Named But Not Heard
Commentary on the Wall Street Journal’s essay about sociology.
On July 24, 2026, the Wall Street Journal ran an essay on sociology’s public unraveling. I’m one of multiple people quoted in it, along with Christian Smith, Kevin McCaffree, Musa al-Gharbi, Saida Grundy, Lisa Hajjar, Melissa Wilde, Jukka Savolainen, and Ashley Rubin.
While the things I was quoted as saying were accurately reported, a quotation is a sentence. An explanation is a structure — a claim, the thing it’s a claim about, what follows from it, what it rules out. You can lift a sentence out of a structure, reproduce it perfectly, set it down inside a different structure, and have it sound like it’s saying something else, without anyone trying to misrepresent anything.
Here is one of my quoted sentences: “We’re treating questions around causation as settled.” On the one hand, I stand behind the statement, knowing that charging a discipline with treating an open question as closed is serious. On the other hand, in a story about whether sociology has been captured by activists, the statement becomes a different accusation than the one I’m making. There it reads more like: sociologists have let their politics contaminate their science. That is a familiar complaint with plenty of adherents, several of them quoted in the same article. And yet, what I’m describing requires no dishonesty, no determination to distort, and no one behaving badly.
But perhaps the most important point of confusion is this: while my claim has implications for sociology, it isn’t about sociology. It’s about a premise treated as fact and where that premise got installed — in employment law, in HR practice, in K–12 curriculum, in how psychological instruments get read, in newsrooms, in higher education, and in sociology.
Appearing in a story about sociology’s troubles shrinks the explanation to something like a tenth of its size, without anyone having said a false word. Perhaps that’s the cost of being quoted in the WSJ, but it’s something I can at least try to clarify here.
The claim
The settled proposition I’m describing is this: disparities in outcomes between groups constitute evidence of discrimination (where discrimination is understood to be an expression of racism).
That is a causal claim, which makes it interpretive by its very nature. Any careful researcher knows that we never observe causation directly. Rather, we observe patterns and sequences and impose an account of how they’re related. This isn’t skepticism for its own sake — it’s the ordinary condition of causal reasoning, and it’s why a claim can be more or less plausible, better or worse supported, without ever converting into a description of what happened. This is especially the case when the subjects are human beings making choices based on motives invisible to outsiders and, sometimes, even to themselves.
The legal turn referenced in the WSJ article is worth walking through.
The idea that racism didn’t only live in the hearts and minds of individuals has a long history in academic and activist circles. In other words, the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (mentioned in the WSJ article) didn’t introduce the idea. It did, however, make two different things violations of Title VII: discrimination with intent, and disparate outcomes regardless of intent.
In my view, the Court’s decision was understandable given the context; Duke Power Co. had a history of restricting opportunities for black employees. And when its facially neutral tests arrived the day Title VII took effect in July 1965, the Court knew that proving discriminatory intent — until then what nearly all discrimination claims required — under such policies would be close to impossible. The route around that problem was to make disparate impact itself sufficient for a violation of Title VII. Chief Justice Burger was famously careful to say in the Griggs decision that good intent doesn’t redeem a practice operating as a “built-in headwind.” In fact, that carefulness may be part of why the causal question no longer needed to be asked. Once good intent is no defense, there’s no longer any reason for a court to determine what produced the disparity. The question of causality isn’t ruled out. It simply has nothing to do.
As I’ve documented elsewhere in detail, the legal equation of the two kinds of practices moved outward from employment law: into scholarship on systemic racism, into the interpretation of psychological instruments, into education, into HR, into the ordinary vocabulary of American institutional life.
The problem isn’t that the claim that disparities equal discrimination is false. I don’t know for sure that it’s wrong, and in some cases, it may well be all or partly true. The problem is that an interpretive claim got treated as a descriptive and factual one — and once that happens, disagreement with it stops registering as disagreement. It registers as denial or worse. Because the cause being named is a moral wrong, someone who disputes the causal claim isn’t heard as disputing a causal claim. They’re heard as making excuses for racism.
How do I know this premise was embedded as settled?
I know from the shadow it casts. Take colorblindness as an example. The principle that race shouldn’t determine how a person is treated was, for most of the twentieth century, the anti-racist position. It’s what the civil rights movement argued for. Today, in many left-leaning circles (including sociology), advocating for it is itself understood as a form of racism — as a mechanism by which racial hierarchy is maintained.
