Black and Jewish: “Double Consciousness” Inspired a Qualitative Interactional Approach that Centers Race, Marginality, and Justice

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.

I HAVE been to Poland three times. The first time was 59 years ago, when I was a student at the University of Berlin. I had been talking to my schoolmate, Stanislaus Ritter von Estreicher. I had been telling him of the race problem in America, which seemed to me at the time the only race problem and the greatest social problem of the world. He brushed it aside. He said, "You know nothing, really, about real race problems." Then he began to tell me about the problem of the Poles and particularly of that part of them who were included in the German empire; of their limited education; of the refusal to let them speak their own language; of the few careers that they were allowed to follow; of the continued insult to their culture and family life. I was astonished; because race problems at the time were to me purely problems of color, and principally of slavery in the United States and near-slavery in Africa. I promised faithfully that when I went on my vacation that summer, I would stop to see him in his home at Krakow, Poland, where his father was a librarian of the university.

W.E.B. DuBois, “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” (1952)

After visiting the ruins of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw, Poland in 1949, W.E.B. DuBois gave a talk in New York City at “Tribute to the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters,” sponsored by Jewish Life magazine. DuBois told the audience that his postwar visit to Poland had reconfirmed his broad conception of Race¹ as a social construction, which had been inspired by earlier visits. DuBois explained that he had confronted “Jewish” and “Polish” as racialized categories for the first time while he was a PhD student at the University of Berlin in 1891, when he found that some of his Jewish friends were not only racially oppressed like Black Americans but had developed the heightened awareness of how they were being marginalized that DuBois called “double consciousness.” When he first visited Poland, he had come face-to-face with the Jewish experience of racism. Once, after entering a house with a German friend, DuBois had “become uneasily aware that all was not going well.” At this point his friend, also aware of the trouble, leaned over and whispered, “They think I may be a Jew. It’s not you they object to, it’s me.” He reports being “astonished,” having until then equated Race prejudice with “color prejudice” (DuBois 1952).²

In this article we highlight the contributions of seven Black and Jewish scholars who translated their experience of marginality and double consciousness into a sociological approach to modernity that challenges popular tendencies toward individualism, positivism, and quantitative methods, emphasizing instead the importance of social construction, fragile social facts, morality, reciprocity, and justice. We maintain that together these seven scholars made essential contributions to a qualitative interactional approach that centers Race and justice (Duck 2016, Rawls 2000, 2009, 2012, 2019; Rawls and Duck 2020).

The seven are, in order of birth: Durkheim (1858), DuBois (1868), Cox (1901), Williams (1911), Garfinkel (1917), Goffman (1922), and Sacks (1935). Our point is not that there is something special about Black and Jewish culture or people that fosters an interest in social construction and justice (Haynes 2020). Rather, it is the constant experience of marginality and trouble in interaction that can give Black and Jewish scholars insight into how social facts are made. DuBois called this heightened awareness “second-sight” and “double consciousness.”³ The experience is sometimes shared by Women, Disabled, Mentally Ill, LGBTQ + persons, and those in other marginalized categories.

In treating double consciousness as the inspiration for a modern sociology that embraces diversity rather than consensus, we meld a sociological lineage founded by Durkheim to another founded by DuBois. This hybrid lineage centers Race and racialization and the taken-for-granted social processes involved in their production. Race is one of the most consequential social facts of the modern era, and racialized slavery has arguably been the most transformative social construction in world history. As Williams, DuBois, and Cox all argue, the invention of racialized slavery financed the rise of Western capitalism, completely altered the relevance of caste and class, and in the process created Race as a modern social fact. Sociological theory and research that neglects the importance of social constructions or explains the development of Western society without taking Race and racialized slavery into account inevitably reproduces false Eurocentric beliefs about the superiority of White European culture and people.

In his second preface to the Division of Labor, written in 1902 at the height of the “Dreyfus Affair,” as anti-Semitism ran rampant in France after Dreyfus, a Jewish officer, was framed for treason,⁴ Durkheim focused on the constitutive practices of Roman enslaved and immigrant guild workers as media of cooperation and communication that are not only free from consensus but of a self-organizing type that has become fundamental to diverse modern occupational, scientific, and public spaces.⁵ In so doing, he called attention to diversity as an unintended consequence of slavery which changed European society. Mixing populations, languages, and cultures creates a diversity of beliefs and practices that cannot function within a traditional consensus. Instead, forms of what he called “constitutive practice” replace consensus, changing the societies they arise in and pushing them toward justice (Rawls 2012, 2019). In the Roman era these practices were concentrated in guilds. But in the modern era they have taken over public life. Often mischaracterized as a conservative functionalist or a consensus theorist, Durkheim developed a school of sociology in which constitutive practices replace consensus, and a lack of justice is recognized as a threat to the solidarity of a diversified modern society.

Eric Williams, who led his country, Trinidad and Tobago, to independence in 1962 and served as its first prime minister, made an argument in his famous book Capitalism and Slavery (1944) that parallels Durkheim’s. According to Williams, racialized slavery first transformed Europe by financing the Industrial Revolution, which then created the conditions for the abolition of slavery and the destruction of tradition and consensus by stimulating the rise of the capitalist middle class and its preference for free trade.

DuBois, Williams, and Durkheim all challenged the received scholarship of most disciplines. They were particularly unorthodox in treating the Individual and Individualism as social constructions and arguing that the positivist treatment of them as natural facts had obscured the importance of justice and the influence of slavery in modern society.

Their challenge was unwelcome and misunderstood. In Durkheim’s case the result was his rehabilitation as a White “founding father” of Sociology who is said to have espoused a conservative position that he explicitly rejected.⁶ DuBois is only recently starting to receive the recognition he deserves from those who control Sociology (Morris 2015), and the discipline has managed to either ignore or vilify the others (Rawls 2018). While Williams’s argument is now being embraced by historians of capitalism (e.g., Beckert 2014; Beckert and Rockman 2016; Rosenthal 2018), most sociologists outside of those who specialize in Race and/or Caribbean studies still ignore his work and its implications for social theory. When he originally tried to publish the book, after enduring years of “polite” racism at Oxford, publishers were not interested. One turned him down because the argument violated “British tradition”— which of course it did and does (Williams 1971).⁷

The contributions of these seven Black and Jewish scholars, along with their detailed studies of the troubles associated with Race and marginalization, have always been central to the theoretical concerns of sociology. These scholars may have been oppressed, ignored, and marginalized, but their contribution has never been marginal to sociology as a discipline. In centering Race and marginality, they revealed the hidden social structures of modern society writ large. In the process they exposed the fallacy of the positivism and individualism that has naively dominated most conventional research and theory, both then and now.

Durkheim’s argument that in contexts of diversity the constitutive practices of work and public life reject inequality in favor of justice works in tandem with DuBois, Williams, and Cox to ground a sociological theory of modernity and an empirical approach to social facts. Garfinkel, Goffman, and Sacks followed up Durkheim’s argument with studies of constitutive practices in interaction that reveal the social and moral conditions of modern society in empirical detail.⁸ Durkheim’s (1893) “Implicit Conditions of Contract” and Garfinkel’s (1963) “Trust Conditions” elaborate reciprocity requirements for successful sensemaking, while Goffman’s (1959) “Working Consensus” proposes requirements for the achievement of Self in interaction. Sacks extended the argument to the sequencing of preferred orders of Turn-Taking in conversation (Sacks et al. 1974; Sacks (1992a, 1992b); Schegloff (1972); Schegloff (1996); Schegloff (2007); Schegloff (1973) and what he referred to as the “Listening and Hearing Obligations” they entail. Together these sociologists established that achieving mutual intelligibility requires participants in any situation to commit implicitly to a single set of constitutive practices—–what we call an Interaction Order (Goffman 1983; Rawls 1987)—that obligates them to fair play, competent use, and mutual reciprocity.

