rawls) while they worked together on this project, he and Garfinkel talked frequently and became good friends.
Garfinkel had an experience while doing field research in Bastrop, Texas for Wilbert Moore in 1942 that he used in conversation to illustrate this point. A man he was trying to interview for his research identified Garfinkel as Jewish in a problematic way. Garfinkel tried for an inclusive category. “But we all believe in the same deity”. The man was not having it. The bottom line was “You are a Jew,” and the interview went nowhere.
Garfinkel took a lifelong interest in discovery in the sciences. While many philosophers of science have argued that discovery is not possible, that there must be some conception of what could be discovered in order to make the discovery, Garfinkel disagreed. His study of the discovery of the Optical Pulsar (Garfinkel 1998) is a case in point. The initial noticing was an anomaly, and it didn’t register until it was seen for the second time. Then it took three years to develop the language with which to discuss and present the discovery. So, it was only announced as a discovery after the conceptual apparatus for accounting for it had been constructed. But the thing that led to the discovery was completely unexpected and there was no way of accounting for it at the time. The same is true apparently for the discovery of oxygen, which was found years before it was announced. As anomalies occur in interaction and scientific work and as those familiar with the work discuss them it is possible to discover formerly unknown things by using familiar scientific processes.
Unknown to Garfinkel at the time, the incident involved Pauli Murray, a well-known feminist civil rights activist. To complicate matters Murray was secretly a cross dressing female – identified by Garfinkel as an adolescent boy. Garfinkel’s description of Murray as a “boy” is consistent with his discussion of Agnes (a transgendered person) as a woman. Murray “presented” as a boy – and hoped to be seen as a boy. Garfinkel obliged. Garfinkel considered the successful performance of Gender to settle the question. In this he was ahead of his time. That Garfinkel “mistook” Murray for a boy is not an “error” in his analysis. It was due to her own success in presenting herself as a boy and consistent with his later analysis of Agnes (a trans-woman) which has also been misunderstood). Murray – performing successfully as a boy – was a boy. Agnes performing successfully as a woman was a woman. It is interesting to note, however, that in his description Garfinkel refers to the “boy” as “flat chested” which suggests he may have been sensitive to some transgender aspect of the presentation. Murray recognized Garfinkel’s description of the incident while still in jail and the article has become associated with Murray’s arrest in the history of the civil rights movement. Glenda Gilmore wrote about it in Defying Dixie (2008), taking Garfinkel to task for not being clear that the incident was true. But, in his first publication of the observation in the Urban League Journal Opportunity in May 1940 Garfinkel did present it as a true incident. Rosalind Rosenberg (2013) a civil rights historian, focused on discrepancies between the accounts of Garfinkel and Murray – of which there are few – mainly involving what could be seen by Garfinkel in the front of the bus versus Murray at the back. Murray’s account can be found in the Harvard University Schlesinger archive.
While the idea that sociology formulated itself as suffering a trauma seems right, Alexander also suggests that scientists would deal with trauma scientifically. Sociologists did use the language of science to reformulate the categories and meanings of their science. But they did not do this based on scientific evidence or practice. When a science formulates itself as suffering a trauma, there is no reason to expect it to do so scientifically, any more than other groups or individuals do, and American sociologists did not do so.
Why they expected sociology to be able to prevent war is an interesting question. But they did. The problem was also discussed at the outbreak of World War I, and Teddy Roosevelt attended the sociology association meetings that year to discuss the problem. At the onset of World War II, it became an issue again. The question of how war could have been averted if only sociology had produced better research was under serious discussion.
Garfinkel’s war work at Gulfport Field Mississippi is quite interesting. In order to get troops ready for war quickly the Generals wanted to dispense with “theory” and go directly to practice. This was of particular importance given that many of the men could not read. Garfinkel had a front-row seat documenting the process as an “historian” when the Army Airforce experimented with an approach that put practice ahead of theory in the training (Garfinkel [1943]2019); Rawls and Lynch 2019).
Garfinkel entered graduate school in 1939, was a sociological researcher for the Army during the war, and began his PhD at Harvard with Talcott Parsons in 1946. Goffman completed his BA in 1945 and was at Chicago for his MA before 1947. Conventional disciplinary history does not account for their longstanding collaboration with Parsons or for the disdain and outright disrespect for their work in later decades. By contrast, the wartime narrative offers a plausible context for Garfinkel’s defense of both Znaniecki and Parsons in early papers (Garfinkel 1948) and for the consistent attempts by both Garfinkel and Goffman to establish research on the interactional parameters of Durkheim’s social facts.
The effort to become totally “value-free” during the war inspired Rupert Vance in his Presidential Address to say that even economics, which sociology at the time claimed to be modeling itself on, acknowledged the need to deal with “values.”.