There’s only one way to get from one version of colorblindness to the other: that is with the claim that it is upholding racism itself. Once disparities are evidence of discrimination, then declining to adopt race-conscious policies means declining to address discrimination — and the principle stops being a competing moral vision and becomes a way of protecting the status quo. Grant the underlying premise and the conversion is automatic. Withhold it and a person committed to equal treatment is committed to equal treatment. The premise is what the idea of colorblind racism stands on, even though it never appears in the argument.
And colorblindness is only a clean case; it’s not unique. The same conversion changes a whole set of commitments. Equal treatment under law becomes an approach that entrenches advantage. Merit becomes a construct built to launder existing hierarchy. Appeals to individual responsibility become victim-blaming. And so on.
Run that kind of reclassification across enough commitments and you no longer have people who hold different views. You have people who are immoral. Within that framework, calling the conservative half of the country racist isn’t an insult. It’s an entailment.
Why did it happen?
Probably for multiple reasons. The premise that inequality is fundamentally unjust fit the political sensibilities of people positioned to adopt it. Not requiring proof of intent gave teeth to the new Civil Rights Act. Blaming systems is a more comfortable explanation for persistent racial inequality than considering factors related to individual or community level choices. Regardless of which reason was most salient, I doubt anyone experienced the moment as adopting a contested premise at all. The adoption of its moral entailments would have simply seemed like progress.
Going through the room
Consider how understanding this premise recasts the quotes of every scholar in the WSJ piece.
Kevin McCaffree says sociology misrepresents, conceals, or distorts the evidence. That’s a charge about accuracy and, in “distorts,” about intent. If I’m right, even if every sociologist in America were to report findings scrupulously, the problem would remain untouched, because the premise operates before any evidence is gathered. You can’t distort the answer to a question nobody asked. And you don’t need to distort the answer to a question you’re treating as a matter of fact. It comes out right on its own.
Christian Smith describes a sacred project, a quasi-religious impulse. It’s a claim about motive again, in a more sweeping form. But watch the remedy: Smith wonders aloud about liquidating the discipline. If sociology’s culture is really the problem, dissolving sociology should address it. And yet, we could close every department in the country tomorrow and the shadow of the Griggs-related shift would still stand. The EEOC would still operate on disparate impact, the compliance frameworks still run, curriculums still teach its moral entailments. The premise doesn’t live in sociology. Sociology is simply one of the places it landed.
Musa al-Gharbi says the discipline undermines what he calls “normie” beliefs — that religion is good, that marriage is stabilizing, that police are necessary. He’s right that it does. But the question that matters is why.
The premise supplies the answer. What those three have in common is that they’re inherited — long-standing arrangements that shaped the distribution we now observe. If that distribution is evidence of injustice, then the institutions that produced and sustain it are implicated in producing and sustaining injustice. Nothing further needs to be established about any of them. Marriage stops being a stabilizing arrangement and becomes a structure that encodes a hierarchy. Policing stops being a public function and becomes an instrument for maintaining one. Religion stops being a source of meaning and becomes a system of authority that legitimated the whole arrangement. Restoring those beliefs to good standing one at a time won’t work and isn’t really the point. They were convicted by the premise, and they’ll be reconvicted as long as it holds.
Saida Grundy says she believes in sociology as a weapon. She’s reasoning logically from the premise as described. If disparate outcomes are discrimination, then research documenting them documents an injustice, and advocacy isn’t politics contaminating knowledge — it’s the applied form of it. In this view, calling her an activist misdescribes what she’s doing: she isn’t smuggling a value into science, she’s drawing the entailed conclusion from a causal claim no one has asked her to defend, because no one is asked to defend it.
Lisa Hajjar says there’s no single Archimedean point of truth, only better and worse ways of presenting information. This deserves specific attention because, at a quick glance, it sounds like it should be on my side. It’s not.
At one level, my claim depends on a distinction between descriptive claims and interpretive ones. Dissolve that distinction — declare that every account is positioned, that description is always already interpretation — and my objection loses its grip. I want to say that a particular claim is interpretive and has been treated as descriptive. If all claims are interpretive, that’s true of every claim in the discipline, and pointing it out at any particular one carries no information.