Insofar as Race and marginalization hold the key to understanding the social organization of diverse modern societies, DuBois should take a position alongside Durkheim, whose major works were published when the famous African Americana scholar was beginning his own long and prolific career. DuBois was the first classical theorist of Race and the first to expose hidden aspects of social experience related to Race. He and Durkheim were the first to argue that justice is a prerequisite for the constitutive practices of modernity. Durkheim’s plan was to develop a public sociology that would teach the sociological principles of morality needed to support the interactional needs of diverse modern publics (Durkheim [1924]1953). Like DuBois, who founded The Crisis in 1910 as an outlet for articles about Race, Durkheim established L'Année Sociologique in 1898 as a vehicle for articles about social fact making processes by members of his own school of sociology.⁹

DuBois and Durkheim occupy the founding roles in a classical sociological lineage that contests the positivist, individualist, consensus-based versions of sociology that built on Comte, Spencer, and the Utilitarians. Durkheim started the first French school of sociology to replace this heritage, while DuBois started the first American school of sociology with similar objectives (Bobo 2000; Briggs 2005; Deegan 1988; England and Warner 2013; Gabbidon 2007; Hancock 2005; Morris and Ghaziani 2005; Morris 2015; Hunter 2013a, b; Watts 2006; Wright 2002a, 2002b, 2002c, 2006; Gooding-Williams 2011; Zuckerman 2004; Gooding-Williams 2011). We position Garfinkel, Goffman, and Sacks in this lineage alongside Williams and Cox, who took up the impact of racialized slavery and its resulting social constructions on Western and global social, economic, and political systems.

In considering the contributions of these seven scholars to sociology, ten sections follow that draw relationships between: double consciousness and Interaction Orders of Race; clashing Interaction Orders and definitions of the situation; ethnomethodology and double consciousness; qualitative methods and World War II; positivism and the social fact tradition; justice and science; Individualism and social construction; tutorial problems and double consciousness; Indexicality and turn-taking; and, finally, racialized slavery and sociological theory.

Double Consciousness and Interaction Orders of Race

Throughout DuBois’s prolific and path-breaking career as a sociologist and public intellectual, he challenged accepted notions of Race and racism. His experiences teaching and traveling in the U.S. South in 1886 as Reconstruction was collapsing, combined with his encounters with Jewish and Polish racial exclusion in Europe to broaden his conceptions of double consciousness and the character of Race as a social fact.¹⁰ Although not usually associated with qualitative sociology, studies of interaction, or even with classical social theory, DuBois’s descriptions of double consciousness are invariably conveyed through interactional detail (Rawls 2000). Moreover, his treatment of Race as a social fact extends Durkheim’s theoretical argument that social facts are fragile creations using what Durkheim called “constitutive practices” in interactions.

Our argument in Tacit Racism (Rawls and Duck 2020) that racial oppression led to the formation of clashing Interaction Orders of Race in the U.S. (and likely elsewhere), is informed by DuBois. His approach affords a view of racism in interaction and of the African American worldview that developed in opposition to racism, which addresses the question of how inequalities in the large-scale economic and social relations between the separate worlds of Black and White Americans, and differences in their awareness of the relationship between individual social selves and the larger community, translate into clashing interactional practices. DuBois’s important conception of “Submissive Civility,” which denotes Black Americans’ recognition of the constitutive relationship between community and Self (in contrast to the Individualism of what he called the “White Strong Man ideal”), has this origin (DuBois [1980]1943).

Although DuBois (1903:134) did not focus on interactional differences, he often relied on descriptions of interaction when discussing double consciousness, and his own first experience with it was described in the context of a schoolroom interaction.¹¹ Furthermore, DuBois included communication and interaction in his overall consideration of Race, identifying four levels of “race contact”: the first being physical proximity, the second economic relations, followed by political relations, and a fourth level, which he calls “less tangible,” that involves interaction. For DuBois (1903:135), this interactional level of Race contact consists of:

[T]he interchange of ideas through conversation and conference, through periodicals and libraries, and, above all, the gradual formation for each community of that curious tertium quid which we call public opinion. Closely allied with this come the various forms of social contact in everyday life.

DuBois’s treatment of everyday interaction as an essential form of Race contact includes the role daily interaction plays in the formation of the individual Self, the achievement of mutual intelligibility, the creation of narratives, rumors, stereotypes, and finally, the interplay between those institutional structures that both result from and place constraints on differences between communicative practices. According to DuBois (1903:147):

It is, in fine, the atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one little actions which go to make up life. In any community or nation, it is these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and yet most essential to any clear conception of the group life taken as a whole.

While interaction is essential, its “elusive” workings are curiously invisible. This, says DuBois, “is peculiarly true of the South.” Describing interactions in the South during the rise of DuBois (1903:148), he emphasized the subtlety of the practices, which are so unobtrusive that “the casual observer visiting the South sees at first little of this.” People are quite literally living in different socially constructed worlds. According to DuBois (1903:148), the visitor “realizes at last that silently, resistlessly, the world about flows by him in two great streams; they ripple on in the same sunshine, they approach and mingle their waters in seeming carelessness, then they divide and flow wide apart.” Although the two merge physically, they remain separate socially.

The lack of close contact that began with Emancipation and deepened after the end of Reconstruction is different from the close daily contact between Races before the Civil War. C. Van Woodward (1957), in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, emphasized that racial segregation was a post–Civil War invention, not a “Southern Tradition” as opponents of civil rights had claimed.¹² Before Emancipation there was no racial segregation in most public spaces and worksites and White and Black Americans often worked side-by-side as a consequence (although rarely as equals). Jim Crow—and its modern iterations in mass incarceration (Alexander 2011), police brutality, and the chokehold (Butler 2017; Duck 2017) effectively create and sustain two separate worlds, blocking Black Americans from participation in the White world (Feagin 2009), while at the same time, as Garfinkel (1940) noted, requiring the pretense that their submission to Jim Crow is voluntary.

In his first publication, titled “Color Trouble” (1940), Garfinkel made the hidden, taken-for-granted character of this complicity a central feature of his analysis, pointing out how the tacit social structures of Jim Crow broke down when two Black passengers on a segregated bus made them explicit by refusing to participate in their own humiliation (Rawls 2022a, b, c). Making racism and its coercive character blatantly obvious undermines the surface veneer of politeness behind which it hides, which is why the prospect of Black “social equality” is such a fearful thing to those who refuse to examine racist practices. Garfinkel detailed the general embarrassment and remedial work used to repair the breach of Jim Crow conventions on the bus, which required the other Black passengers to openly display their approval of its strictures (Rawls 2022a). This first ethnography by Garfinkel underscored both why interaction as a social institution is worthy of study and how interactions break down in contexts of inequality when the taken-for-granted rules that govern interracial contacts are openly challenged in public.

The problem, as DuBois (1903:150) eloquently develops it, is that being unable to achieve mutual reciprocity and equality with a group of Others through close daily contact is damaging to the development of the Self and mutual Sensemaking:

In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches, one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and street-cars.