It is important to note that, while this is on the surface a North American narrative, it had worldwide implications, because World War II put an end to most academic sociology outside the U.S. Many of the scholars from other countries who continued doing academic work during the war did that work in the U.S., and many of those were qualitative Jewish sociologists. The American wartime influence on Levi-Strauss and how his resulting misinterpretation of Durkheim influenced French social theory has recently become a research issue in France (Nicolas Meylan, personal communication, Cologne, May 2016). That Adorno and Horkheimer took the American narrative and techniques back to Frankfurt in the 1950s should raise similar questions (Frederic Vandenberghe, personal communication).
In “The Myth of the Framework,” Popper (1994) uses the notion of “framework” to criticize the idea of a social fact or traditional consensus as the origin of reasoning. According to Popper, any research that is grounded in the idea of consensus or framework is relativistic. Durkheim agreed with this view. Traditional morality and reasoning within a social consensus are both relativistic. It is only in a context of constitutive practices that diverse humans are able to use practices to make sense together in a way that escapes relativism, see also (Warnock 1971).
Locke was not alone in his thinking. The controversies of this period inspired Samuel Johnson to compile the first English dictionary by 1755, and Sir William Blackstone completed his famous four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England in 1765.
Hume did argue that statements about human emotions have validity because we have direct experience of our emotions, and he tried to make this the basis of a moral philosophy. This position is similar to the one that Comte would make in some respects, but it settles on an individual attribute (emotionality) and not a social constant (social fact), which gives the position the drawbacks of Kant’s in requiring all humans to be the same, which we are not.
Many different schools of thought were inspired by Kant. The name Neo-Kantian applied to some of them is misleading, however, because groups identified as Neo-Kantian developed in different disciplines and interpreted Kant in vastly different ways. The only common element is the treatment of some human a priori (involving reason, language, sense, logic, etc.) as a legitimate basis for scientific claims, insofar as the scientist understands that the claims are only valid within the particular a priori circle they draw and that they are not talking about the world in-itself.
The argument that constitutive social facts are not relative in the same way that consensus based social facts are, is complicated. It rests on the proposal that because constitutive practices do not require beliefs and they are not themselves ideas or concepts, anyone can learn how to use them to make social facts, the validity of which is then an empirical matter. This is what Garfinkel means by the unique adequacy of methods.
Influential qualitative scholars like Florian Znaniecki also experienced exclusion and oppression of many sorts. Znaniecki was Jewish, educated in Poland during the period when the country was split between Prussia, Austria and Russia. Attending schools under Russian administration, he joined an underground study group to pursue Polish language studies, which were banned. He entered University in 1902 but was soon expelled for protesting Russian limitations on student rights. After this he seems to have travelled around Europe attending several universities, fighting in the French Foreign Legion and working in a circus. In 1908 he transferred from the University of Zurich to the Sorbonne in Paris where he attended Durkheim’s lectures.
Those who criticize the sociological reliance on collaborative social fact making for being relativistic forget the philosophical impasse. The only philosophical way out of the dilemma so far is to assume that all minds work the same way (which they don’t), or to adopt pragmatism – which is relativistic. Durkheim avoided both problems.
That this is often considered a turn toward idealism in Durkheim’s position after 1895 misconstrues his point. Durkheim was elaborating on his earlier point that using constitutive practices could create shared ideas— a use argument that was not focused on the ideas themselves or their logics, but on the empirical conditions of their making (Rawls 1996, 2009).
The “Dreyfus Affair,” as it came to be known, seems to have represented a period in French history with many similarities to the period of BlackLivesMatter and the Trump Presidency in the US. Part of the population became more aware of racial discrimination and sprang into action, while at the same time active acts of discrimination and anti-Semitism increased and became quite open in everyday life. The period was important for Durkheim, and many authors have commented on its influence on the development of his thinking. Goldberg (2008: 300) writes that “These accusations were accompanied by public demands to bar Jews from political life and the state service, repeal the emancipation that the French state had granted them in 1791, and even expel them from France altogether (see also Vital 1999:540–66; Fournier 2007:365–90; Gartner 2001:232, 234–35; Kedward 1965; Lukes 1973:347–49; and Strenski 1997).”.
Simmel’s 1908 “The Stranger” offers a similar analysis.
According to Goldberg (303): “Since Durkheim views anomie as pathological and anti-Semitism as symptomatic of it, anti-Semitism serves as a kind of social thermometer for him, a useful index of the health of society; it is “one of the numerous indications that reveals the serious moral disturbance from which we suffer.” Any sudden upsurge of anti-Semitism could thus be taken as a sign of the illness of society.”.
C.L R. James is another famous Black writer from Trinidad and Tobago who was an early teacher of Eric Williams and had a profound effect on his thinking. James also took a social constructionist approach. But, unlike the others, he was more a public intellectual and author.
There is a deep irony in current conservative talk in the U.S. about freedom, which positions itself in defense of an individual who on the one hand exists independently of society while on the other hand passionately defends a traditional consensus that treats all who are not part of that consensus as unfree and not belonging—even though all individuals are alleged to be independent.
