Public and Academic Questions on Race: The Problem with Racial Controversies

This essay offers an in‐depth look at how some national discussions of race serve to heighten divisions and to distort Americans' understandings of racism. First, I contend that these controversies produce questions that create racial and partisan divisions. In other words, they focus on who or which group is guilty of racism. Second, I argue that such questions about racism depart from the kinds of questions that sociologists seek to answer. As such, racial controversies move the public away from applying a sociological imagination to the problem of racism.