The deeper problem with Hajjar’s point is that the no-Archimedean-point view isn’t actually held. I know of no one who actually treats all accounts as equally positioned. To focus again on sociology for a moment, in the same discipline that says there’s no Archimedean point, the account offered by a disadvantaged group is routinely treated as closer to the truth than the account offered by an advantaged one.
If every account is positioned, the disadvantaged account is positioned too, and there’s no ground from which to rank it higher. If it does have better access to the truth, then something confers that access — presumably a claim about how social position shapes perception, and about who is in a position to see the arrangement plainly. That’s a substantive causal claim about the world. It’s the kind of thing that needs an argument, and it’s exactly the kind of thing the no-Archimedean-point view says can’t be established.
Universal skepticism about objectivity turns out to leave exactly one interpretation standing. That’s not a theory of knowledge. It’s a way of protecting a claim from having to be argued for.
Melissa Wilde argues the ASA should stay politically neutral as a body. I don’t oppose that in theory. But an organization can be scrupulous in its official conduct while every claim it makes is derived from a premise no one is asked to argue for.
Besides, there’s a harder problem underneath. Neutrality means declining to take sides on contested questions — which requires knowing and acknowledging which questions are contested. An institution operating on a premise it no longer recognizes as a premise at all has lost the ability to make that determination. Once it quietly files the premise under settled fact, everything downstream of it will look like description rather than position. It can then be perfectly sincere in believing itself neutral while advancing a contested causal claim in every document it produces, because the claim doesn’t register as the kind of thing neutrality is about.
That’s not a failure of will. It’s a failure of sight. You can’t decline to take a side on a question you’ve stopped seeing as a question.
Jukka Savolainen probably comes closest to naming what I’m describing. He asks whether we want to learn the causes of crime or just repeat that policing is bad. That’s the right shape — a complaint about foreclosed causal inquiry. But it’s framed as a problem of research priorities and wasted resources, as though the fix were choosing better topics. The obstacle isn’t topic selection. It’s that the answer is fixed in advance, so studying the topic differently yields the same conclusion.
Finally, Ashley Rubin says activist logics are displacing scientific ones. Note what the word “logic” implies: something a person adopts and could therefore put down. On that description the fix is to swap the activist logic back out for the scientific one and the field might recover. But a settled premise isn’t a logic anyone adopted. It’s what the logic runs on. Apply the most scrupulous scientific reasoning you like to a proposition you’ve filed under settled fact, and it will carry that proposition straight through to the conclusion, more efficiently than sloppy reasoning would. Rigor doesn’t correct an unexamined premise. It transmits it.
One last item from the article before we move on. It offers as its most damning statistic that roughly 80 percent of articles in flagship sociology journals touch on inequality. It’s easy to read that as obsession — too much attention to one subject. But it’s the wrong reading. A discipline could devote every page it publishes to inequality and be in fine shape, provided the causal question stayed open inside those pages. The number isn’t a measure of how much sociologists study gaps. It’s a measure of how widely one reading of them has been applied.
Why the diagnosis matters
There are multiple reasons to care about getting the diagnosis right. (I go into those reasons in my spring 2027 book “Presumption of Guilt: How Equating Inequality with Injustice Fractured American Democracy.”) But one is that the diagnosis determines the remedy, and every remedy the article contemplates leaves the premise standing.
Depoliticize the discipline: the premise isn’t experienced as politics. Restore official neutrality: neutrality doesn’t reach what members treat as settled. Add viewpoint diversity: a premise isn’t a viewpoint; it’s the floor people stand on to have viewpoints. Teach better, publish more rigorously, recruit differently. Liquidate the whole thing. Each addresses how sociologists disagree. None addresses what has been placed outside the range of disagreement or how.
That pattern isn’t specific to sociology. Civility work, dialogue programs, civics education, depolarization — each is built to improve the conduct of a disagreement. None is built to locate a claim that stopped being visible as a claim. When one of them reaches such a claim, it’s because the right dissenter happened to be in the room, not because the tool went looking.
Named but not heard
I didn’t arrive at any of this by asking what’s wrong with sociology.