Black Americans’ expectations have much in common with Kant’s “Kingdom of Ends,” the one idea Kant said that the individual should subordinate itself to. There is an interesting sense in which, although Kant was beginning with the individual, his formulation of the individual as an end-in-itself, combined with his conception of a Kingdom of Ends to which all Individuals should subordinate themselves, is a very sociological conception. For Kant it was an idea. For Durkheim and Goffman, it became a social contract grounding the possibility of a fragile but real social world.
Goffman, Garfinkel, and Sacks, talked among themselves about the significance of being Jewish, saying in 1964 during a conference in Los Angeles that you had to be Jewish to think up ethnomethodology (audio recordings in the Garfinkel archive). Sacks said that the possible identities for Jewish men like himself are limited, and that a Jew only “counts” in his father’s eyes if he becomes a doctor (Sacks had studies law). Simmel also wrote about being Jewish, but his stranger played a more positive role in society while remaining a permanent outsider—a role that seems at odds with the actual experience of Jews in Germany at the time.
In research for his PhD in 1948, Garfinkel studied how Jewish students at Harvard who were anxious about being accepted into medical school engaged in contradictory reasoning in response to disconfirming information (Leon Festinger, who was a friend of Garfinkel’s, coined the term “cognitive dissonance” for this phenomenon in 1957). Garfinkel found that all high achieving-students experienced cognitive dissonance when presented with disconfirming information, but that high achieving Jewish students did so more than the others. Garfinkel argued that they were trying to make it seem as if they had understood what was happening all along when they had not.
We caution that the many stories about how difficult Garfinkel was as a person and comments about his “strangeness” miss the point. Like DuBois, Garfinkel was marginalized, and often ostracized for his lack of “conformity.” Like Agnes, Garfinkel’s strangeness and marginality explains how he developed the ability to see the enormous detail in the order properties of the social life he was not allowed to fully blend into.
In doing ethnomethodology, it is important to recognize that constitutive practices self-sanction. That is, because they are constitutive, doing them wrong meets with immediate trouble in the interaction. The action or utterance in question fails to make sense, and remedial work is needed. Trouble can be an important clue to the order properties.
Durable social facts do not self-sanction. Thus, as Malinowski and other anthropologists have noted, there are often obvious violations of consensus-based norms that are not sanctioned unless they are made explicit publicly.
With regard to speaking in tongues, doing it wrong is treated in some congregations as evidence of demonic possession and the persons in question are physically removed from the building (Wright and Rawls 2006).
Don Levine lamented what he saw as a loss of playfulness – richness of word play – in modern Western society. He had observed that formatted and ritual talk in consensus-based societies affords more opportunities for wordplay, such as parables. What he did not appreciate was why: That this is possible precisely because talk in such societies does not rely on turn structure and fragile social facts to the same degree. When a traditional consensus is in place position does not give the meanings of words to the same degree—consensus does—so position can be played with.
Some essential aspects of turn-taking practices are not equally available to the blind and deaf. This means that there are Interaction Orders for the Sighted and different ones for the Blind/Deaf (see Coates and Rawls, 2022).
Spanish, French, and Portuguese forms of racialization are much more complex therefore – involving many categories. As many as 128 categories in Haiti according to James, and we have been told 23 categories in Brazil. These categories tend to constitute a hierarchy with the lightest skinned people at the top and the darkest at the bottom. But, in these systems it is always possible to move between categories in a number of ways and skin color is not the only determinant. Whereas the binary two category system can be quite absolute, allowing for no movement between categories, and giving the lowest white people nearest the boundary good reasons to maintain that boundary – such that they police the boundary vigilantly – multi category systems encourage people to focus on climbing to the next category. Because Black people in a two-category system cannot “improve” their category they develop a strong identification with their category and focus on improving everyone within it – rather than putting all their energy into escaping from the category. This, in DuBois’ view was the most important difference leading to double consciousness in a binary system as opposed to Fanon’s “Colonial Mentality”.
Williams was the first to describe how the extensive British use of White forced labor, the only colonial empire to do so, led to the development of the Black/White binary Race categorization system in the North American colonies in order to coerce free White men to oppress African slaves after the English got access to the African slave trade around 1660. See also Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, volumes I and II (1994 and 1996).
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Duck, W., Rawls, A. Black and Jewish: “Double Consciousness” Inspired a Qualitative Interactional Approach that Centers Race, Marginality, and Justice. Qual Sociol 46, 163–198 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-023-09535-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-023-09535-9
Keywords
- Race and Racism
- Marginality and Exclusion
- Racialized Slavery
- Social Interaction
- Qualitative Sociology
- Ethnomethodology
- Positivism
- W.E.B. DuBois
- Double Consciousness
- Eric Williams
- Oliver Cromwell Cox
- Harold Garfinkel
- Emile Durkheim
- Social Facts
- Constitutive Practices
- Sociological Theory
- Erving Goffman
- Harvey Sacks
- Talcott Parsons