Since the end of Reconstruction, Black and White Americans sometimes occupy the same physical space, but rarely the same interactional space. While most Americans would likely say there is much more interaction between people of different Races today, in our research we find the separation between races almost as complete now as it was 120 years ago when DuBois first wrote about it. Our research, based on ethnographic, ethnomethodological, conversation analytic, focus group, and interview data on social interaction between Races, finds that Black and White Americans inhabit two very different Interaction Orders with clashing interactional preferences (Rawls 2000; Duck 2015; Rawls and Duck 2017, 2020; Rawls et al. 2018).¹³

DuBois wrote that troubled interactions reveal that members of different racial groups often use distinct and incompatible “definitions of the situation.” In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he argued that whereas Black Americans are gifted with “second sight” which can make them aware of the problem, White Americans generally are not aware, seeing only a single reality and often not even recognizing that it is a socially constructed reality, not the natural order of things.

In our research we find that this incongruity occurs in most cross-Race interactions. In research on what we call “Fractured Reflections” of Self-presentation, for instance, we find that high status Black men report that they are constantly on guard against White subordinates, such as administrative assistants and other company employees, who fail to confirm their high status identities (Rawls and Duck 2017; Rawls and Duck 2020). This is the case even when they are sure that those employees wish them well and are trying to help. We have been told that is also happening to Chinese and Latinx Americans. They must live with the understanding that the White people whom they need to count on neither recognize nor confirm their competence.

Clashing Interaction Orders and Definitions of the Situation

When definitions of the situation clash or Interaction Orders conflict, interactions can fail. This is because the performative requirements of Interaction Orders are not normative, rather they are “constitutive,” making them much tighter requirements than norms in a consensus-based solidarity. Achieving mutual intelligibility requires performing actions that are recognizable to others as a particular move in a sequence of moves. It is like the expectation in a chess game that both players comply with the rules governing possible moves for specific pieces. If a player breaks them, it is not chess. Believing in chess does not make actions recognizable as chess moves. Competent performance of practice is constitutive of both Self and Sense (Goffman 1959, 1961, 1963; Rawls 1987, 1990). Recognizable actions within a practice create social identities, objects, and meanings as social facts that cannot exist otherwise.

When the demands on participants in racialized Interaction Orders are not the same, or when definitions of the situation clash, White and Black Americans often inadvertently violate one another's expectations, and the resulting failures to achieve social facts and mutually confirm competence can have a moral tone (Rawls and Duck 2020). Because interactional expectations have developed separately, and the resulting Interaction Orders of Race are incompatible and conflicting, displays of orderly and expected social behavior by members of one Race often look like deviant behavior to the other.

For instance, in our research we find that White Americans tend to expect that when they are introduced to people they have not met before, they will engage in a sequence of questions and answers as a way of getting to know each other (Rawls and Duck 2020). These sequences typically involve asking for name, occupation, residence, marital status, etc. When the questions turn up something they have in common, such as living in the same town, that becomes the basis for another series of questions about what they “have in common.” This pattern is typical among White Americans, creating what we call a “categorial self” whose social identity is comprised of a cluster of status categories. Black Americans and Europeans are less likely to treat such a sequence as preferred. We found that this explained a Black American narrative in our data that we referred to as “White people are Nosey”.

By contrast, Black Americans prefer to volunteer information, and focus on things of immediate relevance to the place where they are meeting while avoiding status information. So, for instance at a party Black Americans meeting for the first time might talk about the party, food, or something happening there. We found that the reluctance of Black Americans to ask for, volunteer, or even respond to a request for category information occasioned a complaint from White Americans in our data that “Black people are Rude.”

Black Americans experience an additional difficulty: As individual selves who must function in two different Interaction Orders, they are held to two conflicting sets of demands. In order to recognizably construct practices in one, they often must violate the expectations of the other. These conflicting interactional requirements confront the African American Self on a daily basis. The social and moral tension involved must be added to the challenge of having more than one marginalized role or identity and then having them differentially shaped and valued from one situation to another, which became known as “intersectionality” in the context of gender, but also applies to sexuality and disability.¹⁴

These are aspects of what we call Tacit Racism that we find are so deeply embedded in the interactional structures of daily life and institutionalized in Interaction Orders of Race that they continue to shape daily interactions even for those who are aware and committed to anti-racism (Rawls and Duck 2020). As Butler (2017) argues in Chokehold, good people working in fundamentally racist social structures will reproduce systemic racism, whether they mean to or not. We maintain that this is as true for those who participate in ordinary interaction as it is for those who work in formal social institutions. It is our proposal that interactional preferences can become institutionalized in Interaction Orders and that this is an important missing aspect of sociological theory.

Ethnomethodology and Double Consciousness

Garfinkel grew up in what he called “the Jewish Ghetto” in Newark, New Jersey and was usually not considered White in the U.S. South where he lived from 1939 to 1946.¹⁵ His experiences of racism and exclusion heightened his awareness of the social interactions around him. Garfinkel built his approach on the idea that the building blocks of society—the constitutive practices of making culture, interaction patterns, and social order—are taken for granted and hidden from view unless trouble arises. There are many reasons for this, but to oversimplify, what we need to do to make Sense and Self together is so complicated that when forced to think consciously about what we are doing, as happens when troubles arise, it is difficult to continue doing it.¹⁶

Shortly after arriving at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill as a graduate student in 1939, Garfinkel completed two observational studies of Race (1940, 1942) that demonstrate his awareness of how racialization is achieved in actual situations, while also documenting the shortcomings of quantitative methods. Garfinkel then devoted his wartime work to the problem with letting abstract “models” stand in for social processes (Garfinkel [1943] 2019; Rawls and Lynch 2019). Models, whether theoretical or mathematical, he argued, reify social processes in ways that embed cultural beliefs and values, including the belief in individualism, such that even those calling themselves interactionists were focusing on the “actor’s point of view” instead of on how interaction itself is mutually organized to convey meaning. He later translated his experiences with marginality into a comprehensive effort to document what people take for granted in interaction through the study of “ethno-methods.”

Like DuBois, Williams, and Cox, Garfinkel treated Race as a social category that was constructed and used in interaction (see Rawls 2022a). His 1942 MA thesis examined how Race categories were used to determine moral character and assign prison sentences to Black and White defendants in homicide cases in ten North Carolina courts. Garfinkel found that while Race played a determining role in court, when rendered statistically Race became invisible. Race differences in sentencing disappeared because two categories of homicide received the same lenient sentences for “doing the community a favor”: A Black man the court considered a “Good Black man” who killed someone the court considered a “Bad Black man,” and any White man who killed someone the court considered a “Bad Black man.” Thus, a racist form of reasoning rendered racism invisible in the statistical outcome. Garfinkel (1967) later made a similar point about the relationship between statistical records and organizational priorities in “Good Reasons for ‘Bad’ Clinic Records.” Organizations generate statistical records that reflect organizational priorities, and these social facts (statistics) should never be mistaken for natural facts.

In 1947 as a PhD student of Parsons at Harvard, Garfinkel [1947](2012) wrote a paper titled “The Red” that outlined uses of the categories “Red” (communist), “Negro,” “Jew,” and “Criminal” in U.S. society. His experience growing up in a Jewish community where legitimate work was scarce informed his recognition of “Criminal” as a social construction.¹⁷ He began documenting the need for a mutual commitment to constitutive groundrules of interaction, or “Trust Conditions,” in this paper, showing that persons in asymmetrical social positions, where one person can be categorized by the Other without their consent, have trouble achieving mutual intelligibility.¹⁸

In 1961 Garfinkel titled the first chapter of a manuscript titled, “Essays in Ethnomethodology,” “The Discovery of Culture” (Rawls and Turowetz 2021). There he treated ethno-methods as ways of creating culture in interaction that need to be made visible before they can be investigated empirically.¹⁹ Using his heightened awareness that troubles can reveal what is taken for granted, to devise research and teaching strategies that could raise awareness of social fact making processes, Garfinkel designed Tutorial Problems, sometimes also referred to as Breaching Experiments, for his students. These exercises disrupt ordinary social processes to create heightened awareness. In his research he also turned to identities and situations where trouble could be expected, working with Trans and Mentally Ill people, and using their observations of the troubles they often encounter and their awareness of how they need to manage interaction to reconstruct the taken-for-granted social order of everyday life.²⁰ He referred to these categories of person as “Natural Experiments”.

