We Must Save Sociology From Itself
A field that once illuminated scarce truths has become an ideology in search of evidence.
It was in sociology classes that I first heard the phrase “white supremacy.” Quite naturally, the first thing I thought of was people in hoods. But my sociology professor defined white supremacy as something quite different: the assumption that the cultural patterns associated with white people—from clothes to food to family structure—are normal, alongside the assumption that the patterns associated with ethnic and racial minorities are inferior.
A light bulb went off in my head. The concept of white supremacy helped illuminate whole dimensions of my life that I had hitherto hidden. For example, it reminded me of a specific event during my sophomore year in high school. My mom offered to make biryani for Thanksgiving instead of turkey. Her reasoning was sound: Thanksgiving was a holiday about gratitude celebrated with feast foods. Turkey, cranberry sauce, and stuffing were the feast foods of a particular ethnic and religious culture (white Protestant Americans). But we came from a different ethnic and religious culture (South Asian Ismaili Muslim Americans). We had feast foods too, biryani being a main one.
The choice was easy. Turkey is tough and flavorless, no matter how much cranberry sauce you put on it. Biryani is proof of God’s existence.
I did not tell a soul in my high school that I ate biryani for Thanksgiving. Sociology gave me the conceptual language to explain why: Because American society views the cultures associated with white people as superior to the cultures associated with ethnic minorities.
Sociology was like an alternate universe full of concepts that helped me see parts of my life experience I had not fully explored, and professors who validated me for sharing them. My term papers as an undergraduate basically involved writing an opening paragraph about power, privilege, and oppression as it related to this or that minority identity, and then finding the data to support my thesis.
It is important to say that this was 1993. It’s not like there wasn’t real racism. I had grown up in the white western suburbs of Chicago during the Reagan-Bush era, where racist tropes (welfare queens, Willie Horton) were commonplace. I do not remember any of the teachers in my high school in Glen Ellyn, Illinois so much as mentioning the Rodney King beating when it happened. Racism was simply not a topic of discussion or a category of analysis.
So while my college work was one-sided and not exactly rigorous, in that time and place it was highlighting evidence-based social patterns and national dynamics that were not a part of mainstream discourse. I think this is what beginners in sociology are supposed to do.
But professionals ought to be held to higher standards than beginners. And sociology has been a field of ideologically progressive concepts in search of supporting evidence for so long now that it is in a serious crisis.
In 2026, the liberal to conservative ratio in sociology is somewhere around 50:1. That makes it a grotesquely imbalanced field where students are exceedingly unlikely to encounter professors who believe conservative ideas such as the importance of personal responsibility or the benefits of capitalism. As with other social sciences, there is a replication problem within the discipline—except sociology has been slower than the other social sciences to face it.
Moreover, people are fleeing from the discipline. Membership of the American Sociological Association has fallen below 10,000, down 33% from its peak of nearly 15,000 in 1972. Undergraduate majors have fallen just as far, but even faster: to roughly 20,000 students today from over 30,000 in 2013. Sociology is often named as one of the “most regretted” majors.
It is a case study in loss of trust. Employers don’t trust sociology enough to hire its graduates. Students don’t trust the professors enough to major in the field. Professors don’t trust each other’s research. Several college presidents I know have privately told me that they don’t trust the sociology departments at their own universities to do their work in a manner that meets standard academic expectations of rigor.
Given all this, is it any surprise that Republican politicians are pouncing? This year, the Ron DeSantis administration removed “Introduction to Sociology” from the general education curriculum in Florida’s public colleges and universities, having earlier claimed that the discipline had been “hijacked by left-wing activists.”
The administration was not wrong. The head of the American Sociological Association has proudly described the field as “currently undergoing a renaissance as antiracist, decolonial, feminist, queer and transnational theorizing.”
But while some sociologists proudly claim that their field is a “weapon” for progressive causes, others have recognized the problem of adopting a narrow ideological compass to guide what is meant to be a broadly-trusted disciplinary ship. Christian Smith, one of America’s most prominent sociologists of religion, observed that wielding sociology as an activist tool “tends to produce sectarian narrowness, exclusion, uniformity, silencing, self-censorship, lack of debate, the negative sanctioning of non-conformists, and the debilitation of rigorous thought.”
In other words, the opposite of what an academic field is meant to do.
Not only did Smith leave the American Sociological Association. He has wondered aloud whether sociology has gone so far off track that it should simply be liquidated. The real tragedy, he told the Wall Street Journal’s Pamela Paul, is that sociology done well “really matters and makes a contribution.”
I was lucky enough to learn what it meant to do sociology well. I started my doctorate in sociology at Oxford in 1998, entering with the hope of applying critical race perspectives to the lives of middle class South Asian Ismaili Muslims in London. My theory was that they were a lot like me: white supremacy had affected their lives in invisible ways that their parents did not understand. Secretly, I did not want to be just a researcher; I wanted to be a liberator. I wanted my research—the penetrating way I asked questions, the sly manner in which I revealed layers of my own life—to help the people I was studying to see the truth of themselves: that their identity could be neatly captured by the lens of white racism.
Except, things didn’t quite turn out the way that I had expected. Twice a week for six months I spent time with my subjects. I listened to the conversations about what mattered in their lives. Not much talk of racism there, frankly. So I asked questions directly about white supremacy, at first taking a slight angle to the topic, and then honing in more directly. “Have you ever been embarrassed about your name, or the food your parents cook at home?”
Everybody I talked to recognized the existence of racism. They had stories about it. But nobody reported it as playing a central role in their lives. That place was occupied by something else: the inspiration they got from their religion.