I was trying to understand the moral verdict — why disagreement on certain questions produces a judgment about the person rather than an argument. Work backward from that and you land on a claim being treated as settled, because nothing else makes the verdict intelligible. Then it becomes a question of which settled claim generates this particular set of moral commitments.
In the WSJ piece, I named the settled premise. That turns out not to be enough. Surrounded by others describing a fight about people, a sentence about a contested causal claim reads as one more complaint about politicized sociologists — which is the thing I said, converted into the thing everyone else was saying.
I suppose that is its own small demonstration. A claim doesn’t become visible by being stated. It has to be heard as the kind of claim it is — and by the time a reader reaches my three sentences, the article around them has already established what kind of story this is. The sorting happens first. The sentence arrives into a slot that was built before it got there.
Appendix: A final objection
A note for readers who work in this area. Since the article ran, the sociologist Chris Maggio has pressed me on a point that deserves a fuller answer than a footnote.
Maggio took issue with one sentence in particular: “Even suggesting research into alternative sociological explanations is viewed as racist, morally wrong and victim blaming at best.” He argues this leaves readers with the impression that sociologists don’t care about identification strategies. And he points to the literature to counter that: audit and correspondence studies, including a recent meta-analysis synthesizing 114 field experiments. Those experiments exist to ask whether discrimination is present and are built to isolate it as a cause.
On one level Maggio’s objection is methodological, and on that level he’s simply right. Sociologists do sometimes build careful identification strategies, and anyone reading that sentence and concluding otherwise has been misled.
But there’s a harder objection underneath, and it’s the one worth answering. It goes like this: a field that builds experiments to find something out is a field that didn’t already know the answer. So, the existence of this literature isn’t just evidence of methodological seriousness — it’s evidence that the causal question I’m saying is closed was open.
That puts the challenge to me directly. If the premise is embedded, if the discipline treats disparities as discrimination without argument, then why run these studies at all? What is there to find out? Either the premise isn’t as settled as I say, or something else explains the research.
Here’s what I think is going on.
The settled premise says discrimination is the root cause of the inequality. What it doesn’t supply is an account of how — it has to be some process operating widely enough to produce differences at the level of a population. Multiple candidates have attempted to fill that role, including systemic/structural racism, implicit bias, and stereotype threat; each faces serious limitations.
Structural racism refers to disadvantage produced without anyone intending it — outcomes arising from how systems interact rather than from any actor’s purpose. That’s what distinguishes it from ordinary discrimination. The evidence usually offered is historical: redlining, restrictive covenants, exclusions from postwar housing programs. But those were explicit and intentional. The FHA underwriting manual said what it was doing, which makes it documented policy discrimination. The presence of structural racism is generally established by pointing at an unequal outcome and saying: this is what it looks like.
Implicit bias and stereotype threat share a slightly different problem: each was demonstrated at one scale and applied at another. The IAT shows a response-time difference in a sorting task; it’s used to help explain hiring and promotion outcomes across an economy. Stereotype threat was established experimentally — randomized manipulations of how a test is framed, with real effects on measured performance; it’s invoked to help explain achievement gaps that accumulate over years of schooling.
Different as they are, the three have something in common. Each is asked to explain more than it was ever shown to do.
The relationship among them is worth pausing on, because the literature doesn’t settle it. Sometimes structural racism is the umbrella and implicit bias and stereotype threat are mechanisms operating under it. Sometimes structural racism names something distinct from any individual-level process — that’s what “without anyone intending it” is usually meant to convey. Sometimes the terms appear side by side with no stated relation at all.
The looseness in definition has a consequence. Whatever the arrangement, the explanation tends to be invoked as cumulative — as far as I know, nobody claims implicit bias alone produces the wage gap. And when an explanation is cumulative and its components aren’t individually apportioned, each one’s shortfall can be absorbed by the others. Ask how much implicit bias accounts for and the answer gestures at structural forces. Ask what structural forces consist of and the answer gestures back. Nothing has to carry the weight alone, which means no component has to be assigned a share.
Something has to carry each explanation from where it was shown to where it’s applied, and what carries them is the settled premise. The gap is the reason to believe the mechanism operates at scale, and the mechanism is the reason the gap counts as discrimination.