Goffman has not been mentioned yet in this section. But he was working along similar lines in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s and started corresponding with Garfinkel in 1959. The two were both building on Parsons and Durkheim, and in 1961 began a collaboration “On Passing” that discussed the insights and heightened awareness that come from marginality – but also how “passing” forced people to adopt the practices of their oppressors and consequently also blunted that awareness (see Rawls forthcoming).

That interactional trouble can reveal social order makes qualitative studies of social interaction, and Ethnomethodology in particular, a key piece of an adequate sociological approach to modernity. It also makes those with heightened awareness valuable sources of information. They know more than the majority. Unfortunately, since WW II sociologists have increasingly rejected qualitative sociology, and studies of interaction, Race, and marginality.

Rejecting Qualitative Methods and Interaction in the Name of “Science”

Qualitative methods, including studies of social and symbolic interaction, cultural studies and ethnography, all well-respected before World War II, were stigmatized as subjective and unscientific during the war, and the label stuck. A narrative that developed among sociologists as a way of making sense of scientific work during the war changed how they talked not only about sociology but about “science.” This wartime narrative formulated a “trauma” to sociology (Alexander 2011).²¹ Using terms like “unity/traitor” and “worthy/trivial,” it positioned “good” and “bad” sociology—victim and perpetrator—against one another. Qualitative and “values” oriented research, often by Black and Jewish scholars concerned with justice and inequality, were blamed for damaging the scientific standing of sociology. The result, it was said, was an unscientific discipline unable either to support peace or prevent war (Rawls et al. 2018).²²

Sociology, which was originally distinguished by its focus on social facts, abandoned social facts and social interaction during the war and started counting unexamined categories of phenomena such as “crime” as if they were natural rather than social facts. Polling was the new “objective” tool. The proposed scientific “improvements” were characterized by disciplinary elites as a “unity” of “big”, “worthy”, “verifiable”, quantitative “science,” combined with the elimination of “trivial,” “subjective,” qualitative “traitors.” What had been a scholarly debate before the war became an authoritative formulation of moral categories of what science should and should not be/do. As with other cultural narratives, the categories the narrative created, which recognized only quantitative research as science, were soon taken for granted. The resulting imbalance in the respect accorded to quantitative versus qualitative methods has impoverished sociological research in the decades since, leading to high levels of reification, positivism, and lack of relevance.

Disciplinary history has largely overlooked the wartime period, characterizing the transition to quantitative methods as a gradual and inevitable scientific advance. Those who rejected social facts and qualitative methods have been allowed to write that narrative. The long debate over methods in the prewar period is cited as evidence that the transition was slow (Turner 2005); Hinkle’s (1994: 46) assertion that “with almost no modifications” the prewar development of a quantified positivist approach to science was “transmitted to the post World War Two period” is representative. Those few who did examine the wartime period (e.g., Abbott and Sparrow 2005) have concluded that the war did little more than speed up changes already underway. How could anyone look at this turbulent period during which so much change was demanded and conclude that nothing much had happened?²³

It is equally puzzling that the intense and sustained effort by social interactionists to defend social facts and stop quantitative methods from overwhelming the discipline could have been overlooked. Although the New Deal increased demand for statistical research after 1935, and Ogburn, Lazarsfeld, Stouffer and others found their skill as statisticians growing in popularity (Ryan 2013:23), qualitative methods were still well respected before 1940. In fact, throughout the 1930s it was quantitative sociology that struggled to establish itself, as two approaches battled for dominance: one led by Ogburn, and the other by Bernard (Bannister 1987:7). Before 1940, they could not agree on much. It was during the war that the balance suddenly shifted: The question is why and how.

World War II initiated a crisis of meaning. In the words of Park (1943:165), “in the course of an incredibly brief space things that were once familiar have begun to look strange and eventualities that seemed remote are now visibly close at hand.” That “strangeness” brought on by the war cried out for reconceptualization. Sociologists did a lot of talking about how to meet the challenge as scientists. Most stopped doing “business as usual,” and many turned to professional war work. Their elected representatives talked about what they should do in new terms. What they were saying in that moment comprises an essential narrative context for understanding how qualitative sociologists like Garfinkel, who were defending an eclectic and balanced prewar sociology grounded in the experience of double consciousness, were cast as traitors. The narrative formulated scientific sociology as the victim of what Ryan (2013:5), singling out Jewish sociologists, referred to as qualitative “charlatans and soothsayers” (Rawls et al. 2018).

What in the 1960s looked like a rebellion led by Garfinkel and Goffman against an established preference for quantitative sociology actually began during the war as a fight to protect a viable, eclectic discipline that valued qualitative approaches from a self-destructive reformulation in which sociology positioned itself to compete with other sciences by becoming more like them.²⁴ If things had worked out differently, the diversity of prewar sociology, with its focus on social facts and social constructions, could have become a strength in a well-integrated modern sociology, and Parsons’s early effort to ground social theory on interaction might have succeeded (Parsons 1950, 1963; Rawls and Turowetz 2021a, 2021b). While Parsons’s position was conflicted, his prewar effort to reintroduce Durkheim, and his 1949 proposal that culture is an independent level of social action (in interaction) were pivotal moves at a critical time that inspired Garfinkel, Goffman, and Sacks (Garfinkel [1962]2019; Rawls and Turowetz 2021a, 2021b).

Instead, during the war sociologists turned with active hostility against their own theoretical tradition, praising economics (which did not recognize social facts or behavioral patterns) as a “better” science.²⁵ The legacy of the wartime rejection of the social fact tradition and the studies of social interaction it generated is a fragmented discipline that with few exceptions (e.g., Brandeis, the New School for Social Research, and UCLA, UCSB) is heavily quantitative, treats theory as largely irrelevant, rarely recognizes Race and its attendant categories (i.e., Crime) as social constructions, allows double consciousness no role, trivializes qualitative and justice issues, and treats qualitative sociologists as outcasts, rebels, and traitors.²⁶

Positivism versus the Social Fact Tradition in Sociology

It is a particular problem for sociology that, having abandoned social facts and turned to other disciplines, especially economics, as models of a more “scientific” approach during World War II, sociologists forgot that their own social fact tradition originated as a solution to insoluble problems inherent in positivism. This has led to the absurdity that sociologists talk and write from a perspective that does not recognize the existence of social facts. In essence, other disciplines have been invited to define positivism for sociologists. Yet, sociology, alone among all the disciplines, has its origin in the argument that social facts offer a viable alternative to the dead ends of positivism (Rawls 1997; Durkheim [1924]1953). The recognition of social facts and social constructions as ontologically and epistemologically distinct from natural facts began with August Comte in the 1840s and increased in sophistication and complexity with Durkheim, DuBois, and Williams. Garfinkel and Sacks have taken the argument to a new level of empirical detail, documenting the making of social facts across the interactional situations and scientific worksites of modern societies.²⁷

Given the current state of confusion, a review of the debate over positivism as it emerged historically seems to be in order. Unfortunately, most current discussions of positivism have nothing to do with this history, often classifying knowledge-claims as positivist if they involve empirical research and treating social fact approaches as relativist (Popper 1994).

