Examine W.E.B. Dubois' sociology. Should he be considered a founding father of sociology?

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Topic:  Examine W.E.B. Dubois’ sociology.  Should he be considered a founding father of sociology?

William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Dubois, an African American, was born in 1868 and grew up in Barrington, Massachusetts, three years after slavery was abolished.  He was the great grandson of an African slave who won his freedom as a Revolutionary soldier in the war against the British.  Dubois was a mixed Negro as he had traces of Negro, Dutch, Indian and French in his bloodline.  He was raised in a middle-class neighbourhood and as such, did not experience much racial discrimination while growing up, compared to other parts of the South.  

W.E.B. Dubois was a well-learned man.  He attended Fisk University, Harvard University and the University of Berlin.  In 1895, while studying at Harvard, Dubois received his doctorate in philosophy.  He was the first black man to earn a PhD in the United States.  His doctoral dissertation, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, achieved acclamation when it became the first publication in the Harvard Historical Studies in 1896.   Nearly every event in the history of race in America, from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement was influenced   by Dubois’ ideas or his political actions.

Dubois had much interest in the state of the Negro.  The American Civil War had just ended and slavery, the cause of the war, was abolished.  The South depended on slavery to sustain the economies in that part of the country, while slavery was illegal in the North.  However, Negroes did not have many rights until long after the war.  They did not have civil and political rights and faced much discrimination and segregation at the hands of the whites.  Although slavery was abolished, many persons still subscribed to the idea that the Negro was inferior and that this inferiority was demonstrated in their attitudes and behaviour.

The term “sociology” was coined by Auguste Comte (one of the founding fathers of this discipline) in 1839 and can be defined as “the scientific and more particularly, the positivistic, study of society”.   Dubois, a sociologist, used his literary method, reflected his theories and in many of his books and articles to dissect the problem of the Negro in society.  Early in his scholarly year, Dubois, commissioned by the University of Pennslyvainia singlehandedly completed the first major, and still important, empirical sociological study of Negro life in the United States, The Philadelphia Negro.

The Philadelphia Negro was published two years after Durkheim’s Suicide.  This was a research carried out by Dubois “into the history and social conditions of the transplanted Africans in Philadelphia from 1896 to 1898”.  According to Dubois:

“…I determined to put science into sociology through a study of the condition and problems of my own group.  I was going to study the facts, any and all facts, concerning the American Negro and his plight, and by measurement and comparison and research, work up to any valid generalization which I could.  I entered this primarily with the utilitarian object of reform and uplift; but nevertheless, I wanted to do the work with scientific accuracy.  Thus in my own sociology, because of firm belief in a changing racial group, I easily grasped the idea of a changing developing society rather than a fixed social structure”.

Dubois purported that “The final design of the work is to lay before the public such a body of information as may be a safe guide for all efforts toward the solution of the many Negro problems of a great American city”.    Dubois argued that the existence of certain peculiar social problems affecting the Negro were plainly manifest within the state of Philadelphia.  He found that although the Negroes were large in number – approximately forty five thousand – they were not an integral part of the larger social group.  This unassimilation was not unique to the Negro race, but their situation was peculiar in that, their segregation was intertwined with a long historic evolution, with peculiarly pressing social problems of poverty, ignorance, crime and labour.  Consequently, the Negro problem far surpassed in scientific interest and social gravity, most of the other race or class questions.

The purpose of The Philadelphia Negro was to empirically verify the social and class origins of poverty and inequality.  Dubois substantially showed that the Black ghetto was a creation of poverty and racism, rather than the so-called innate inferiority and supposed criminal tendencies of African Americans.  This research gave evidence to support the theory that racism was an entrenched phenomenon of the structures (i.e. institutions such as the church, home, school, business places, etc.).  Racism and prejudice were social facts (i.e. belief systems and the institutionalization of certain customs and norms).  

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Dubois firmly felt that racism and prejudice were institutionalized features of his society.  This was validated by the structures in society that sought to discriminate against Negroes and keep them in a mode of perpetual poverty that incorporated an inability to advance or contribute effectively to society.  Poverty referred to illiteracy, the inability to provide substantially for children, lack of money, lack of opportunities, and the lack of chances for upward mobility.  Dubois realized quite early in his study that complete study of the Negro involved a study of the setting in which he was placed.  In studying the ...

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