African American Social Theory

This research will examine how major social theorists cast light on the experience of African Americans as described in books on the status of race relations in the U.S., by Andrew Hacker and Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, respectively. The research will set forth the context for application of social theory to the two books and then discuss how theories of social structure can be employed to illuminate or explain certain assumptions and attitudes that inform each book.

It could be argued that there are as many definitions of social structure as there are commentators defining it, and the problem of definition and interpretation of observed conditions of human society (and of critique of such definition and interpretation) reaches back at least as far as Rousseau, who answers such earlier commentators as Aristotle and Hobbes (Rousseau, Inequality 39, 41, 53, et passim). In defining what he terms the social compact, Rousseau posits the ideal framework of a society organized according to his Social Contract. In Inequality, Rousseau makes a case against a social contract embedded with fundamental inequalities of experience within a given society.

There is no doubt that intellectual currents in Western philosophy and economics, notably the insights of Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau, influenced subsequent analysts. There is evidence of direct connection between Rousseau's declaration at the beginning of his Social Contract (141) that man is born free but everywhere

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icans remain oppressed and marginalized by social norms in which white-majority culture, attitudes, and power are the standards against which nonwhites in general and African Americans in particular are to be measured. Wealth, property, and the power implied by control over them are by and large concentrated in white-majority hands. The social injustice that this implies can be interpreted in line with Rousseau's equation between the very existence of private property and the very existence of inequality. For example, although blacks, like whites, want "a fair chance for steady employment at decent pay" (Hacker 110), the fact is that entire professions are de facto closed to blacks and entire professions are de facto reserved for blacks. Blacks account for 10.2% of the total American labor force but 30% of the unemployed force; 30.7% of nurses' aides and orderlies but only 1.9% of dentists; 21.5% of janitors but 3.1% of architects (116). A key observation about the unequal employment position of blacks is contained in Hacker's description of why the proportion of black representation among auto mechanics has declined in recent years: One answer is that he bulk of car-service work now takes place in suburbs or farther-flung lo

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