The modern version of the ancient debate over the validity of knowledge-claims (which in the Western classical tradition began with Plato) started in the late seventeenth century. It was an important discussion because modern sciences were in their infancy and scientists were just beginning to announce important “discoveries.” Scholars worried about whether and how these scientific claims and the new concepts they produced could be valid. In 1689 John Locke kicked things off with his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Having just come from a long and unsatisfying discussion of medicine, convinced that those present had only disagreed because their words meant too many different things, Locke identified a looseness in concepts as the problem. Unless words (like “gold”) refer precisely to a real object (the element gold) language is, he argued, too imprecise to be the basis of scientific knowledge-claims. Yet such claims can only be made in language.²⁸ Locke was right that treating knowledge-claims that use imprecise words as if they referred directly to “facts” in the world is a problem. It turns out, however, that words cannot be made sufficiently precise to solve the problem (see the problem of indexicality, section IX).

In 1739, David Hume took up the issue in A Treatise of Human Nature, roughly agreeing with Locke about the initial problem, but adding that even if words could be rendered with precision, which he did not think they could, knowledge-claims about relationships between cause and effect, which are essential to science, could not rise to the level of certainty because humans do not have any empirical experience of causality. Hume maintained that the idea of cause and effect is only an opinion derived from seeing one thing happen after another. Thus causal statements have no empirical validity, a limitation that is now generally accepted.²⁹

Immanuel Kant entered the debate after Hume, proposing an a priori solution to the problem: that all human experience is a function of the human brain and has nothing to do with experience of the external world in itself. In other words, red flowers are not red. Our brains process light rays they receive as “red.” “Red” is a human addition. So is causality. This would be a problem for scientific knowledge-claims if the process varied between people. But Kant, a scientist himself, argued that all humans process sense impressions the same way. On this view, the problem of positivism is with making knowledge-claims about the world in itself. For Kant, the only valid knowledge-claims are about the world as it is experienced by humans.

The social fact solution to the problem is often referred to as Neo-Kantian and positivist, but is actually neither.³⁰ Comte initiated the argument in the 1840s that within a single society (or consensus group) people all learn to process information the same way. It is not an a priori solution, but it works in a similar way to give everyone within a group the same conceptual equipment. For some, like Durkheim, it is the origin of shared ideas in the direct experience of rituals that makes reasoning the same for all participants, rather than consensus (Rawls 1996, 2009). The point, however, is the same: that within a social circle “social facts” can be constant.

Durkheim’s epistemology as elaborated in The Elementary Forms (Durkheim 1912) is closely modeled on Hume’s empiricism in this regard, not on Kant (Rawls 1996, 2009). But in taking a social fact approach he could be empirical without being positivist. For both Comte and Durkheim, some facts are social facts, and humans can have empirical knowledge within the parameters of the social practices used to create social facts. Sociology under Comte began articulating the parameters within which social facts are created in the 1880s (the form of consensus-based sociology that dominated in the U.S. under the early Chicago School). To confuse the issue, Comte announced his approach as a “positive” philosophy. What Comte meant by “positive” was that knowledge-claims within his new science of sociology could be based on direct empirical experience without falling into what we would now call positivism.

While Durkheim accepted Comte’s initial premise that the study of social facts avoids the problem that human experience is never in direct contact with natural facts, he modified the argument. For Durkheim there are at least two ways social facts can be created. One involves consensus and accords with Comte. The other involves the creation of social facts on the spot. While durable social facts do need to be remade from time to time, they can live on in the “collective consciousness” for some time as concepts of a sort. However, what Durkheim called “constitutive practices” must be used to create social facts on the spot by cooperating participants. The two kinds of social facts have different social and moral requirements and different implications for social theory.³¹ Because constitutive practices self-sanction—that is, they fail if done incorrectly—their failings can be tracked empirically across interactions.

When sociology abandoned the social fact tradition during World War II, the discipline fell back into the original philosophical problems with knowledge-claims that Comte and Durkheim had both solved. Now we find sociologists arguing that Comte was a positivist, or that Durkheim was a Kantian, or that all empirical research is positivist, and that the only choice is between positivism and interpretation. It was the social fact legacy that originally set sociology apart. Without social facts, anything a researcher does is positivist, including interpretation.

All seven of the Black and Jewish scholars we discuss in this article were social constructionists and all took a social fact position. They all insisted on a sociological solution to the problem of knowledge-claims and resisted the abandonment of social facts that mainstream sociology embraced. Furthermore, they pointed out that fundamental changes in a society, such as the introduction and institutionalization of racialized slavery, would create new social facts, such as Race, and that empirical research on how these changes occur is not only valid but sheds important light on how those social facts are made that can correct deeply held assumptions, theories, and beliefs.

For a social fact position, the conditions necessary for everyone to successfully cooperate in the making of social facts is a matter that is open to empirical investigation. Durkheim argued that justice, equality, and reciprocity are necessary for social fact making in a modern social context. DuBois argued that a lack of justice had resulted in a separation between Races that blocks communication between Black and White Americans. The others all fall somewhere within this framework. Consequently, none of the seven scholars we consider were positivist; all focused on delineating the conditions under which social facts are created (with Garfinkel and Goffman also considering the role of “passing” in hindering this process (Rawls forthcoming), and they were all concerned with justice in relation to social facts in modernity.

Justice is a Scientific Issue for a Sociological Theory of Modernity

It is not a coincidence that the rejection of qualitative sociology and the abandonment of the social fact tradition had an outsized impact on Black and Jewish scholars who treated Race as a social fact and explored the role of justice and equality in social fact making.³² In outlining his vision for a new discipline of sociology in 1893, Durkheim had announced that sociology, as the study of social fact making in modernity, would be the new scientific study of morality.

It was Durkheim’s argument that in diverse modern social contexts the transition to the making of fragile social facts would make justice a core issue for sociology. On that basis Durkheim argued that equality and justice are not concerns for well-ordered consensus-based societies because in such societies everyone is committed to a set of beliefs that gives each person a meaningful place in a whole that belongs to them all. Because consensus resists change it also tends to keep inequalities from increasing. The transition to modernity changes this. Once a society transitions to a form of solidarity based primarily on constitutive practices, consensus erodes, change is rapid, and justice becomes a functional prerequisite for the use of constitutive practices. Under these conditions justice becomes a scientific issue, and empirical sociological studies of whether there is adequate justice to support the social system – and what troubles occur in its absence – have scientific relevance.

In Caste, Class and Race, (Cox 1948), Cox contrasted the caste system in India with racialized slavery in the West, making a similar point. He described the caste system in meticulous detail, noting how it gave everyone a place. As long as people believe in the system, they are part of a whole in which they have value. They can use this belief to create social facts together, and even extreme inequality does not usually push such a consensus-based system toward change. Cox (1948) contrasted his analysis of caste with racialized slavery, which occurred in a context of diversity in which no beliefs were shared that could have been used to make sense together, or to convince the enslaved that their status was ordained. The religious and economic arguments Europeans used to justify slavery were meaningful only to themselves. Communication between enslaved and enslavers remained problematic throughout.

Once consensus breaks down, as it did under both racialized slavery and industrial labor relations, and new sensemaking practices that rely on constitutive practices take the place of older symbolic systems to create solidarity (Rawls 2009, 2019), the equality required for people to make Sense and Self together using constitutive practices limits the inequality that social interaction can tolerate. But it can only limit inequality within interaction. When remaining inequalities in the broader society intrude, they can prevent interaction and create instability.

