The Occlusion of Empire in the Reification of Race: A Postcolonial Critique of the American Sociology of Race

Julia Bates, Sacred Heart University

Following World War I, the U.S. Department of Labor worked with a large-scale commercial philanthropic endeavor called the Phelps Stokes Fund to transfer educational policies designed for African Americans to West Africa and South Africa. They specifically promoted the “adaptive education” model used at Tuskegee and the Hampton institutes for African American education. This model emphasized manual labor, Christian character formation, and political passivity as a form of racial uplift. They relied upon the sociologist and educational director of the Phelps Stokes Fund, Thomas Jesse Jones, to advocate for the transnational development of the model. Juxtaposing Jones’s advocacy for the adaptive education model in Education in Africa and W.E.B. Du Bois’s critique of the model in The Crisis and Darkwater, the author finds that two different conceptions of the U.S. racial state emerge. I question how advocacy for the transfer of the model effected theories in the American sociology of race?

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 170. Critical Perspectives on US History