The White Man Question: Race, Sex, and the Politics of American Sociological Review

During the Spring 2020 uprisings, the American Sociological Association professed an alignment with the goals of racial justice and gender equity. These statements, however, were met with those of the many BIPOC sociologists, who countercharged the discipline with a legacy of violent forms white male exclusivity. Today, this legacy of exclusivity arguably remains the most evident within faculty hires and promotions. Although the mechanisms behind this debarment have been unclear, scholars in other disciplines have noted that academic journals play an integral role. To investigate if this could be the case within sociology, we interrogated the publication practices of the American Sociological Review , the flagship publication in the field. We examined who was published between 2018 and 2022. Our research reveals that white people accounted for 80% of all ASR publications, with white men alone commanding 48%. Black women and men, by contrast, comprised a combined 2% of published authors. Only ∼10% of articles used an intersectional approach. We conclude that while as a discipline sociology propounds upon the merits of racial and gendered inclusion, its top publication favors white men doing race-and-gender blind research, which advantages white men on the tenure track.