When elite U.S. sociologists who rejected social facts treated an interest in morality as unscientific during World War II, they were rejecting sociology itself in favor of positivism: They were making knowledge-claims that require a direct empirical contact with reality that they did not have. This positivist position is also subjective because it prioritizes the individual claim maker over collaborative social processes.³³ It is ironic, then, that they mistakenly called the social fact position of these Black and Jewish scholars “subjective.” Lundberg in his 1944 Presidential Address also characterized the preoccupations of Jewish scholars with justice and inequality as “subjective,” which contributed to sociology being unscientific. Thirty years later, Coser (1975) made similar complaints about Garfinkel and ethnomethodology, in his own Presidential Address. For most disciplinary elites after 1940, morality had nothing to do with science. For Ryan (2013:5) the idea was as absurd as talking about “the justice of a landslide.”

Of course, Black and Jewish scholars were concerned with issues of justice, and yes, that concern was informed by their own experiences with racism and marginality. Just as certainly, the position of majority thinkers was informed (however unconsciously) by their own privileged social positions. But the interest Black and Jewish scholars took in justice was not “subjective.” Rather, it was a valid scientific interest in a social fact position: If equality and reciprocity are necessary to make social facts using constitutive practices in diverse modern situations, then the justice needed to support that cooperation is a scientific issue.

Moreover, not treating justice as a scientific issue when it has become necessary for the successful working of constitutive practices in modern society is responsible for many errors in sociological theory and research. Like the abandonment of social facts, ignoring inequality lands sociology back in the midst of positivism, treating the results of social processes and their inequalities as if they were natural facts when they are social constructions. Thus, the refusal to recognize the scientific merit of the arguments of these seven Black and Jewish sociologists has undermined sociology as a science.

Individualism and Social Constructionism

While most social thinkers treat the individual and individualism as natural facts and build their arguments on assumptions about the natural individual, all seven of the Black and Jewish scholars we are considering treat the Individual and Individualism as social constructions. Treating Individualism as a social fact was the cornerstone of Durkheim’s critique of both moral philosophy generally and Utilitarianism in particular (Durkheim 1893; Rawls 2012, 2019). It was also his answer to positivism, and the key to a modern sociology. DuBois took a similar position. We maintain that double consciousness gave these scholars the insight that taken-for-granted social facts like the Individual and Individualism are social constructions that require collaborative work for their achievement, making double consciousness an important defense against positivism.

Durkheim’s theory of modernity—the shift from a value- and norms-based traditional consensus to forms of situated performative solidarity achieved through constitutive practices—both addressed, and was informed by, dilemmas inherent in his position as a Jewish man who could be united only with a society that abandoned traditional values and identities in favor of constitutive practices grounded in justice. Urban places and occupations often generate the kind of performative solidarity Durkheim described, which is why they tend to be more progressive, democratic, and what is often called “cosmopolitan.”³⁴

Durkheim wrote articles on anti-Semitism as a scientific issue, and on the Dreyfus period, during which the open rioting and destruction of Jewish people and their property affected him deeply.³⁵ Awareness of the problem was widespread and DuBois also mentions the Dreyfus affair twice in Dusk of Dawn (DuBois [1940]1983: 15, 24). In “Anti-Semitism and Social Crisis,” Durkheim described Jews as “expiatory victims” of the Dreyfus crisis (Goldberg 2009:304), an analysis similar to Garfinkel’s ([1947]2012) portrayal of the roles of “Negro” and “Jew” in U.S. society as reinforcing sacred/profane boundaries, in a way that provides an outlet for the frustrations of the majority—a scapegoat role that both still play today.³⁶

According to Goldberg (2008: 303), Durkheim’s analysis of French anti-Semitism “suggested an analogy to disease,” marking a connection between that analysis and Book III of the Division of Labor, in which Durkheim characterized unjust forms of modern society as diseased Abnormal Forms.³⁷ In treating injustice as a diseased form of society, Durkheim was making a scientific argument about both justice and Individualism.

Without an acknowledgment of the socially constructed character of the Individual Self, Durkheim argued, arguments about morality tend to begin with the individual and individual reason and arrive at the absurd conclusion that society is not necessary. As C.L.R. James wrote in The Black Jacobins (1938)³⁸:

Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence as foundation, there is built a superstructure of diversified and characteristic sentiments, illusions, habits of thought, and outlooks on life in general. The class as a whole creates and shapes them out of its material foundation, and out of the corresponding social relationships. The individual in whom they arise, through tradition and education, may fancy them to be the true determinants, the real origin of his activities. On this common derivation of prejudice, small whites, big whites and bureaucracy, were united against the Mulattoes.

Although the Individual even in their deepest feelings and prejudices is a social construction, most disciplines treat the individual as a starting point, as if it were a natural fact. Durkheim criticized moral philosophy for making this mistake in the Division of Labor, arguing that in positing the existence of the individual and reason philosophers had overlooked the most important thing: That because society is needed to create Self and Sense, without society there is no rational Individual or Individualism (Rawls 2019).

There is a direct connection between Durkheim’s analysis of Individualism as a social fact in the Division of Labor and Goffman’s portrayal of a fragile Self in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). For Goffman, it is the interactional performance of Self and its confirmation by the other that creates Individual identity. For both Durkheim and Goffman, the belief of any given Self that they exist independently is itself a social construction. Goffman’s performative Self only exists insofar as it can participate successfully in interaction which is grounded in a working consensus that allows that Self to respond freely. This Self is oppressed insofar as the situation embeds systemic inequalities that require aspects of personal biography to be hidden (e.g., being Jewish, Black, Epileptic) in order to “pass” as “normal” members of society.³⁹ There is a further problem that both Goffman and Garfinkel wrote about: that the passing Self must contradict what they know about themselves to pass, leading to a state of deep contradiction. Although inequality is all too common, Goffman (1951, 1959) demonstrated how inequalities in interaction impact the achievement of Self, concluding that a minimum of equality in the groundrules of interaction is a prerequisite or interactions fail, even within total institutions (Goffman 1961; Rawls 1987, 1990).

There is also a strong connection to Garfinkel, who, in an effort to overcome Individualism devoted his career to clarifying what interaction is, trying to get sociology to focus on taken-for-granted aspects of what people are doing rather than on what they are thinking or valuing. Garfinkel treated the creation of each next social fact, including the Individual, as a situated accomplishment (Garfinkel 1940, 1949, 1947, 1948, 1967). Because meaning is created in and through interaction, he insisted that research should focus on the back-and-forth exchange between two or more people of the visible and audible expressions that comprise interaction, turn-by-turn and sequence-by-sequence, and not on the people themselves.

Our own research (Rawls and Duck 2017, 2020) suggests that in the U.S., a failure to guarantee equal participation by Race led to the formation of alternate Interaction Orders that make interaction between Races difficult. We find that Black Americans tend to orient interactional expectations that produce an egalitarian form of relationship, rather than the more familiar hierarchical form of Individualism oriented by White Americans. We describe these alternate expectations, in terms borrowed from DuBois (1890), as “Submissive Civility,” which he characterized as submission to the good of the whole and contrast it with the Individualism of what he called the “White Strong Man” ideal. We consider Submissive Civility to be a response to oppressive interactional practices that have historically denied the granting of high-status identities to those who belong to marginalized groups, and a by-product of double consciousness.