Audit and correspondence studies share the scale problem — a callback difference doesn’t tell you what portion of a wage gap it accounts for — without sharing the circularity. But look at what gets demonstrated. Employers respond differently to names, at the callback stage, in the markets sampled. That’s the finding. Then it appears in explanations of labor market gaps, which requires two further claims the study never tested.
The first is about magnitude, and it’s the same shortfall as before — the difference being that here you can see exactly where it opens. The study measured whether the mechanism operates, not how much inequality it produces. A thirty percent callback penalty is compatible with discrimination accounting for five percent of the wage gap or for all of it.
The second is about kind. A callback difference is consistent with an employer acting on aversion — taste-based discrimination. It’s equally consistent with an employer using the name as a proxy for something he can’t observe and would rather know — statistical discrimination. Same result, different mechanisms, different remedies, and the design doesn’t distinguish them. What travels downstream is aversion.
Nothing bridges the raw finding to either claim except the settled premise. If disparities are discrimination, and discrimination carries the moral weight of racism, then the mechanism has to be animus and it has to be doing most of the work — because the alternatives lead somewhere the premise forecloses. Statistical discrimination implies the proxy might track something real, and asking what it tracks reopens the causal question. And if discrimination accounts for only a modest share of the gap, something else accounts for the rest, and that something needs a name nobody can offer without cost.
So the studies aren’t evidence that the causal question is open. They’re evidence that the field located the one setting where a mechanism could be demonstrated cleanly and demonstrated it. What studies in that literature don’t generally establish is the step from a callback difference to the gaps everyone is actually arguing about.
Now, it would be fair to ask here what the alternative would look like, so let me try to state it.
An open question would show up in what gets asked after a callback gap is found. Suppose the gap comes back at thirty percent — the number I threw out above. If the causal question were live, that result would generate its own next questions: A callback penalty of this size — what share of the observed wage gap could it plausibly produce? What’s in the rest, and how would we get at it? Those are the kinds of questions a finding raises when you don’t already know what it means. It would also mean asking: is this aversion or is the employer using the name as a proxy for something he can’t observe?
I’ll note here that there are designs that try to answer that last question. The main one turns on a prediction: an employer using a proxy does so because he lacks direct information, so give him more and he should need the proxy less. Build résumés at two levels of detail — thin ones with a name and a degree, thick ones with a specific work history, quantified accomplishments, references. If the gap shrinks as résumés get richer, that looks like an information problem resolving. If it holds steady, that looks like aversion.
The design is good — where it falls short, it falls short on identification, and the researchers know its limits better than I do. The trouble is what a result means once you have it. If the callback gap shrinks, that’s consistent with statistical discrimination; it’s also consistent with an employer whose aversion is simply overridden by a strong enough candidate. If the gap holds, that’s consistent with aversion. But it’s also consistent with an employer who doesn’t take the added information at face value from both applicants — which could itself be the result of statistical discrimination.
Suppose both thick résumés list a supervisory role and a strong reference. The employer reads one and thinks: solid record. He reads the other and wonders whether the title was inflated, whether the reference is a favor. He isn’t refusing to hire the second applicant because of the name. He’s discounting the evidence because of it — and if he discounts it, the extra information never reached him. He’s still working from the proxy, because as far as he’s concerned nothing reliable was added. Notice what that employer is doing. He’s using the name as a proxy for how much to trust the applicant’s own account of himself — statistical discrimination applied one level up, to the evidence rather than to the person. Which means a stable gap doesn’t even establish aversion. It’s consistent with a world in which no employer holds any animus and every one of them is discounting paperwork.
Let me be clear. I’m not saying the latter isn’t a problem. I’m saying it’s a different problem than taste-based racism, and the difference determines what would fix it. The applicant is harmed either way, which is probably part of what makes the conflation tempting: the outcome looks the same from where he’s standing. But treating the second employer as the first means addressing him with a remedy built for someone else — and being told you hold a prejudice you don’t hold is its own kind of provocation, one that tends to produce resistance rather than change.
None of this puts Maggio’s concern and my claim in tension. He can point to 114 studies of genuine causal identification, and I can grant every one, because the premise isn’t operating in place of the identification work. It’s operating on top of it, on the questions the work leaves open — and drawing its authority from the very rigor that stopped short of them.