“I’m failing at this,” I told my PhD advisor, Geoffrey Walford. “I can’t seem to be present at the moments where racism occurs, or even get them to discuss it much in my interviews with them. Maybe I’m asking the wrong questions? Maybe they don’t trust me?”
“Or maybe,” Geoffrey offered, “your theory is wrong. Maybe they don’t see racism impacting their lives as much as you expected—or as much as you want racism to have impacted their lives.”
He added: “Remember, sociology is meant to explore how your subjects understand their own lives, not how you want them to understand their lives. The cardinal sin of the social researcher is squeezing the world into his worldview.”
Paying close attention to what the world is telling you, and finding or developing theories that illuminate it, is what real sociologists do. Nobody can be fully objective, but sociologists have an obligation to be rigorous. This means following sound research processes:
Ensuring that the sample you are studying is reasonably representative of the broader population you are generalizing from;
Sincerely putting your data in conversation with a range of theories to see which one best explains the world;
Following Karl Popper’s famous “falsifiability” test, which means proactively seeking examples that challenge the theory rather than simply looking for more cases that confirm it;
Never confusing correlation with causation;
Being extremely judicious about stating conclusions.
Geoffrey was adamant about these principles. He believed that the integrity of sociology rested upon them, especially qualitative sociology. The reason was simple: not only are qualitative sociologists interested in the same things that everyone else is (Why is there inequality? How do the social worlds of women differ from the social worlds of men?), but we basically use the same tools that are available to other people: observation and conversation. The only way that the field of qualitative sociology can justify academic standing is if our conclusions are more accurate than the conclusions of others.
If we aren’t more accurate than others, we’re no better than the guy on the next bar stool spouting off opinions. And then the field loses credibility. That is the beginning of the end.
Sociology is most useful when it identifies important patterns in society that are not part of mainstream discourse. At a certain time, those patterns included racism. But by the early 2000s, talking about racism had become dogma in sociological discourse. Figures like bell hooks and Cornel West, once considered edgy intellectuals, were now standard fare.
Except, the minority groups I was studying in my doctorate were telling me that their identities were not principally formed by being victims of racism. Rather, they were primarily inspired by their religious identities. This led me to a whole new world of sociological theory about the central role religion plays in modern society—a field pioneered by scholars like Diana Eck, Martin Marty, Scott Appleby, Peter Berger, and Robert Putnam.
As I read their work, I realized that there were lots of civic efforts focused on bridging young people across race and class identities (this was the heyday of Teach for America, City Year, and Public Allies), but virtually none that sought to bridge the gaps between diverse religious youth groups. (That is what inspired me to start the nonprofit organization I still lead, Interfaith America.)
I’m glad that Geoffrey forced me to do proper academic work by finding the theories that actually illuminated the data that I was gathering. I wonder sometimes: If I was doing a doctorate in sociology today, would I have an advisor who allowed me (maybe even encouraged me) to twist my data so that it fit into some version of antiracism—essentially, to play down what were clearly the most important stories my subjects were telling me about their lives, and play up the dogmas of the day? There are sociologists who have confessed to basically doing precisely that.
There is no shortage of guys on barstools spouting crazy theories. Some of them have huge media platforms and influential government positions. In an era of tectonic changes, full of charlatans, we need sociology more than ever to do its job: to be a discipline that helps us develop worldviews that genuinely explain the world around us. Only then can we hope to improve it for the better.
Eboo Patel, a contributing writer at Persuasion, is the founder of Interfaith America and the author of We Need to Build: Field Notes For Diverse Democracy. He served as an advisor on faith to President Barack Obama.
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Great piece! Also, I would add that sociology should start focusing more on other social problems besides racism. Economic inequality, for example, is a subject that could use far more attention from the field. It is too important to be left to the economists
I completely agree with the critique of sociology and 100% appreciate the defense of its formerly traditional standards. That said, I also think that this piece could have been a lot stronger if it had included a deeper analysis of why the societal impact of critical race theory and related ideas evolved in a way that was so, so much worse than what could have been imagined in the 1990s (at least by the liberal-left).
Back then, a broadly defined liberalism dominated U.S. politics and culture so thoroughly that it was hard to imagine that this would ever change. Therefore, it seemed to many (including myself at the time) that CRT and the like would simply help to move the needle towards an even better, more fully inclusive realization of American liberal democracy. This, however, has proven to be an extremely naive and time-bound assumption. It hasn't aged well at all . . . instead, we've seen how the appropriation of this history of racial injustice in the U.S. by elite women and non-whites has undermined the ethos that propelled the country towards their greater inclusion and equality in the first place.
Patel is the son of a father who (according to a quick search) came to the US to get an MBA at Notre Dame and went on to become a corporate marketing executive. His mother worked as an accounting professor. This is an elite family by any reasonable measure. Yet, he was encouraged in college to use the term "white supremacy" to describe his feelings around his family serving biryani instead of turkey for Thanksgiving. While I get how at the time this seemed insightful, now it honestly seems like stolen valor in the service of securing the elite status of the college educated professional managerial class.
This was the same decade in which NAFTA was passed under a Democratic Administration, and many communities that had relied upon a manufacturing jobs base collapsed. This included both White and Black areas. And since then, with the influx of more and more devastating street drugs and accelerating family breakdown, such areas have only gotten far, far worse.
Plus, places like Gary, Indiana, were full of Black workers whose ancestors had actually experienced the real horrors of White supremacy in this country. To equate their ancestral experience (and its continued aftermath) with that of a college-bound son of elite professionals and his feelings around a holiday meal is -- let's just say, a huge problem on multiple levels.
Then, when Trump is elected in a populist reaction to so many people and parts of the country being written off (not saying Patel ever did this, just speaking generally), the response from the progressive side of US politics is to call them racists. We can now connect the dots and should.