As Hannah-Jones (2019) wrote in her introduction to The 1619 Project, it is Black Americans who have fought for democracy in the U.S., while White Americans have consistently tried to suppress it. In our own research we find that conceptions of moral obligation among Black Americans are more in keeping with the ideals of Durkheim and DuBois than the forms of individualistic morality embraced by most White Americans, which, in assuming the existence of the Individual, neglect the interactional requirements for its achievement.⁴⁰

Tutorial Problems and Double Consciousness

Garfinkel, like DuBois, treated the awareness of what is being taken for granted that comes from trouble as an essential foundation for sociology and made the scientific production of such awareness an objective through the qualitative study of “ethno-methods” revealed by trouble (Eisenmann and Rawls 2023). Garfinkel, Goffman, and Sacks explicitly said several times in their meetings from 1960 to 1964 that the detailed interactional approach they were developing was informed by their experience of being Jewish (Rawls 2022b, audio in the Garfinkel Archive).⁴¹ Realizing that most of his students did not have this awareness, Garfinkel devised what he called “Tutorials” for his classes to disrupt the taken-for-granted and make what had been going on all along (albeit unrecognized) suddenly empirically evident. These tutorial exercises sometimes disrupt the embodied social processing of the senses, such as sight and hearing. Other tutorials disrupt the expectations of interaction in ways that make game moves, or conversational moves, unrecognizable to participants, for instance having students play a game of chess wearing inverting lenses (video in the Garfinkel Archive), or asking students going home for spring break to be polite, which made their parents think there was something going wrong at school, that they are flunking out, need money, are on drugs, etc. (Garfinkel 1967). Many tutorials were so successful that students immediately got the point that what they had been taking for granted is actually socially organized.

The challenge Garfinkel faced in attempting to convince sociologists that it is important to study interaction was the same challenge he faced with his students: to raise awareness (in those who do not experience marginality) of the embodied social practices we all engage in but take for granted and then develop procedures for documenting those practices and their order properties. If he could achieve these two things, he could improve the respect accorded to studies of interaction and demonstrate that basic assumptions of mainstream sociology are false. For instance, the presumption that theory must come before method assumes that situated social practices do not create meaning or concepts – but they do. Theoretical models might be able to stand in for durable social facts, but they cannot represent the interactional processes involved in using constitutive practices to create social facts (at least not before they have been discovered empirically – and even then, there would be serious limitations).

Garfinkel wanted to fulfill the potential of sociology as a mode of discovery science. In this regard he was concerned by a tendency of some marginalized people to hide what they know in order to “pass” (a concern he would later share with Goffman). In research for his PhD, in 1940 Garfinkel considered ways that “passing” might be getting in the way of developing insight (Turowetz and Rawls 2021).⁴² Could people trying to improve their category be engaging in contradictory reasoning to fit in? His findings suggest that such people often reinforce category boundaries in an effort to stay on the “right” side of those boundaries.

Wanting to use his awareness to expose, rather than hide, the practices that marginalize people, Garfinkel designed exercises to produce the experience of trouble for his students and colleagues. These exercises make visible, and subject to rigorous inquiry, aspects of social order that sociologists typically overlook. As described in Ethnomethodology’s Program (Garfinkel 2002), tutorial exercises like clapping to a metronome, and wearing “inverting lenses,” create what Garfinkel called “perspicuous settings” for making “praxeologically visible” the detailed local situated order that researchers need to describe (Lynch and Eisenmann 2022). These are settings in which one can expect the work of making a local social order to be made visible by the troubles involved in using the equipment (inverting lenses) or performing the identity (trans-person) in question.⁴³

For those who do not regularly experience trouble in everyday life, engaging in Garfinkel’s tutorial exercises can make the practices used to create recognizable social objects and actions visible for the first time, an insight that can be rather surprising. By contrast, for those living with marginalized identities, the experience of trouble is familiar. But the explanation of what is happening is not. Experiencing marginality and acquiring heightened awareness is no guarantee a person will develop a critical perspective. As Garfinkel (1967) argued in his discussion of Agnes (pseudonym for a trans-person he interviewed in 1959), many who develop heightened awareness use it to “pass” as one of the majority, thus reinforcing the hidden order of everyday life that excluded them in the first place. “Passing” involves something more like Franz Fanon’s (1952) “colonial mentality” than DuBois’s double consciousness – a problem that Garfinkel and Goffman took up in a collaboration on passing they engaged in from 1961 to 1963 (Rawls forthcoming).

Ethnomethodologists in the field use the insights of those who experience trouble, as well as the presence of trouble itself, to get access to taken-for-granted social processes. People often question whether it is possible to study empirically what they assume are “belief-based” practices (such as religion or Yoga) that are typically assumed to represent “subjective states of consciousness.” If a practice is “instructable” and people can do it wrong, then they are using constitutive practices that can be studied empirically. The question is what “trouble” looks like that could alert a member or researcher that they had done it wrong. Research on “Speaking in Tongues” (Wright and Rawls 2006), and Yoga practices (Eisenmann and Mitchell 2022), illustrate the point.

The key lies in the visibility of a trouble or sanction.⁴⁴ As Durkheim (1893) argued, it is the sanction following a violation that marks the presence of social rules, expectations, and/or agreements, thus making them available for empirical research. With constitutive practices it is a self-sanction that becomes visible.⁴⁵ This, Durkheim argued, is what made the empirical study of both morality and constitutive practices possible. If members can engage in a practice the “wrong” way, resulting in sanctions, then there is empirical evidence of an order of practice.⁴⁶

Indexicality and Turn-Taking

The approach to indexicality and Turn-Taking by Sacks and Garfinkel extends the analysis of fragile social facts and the self-sanctioning characteristic of constitutive practices to the ordering of sequences of interaction and talk (Rawls and Eisenmann 2022). Their approach to indexicality contrasts with the historical treatment of indexicality as a problem. That classic approach assumes that words carry meaning from place to place and that those meanings must be shared among a population to be communicated. On this view precise meanings are durable, and indexicality and diversity are problems.

Garfinkel was critical of the way indexicality had been approached: “That terms are said to be clarifiable by reference to the setting consists of an absurd, irrelevant, or wrong recommendation” (Garfinkel and Sacks 1967:55). For Garfinkel, the argument is backwards. It is not that we take symbols that already have meanings and put them into a setting to narrow down which meaning they have this time. Rather, settings create spaces where things placed “just there” acquire meaning through their sequential position. Thus, the role of setting in conversation, as a meaning-conferring order, is both more important than, and different from, what Comte and philosophers before Wittgenstein imagined (Garfinkel and Sacks 1967; Sacks 1967).

In a diverse context of situated constitutive practices, new meanings can be created and words used in new ways. Under these conditions, indexicality is not a problem, but instead becomes a resource for making meaning sequentially. The use of constitutive practices in ordered sequences creates interactional spaces that confer meaning on whatever is placed in them. First turns can project a preferred response (question/answer, pre-invitation/acceptance). When the responding turn is not the preferred response, new meaning is created. Sacks called these spaces “Turns” and their sequential ordering “Turn-Taking” (Sackset al. 1974).

