Ugly progress: W. E. B. Du Bois’s sociology of the future

The work of W. E. B. Du Bois is a powerful but unjustly neglected resource for sociological enquiry. Powerful insofar that it cuts against the grain of sociology as it exists today, offering a distinctive set of tools that allow the social world to be approached, conceptualised and studied in new ways. Unjustly neglected insofar that the explicit and implicit racism of sociology has positioned Du Bois as a peripheral figure. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the task of recuperating Du Bois’s hidden potency by considering his theory of social time. I argue that Du Bois’s essay ‘Of the Meaning of Progress’ presents an incisive critique of the triumphalist conception of progress that was dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the diffuse desire for a better future common in sociology today. Du Bois rejects the idea that history moves in a necessary and ameliorative fashion towards an ever better world. Instead, drawing on the black experience of slavery and racial violence, Du Bois proposes a notion of ugly progress: a looping conception of time that involves shuffling between the disappointments of the past and utopian hopes for the future. To conclude, I suggest the ugly conception of progress offers a fresh perspective on how marginalised figures from the past, such as Du Bois himself, should be positioned within the discipline of sociology.

How much noise can you make through an interpreter?

The paper employs critical discourse analysis for a pragmatically-oriented exploration of several racist statements by a Polish Eurosceptic Member of the European Parliament (MEP), Janusz Korwin-Mikke. The original fragments in English or in Polish were extracted from a larger corpus containing all the plenary contributions of the MEP (2014–2018). They are com­pared with their interpretations into German and, respectively, either Polish or English. The qualitative analysis reveals that the approach to racist statements by interpreters is inconsistent, both across all the three language units and when the output of each is considered separately. In the analysed interpretations, there is evidence of preservation of the pragmatic effect, slight/radical mitigation, and strengthening. Slight mitigation seems to be the most popular option. The interpreters tended to tone down anthroponyms functioning as racial slurs and to omit implicit racism.

“Why are the Gifted Classes So White?” Making Space for Gifted Latino Students

Bryson Valley Elementary School’s population is changing, formerly consisting of students, 72% of whom identified as White, but now only 53% of students do so; 26% of its 800 students identify as Latinx,1 the largest minority group in the school. The school’s new Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted (AIG) teacher, Judith Hunter, notices a disparity in ethnic representation in the AIG program and hopes to change that situation. Two challenges that Judith faces are resistance from teachers who tend to hold deficit orientations toward some groups of students, as well as a fairly apathetic principal who is nearing retirement. When viewed through the lens of Critical Race Theory, the implicit racism in the school’s gifted identification procedures becomes more obvious.

Christianity and Implicit Racism in the U.S. Moral and Human Economy

The relationship between Christianity and racism in the United States has a long history. In an age of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘colour-blind’ ideology, explicit forms of racism have become less conspicuous. Still, disparities arise across the country’s human economy, and explicit statements of egalitarianism are incongruent with practices of discrimination in U.S. Christian churches. This article explores this incongruence and the relationship between Christianity and implicit forms of racism. By discussing theological individualism and the principle of ‘homophily’, the article contributes to discussions about the relationship between the moral and human economy. Through this, a Christian morality of salvific aspiration is translated into a morality of personal economic responsibility and duty.