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Sociology’s race problem: Urban ethnographers do more harm than good in speaking for Black communities. They see only suffering, not diversity or joy.
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I read this essay a few years ago but was reminded of it by American Fiction (trailer) which criticises Hollywood for exploring only the oppression and suffering of Black people (essentially reducing them to a passive victim role which deprives them of agency), rather than portraying them in the full depth that would humanize them.
In Hollywood you see the same issues with queer stories and with the "desert" orange filter on Mexico or Middle Eastern countries. While it's a literal video filter, it's also about the stories that get told about the people that live there.
Queer joy stories are something I seek out personally but I also try to make my social media and my media consumption include stories of Black joy, etc.
This is a pretty interesting piece. I came in ready to "tut", but the author makes a lot of good points. It seems in a lot of fields there is increasing support for communities to develop and lead their own efforts. I'd say 85% of NatGeo explorers now come from where they do their field work (vs the ~20% of the 2010s) and it seems like sociology is prime to follow suit.
(I wrote out the part below and when I finished I reread it want to pre-warn that I'm thinking through a lot of my thoughts about the article here. I'm in no way an expert or even decently educated in sociology and am kind of hesitant to leave this up because it might all be total garbage. If anyone knows more, and as this is Tildes I'm sure someone does, I'd love to learn more about it!)
I'm coming at this with total ignorance from a white perspective, and I'm wondering how much of sociology is effectively set up to guide or justify the distribution of government funds? I know there are diverse research projects - drug use in queer communities, food access in inner cities, literacy amongst dense immigrant communities - and they all seem to be able to support policy or funding. To me it seems like much of the suffering would go to support changes in policy around zoning (mixed commerical to reduce food deserts), access subsidies (such as public transit or development subsidies), and program funding (like non-market housing or childcare programs). I'm guessing that this isn't the reality of how things play out and maybe overwrites the local need/ruins some of the current solutions (i.e. providing free daycare by subsidizing an externally, white owned daycare chain rather than the families in the community that already fill that role because the former understands the federal bidding process.)
I think I might be going down a total side tangent, but maybe thats part of the problem. Paper comes out that says problem X is a huge issue in the community, locally they are already addressing it but not to the level/in the way an external observer expect, the state or fed wants to solve the issue so they release a request for proposal for that topic, only well funded/connected groups understand the bidding process or even know where to look for the released proposals, even if local groups bid they don't have the staff/resources/reputation of the external group so they lose out on the proposal, the new solution is rolled out and because it's subsidized makes local solutions non-competitive, the folks depending on that income now don't have jobs, the local community is now worse off than before.
Kind of feels like the "Tom's" model for shoes that ended up ruining the local trade for shoe stores and shoe makers in areas it rolled out in. To the point of the article, seems like supporting/subsidizing/funding groups already operating in the area or living in the community would be more beneficial. Which is just a dumbed down summary of the article...
Also, I love this quote.
Edit: Also the behavior the article, and that last quote, talks about feels a lot like the gonzo style journalism of folks like Andrew Callahan.
I'd say the patronizing and often nearsighted view of ethnographers has been an issue since the fouding fathers of the social science, hence the famous personal diary of Malinowski and the polemic wrote by Geertz and others around it it. I think in general an ethnography represents as much the population being documented as the author, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Funnily enough I've always seen ethnography as more of an anthropology thing, curious how the article calls out Sociology specifically instead of Social Sciences or Anthropology itself.