Garfinkel and Sacks proposed that preferred orders of turns in ongoing talk create spaces for particular meanings such that almost any response conveys information (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970). A question prefers an answer, but if it gets anything else that is information. What makes this workable is not that the preferred things always happen, but rather that anything that happens against a background of shared preferences is information. It is a system that makes a virtue of diversity and difference, in which the unexpected—taken against a background of shared situated expectations—is informative.⁴⁷

Rather than trying to reduce indexicality, Garfinkel and Sacks studied how it is useful, not only for how it can acquire meaning sequentially, but how using indexicals forces participants to closely follow a sequential order as it happens, creating a need to fulfill what Sacks in his lectures called “listening and hearing obligations.” The more indexicality there is, the more important listening and hearing obligations become and the more likely they are to be fulfilled.⁴⁸

Taken in the context of Durkheim’s constitutive practice argument, Garfinkel and Sacks are proposing that an approach which treats terms or symbols as indexes to what they can mean as if they were durable social facts, has all the problems of ambiguity and indexicality that have burdened philosophers, linguists, and those sociologists who follow Comte. Treating social facts as fragile, as Durkheim did, however, and as created turn-by-turn in social interaction, as Garfinkel and Sacks did, results in a dynamic view of interaction in which people can use constitutive practices to innovate new meanings or create spaces for familiar old meanings to be created again.⁴⁹

In his famous Second Preface to The Division of Labor, Durkheim envisioned that Roman slaves and immigrants working together in the absence of a traditional consensus could create new techniques and meanings, in a solidarity of constitutive practices grounded in their diversity, that would eventually transform society, making consensus-based forms of solidarity obsolete and setting thought free from belief to pursue new occupations and sciences, and in so doing make justice a necessity (Durkheim 1893, 1913–14; Rawls 2019).

Racialized Slavery and Sociological Theory

Ignoring the pivotal role played by racialized slavery in the rise of the Industrial Revolution has enabled myths about the superiority and rationality of White Western culture and religion to pass as sociological theory. Williams’s argument that the wealth to fund the Industrial Revolution came from slavery, which is generating important new research in a number of disciplines, is consequential for reconsidering theories about what makes economies and societies work. According to Sven Beckert in Empire of Cotton (2014), not only was Williams right that slavery supplied the financing for the Industrial Revolution, but early British efforts to sell their cotton were initially limited by the inferiority of the product. Until the late eighteenth century British merchants relied on monopolies and involuntary trade, forcing colonies to buy their goods through legislation, and selling inferior cotton to slave owners to clothe slaves.

Beckert attributes the eventual success of the Bitish textile industry to what he calls “War Capitalism,” which destroyed the competition. The question of why India, Africa, and China did not “develop” as fast as the West that animates much social theory is based on a false narrative. There were thriving global trade networks for textiles, salt, slaves, spices and gold between Africa, India, China and even Peru going back more than 2,000 years (Beckert 2014). Ancient textile industries organized as guilds (colleges/corporations) were superior to moderm industry. This situation continued until the British sent warships to destroy the guilds in India. Only then was inferior cotton grown by enslaved people in the American colonies and woven by unskilled English workers on inferior British machines broadly marketable, and profits began to soar.

Because of their inferior position in Europe at the time (with the Spanish, French and Portuguese enjoyting favor with the Catholic pope who was dividing up the world for colonization), the Protestant British were the last to start settler colonies in the Americas and the last to base the economies of their colonies on the labor of enslaved Africans. They could steal only those lands the Spanish and Portuguese did not want because they were not suitsable for mining gold or raising sugar. The production of sugar and gold involved intensive use of slave labor, but did not require the manufacturing skill, destruction of existing industries, or generation of an industrial base at home, that British cotton did. Neither did the production of gold and sugar generate the racialized slavery that British activities did.⁵⁰ Only the British used sufficient quantities of forced White laborers to make the racialization of slavery useful as a mechanism of social control for pittng White and Black workers against one another.⁵¹ Thus, it was the British, coming last to the table, who ended up doing the most to transform Europe and ultimately the world by racializing slavery and inventing Race (Williams 1944, Allen 1994 and 1996).

As Williams, DuBois, Cox and others have argued, the capital to idustrialize came from racialized slavery and its monopolies, not from competition or the hard work and savings of Europeans spurred on by the Protestant Ethic. The argument parallels Durkheim’s in maintaining that the conditions that led to the rise of modern capitalism, which were fundamentally unjust, eroded consensus and created new conditions for social fact making that do require justice, eventually undermining the social conditions that created them.

The importance of this argument is that the emphasis on justice in Western society is not an ideology (we are not engaged in a culture war). Justice is not important because we believe in it, although this belief may be important to many. The argument is that after a form of society based on constitutive practices develops, justice is required to support the social facts we now rely on. It is a scientific argument that in the absence of justice, solidarity fails and the excluded develop a double consciousness which impels them to struggle for justice and pushes the whole society in that direction. As a scientific argument it can be documented empirically.

Conclusion

As we sit at the crossroads between an untenable and unjust consensus-based form of society that requires homogeneity, exclusion, and authority, and the hopeful possibility of another that thrives on diversity, constitutive practices, and justice, we must recognize that embracing diversity requires taking marginalized scholars seriously. The seven Black and Jewish scholars we discuss in this article spent their careers pointing out that belief in a “rational individual” who lives in a traditional consensus-based society full of durable symbolic objects is not only a cultural myth, but a dangerous and naïve delusion.

Those who believe in that delusion say we are divided by a “culture war,” treating the differences between people as matter of ideology or belief. But what we are experiencing is a clash between two different ways of creating culture – only one of which can thrive in a modern social context – not two competing ideologies (Rawls 2021a, b). That an alternate form of social solidarity has developed, a culture of fragile and changing social constructions, created using constitutive practices, explains the current situation. Our seven scholars have told us why and how this is the case. Because of their work, the social theories and methods needed to understand the current crisis have existed for most of the past century. Overlooking their legacy has been a failure of imagination, a failure to take that perspective of the Other toward ourselves which has been a sociological staple since G. H. Mead (1934).

To remedy the oversight, we position double consciousness at the center of sociology, along with the contributions of those Black, Jewish, and Other scholars whose familiarity with trouble alerted them to the importance of fragile social facts, social constructions, and ethno-methods. Their combined approaches make a qualitative sociology that focuses on Race, justice and social construction central to the big classic sociological questions – while also transforming those questions.

In adding interactional detail to the insights of Durkheim, DuBois, Cox and Williams, Garfinkel, Goffman, and Sacks, show that interaction is an intrinsic but overlooked aspect of every social fact, social construction, and social institution, such that ignoring interaction has left sociologists counting things and using numbers in ways that have distorted and rendered invisible the social processes they are trying to study. Generalizing across categories cannot capture the detail necessary to document processes of social construction, and treating social facts as natural facts obscures how they are socially created.

Qualitative approaches to the study of social facts and categories are necessary to get beneath the surface and see what is being taken for granted. Too often the results of racism, such as high Black arrest rates, are treated as if they were natural facts, and the systemic racism that ignores White crime to create those results is overlooked. Arrest rates measure police activity, not whether people have broken the law: Crime is an artifact of police behavior – a social fact (Bittner 1967; Bittner 1973; Chevigny 1969).

Sociology Could and Should do Better

That this neglected and misunderstood classic legacy was inspired by double consciousness explains why so many who contributed to it were Black, Jewish, or otherwise marginalized. It also explains why this important lineage has so often been misunderstood by those who have not been marginalized, for whom the errors of positivism are not obvious, and Race and justice have not seemed urgent. We advocate a combination of qualitative studies of interaction, with a social justice focus on Race and inequality, that reprises the groundbreaking work of marginalized scholars and, we hope, hastens The Death of White Sociology—first hopefully announced by Joyce Ladner in 1973. We need a sociology for everyone that is informed by those who have been forced to become most aware of how social interactions work. Our own research on Interaction Orders of Race aims to make what is taken-for-granted visible to those who do not experience racialized troubles, to create what we call a White double consciousness (Rawls and Duck 2020). When we know how racism and marginalization are produced, we also hold the key to transforming the social order that reproduces them.