American Journal of Evaluation

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Slipping Through the Front Door: Relevant Social Scientific Evaluation in the
People of Color Century
John H. Stanfield, II
American Journal of Evaluation 1999; 20; 415
DOI: 10.1177/109821409902000301

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䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵䡵 Articles
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Slipping Through the Front Door: Relevant

Social Scientific Evaluation in the People of
Color Century1

JOHN H. STANFIELD, II

ABSTRACT

This is an essay about the racialized conventional wisdoms and the

academic traditions that impede the ability of social scientists to
adequately explain and evaluate the colorization of the life worlds
around them, particularly in terms of explanations involving power,
privilege, and empowerment. I conclude that it is impossible to discuss
adequately the more technical issues of technique and measurement,
until we grasp the epistemological and biographical problematics of
social sciences and their uses. Traditional frameworks, including tra- John H. Stanfield, II
ditional conceptions of race, hinder our ability to evaluate culturally
and socially different worlds and realities, in this case, those created and transformed by people
of color. It is especially important to find alternatives in a society and globe that are becoming
increasingly colorized in terms of demographics, power and authority.

John H. Stanfield, II ● Morehouse College, Department of Sociology, Wheeler Hall, Room 229, Atlanta, GA 30314. Tel:
(404) 681-2800x2624; E-mail: jstanfie@morehouse.edu.

American Journal of Evaluation, Vol. 20, No. 3, 1999, pp. 415– 431. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.
ISSN: 1098-2140 Copyright © 1999 by American Evaluation Association.

415

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416 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EVALUATION, 20(3), 1999

A DEDICATION

This essay is dedicated to three men now deceased. The first is the late historian Carl Becker,
whose The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (Becker, 1932/1992),
published over sixty years ago, has been an inspiration to me. It has inspired me as a
sociologist of knowledge to study race as an obsolete, nineteenth-century definition of self
and others that continues to shape our individual identities, our collective identity, and
conventional wisdom in America and abroad (see also Kuhn, 1996). This paper is also
dedicated to the urban sociologist, evaluator, and social scientist Scott Greer (1989), who
made a lasting impression on me as a twenty-two year-old graduate student in his logic of
inquiry class at Northwestern University. It was in Scott’s class, through his front-line war
stories about urban action research and its epistemological challenges and paradoxes, that I
learned the importance of grasping and critiquing the ideas, values, and biases that undergird
the theories and methods of action research and that are usually taken for granted. Finally,
this essay is dedicated to the late Morehouse theologian and sociologist of the future Howard
Thurman (Flucker, 1998). In the 1950s, it was Thurman’s prophetic portrayals of a multi-
cultural America and world that inspired the futuristic multicultural societal visions of a
Morehouse sociology major named Martin Luther King Jr.
As these dedications suggest, this is an essay about the conventional wisdoms and the
academic traditions that impede the ability of social scientists to adequately explain and
evaluate the colorization of the life worlds around them. Particularly important are issues
related to power, privilege, and empowerment. My conclusion is that it is impossible to
discuss adequately the more technical issues of technique and measurement until we grasp
certain problematic epistemological (Stanfield, 1993), sociological, and biographical char-
acteristics of social sciences and their uses. These background characteristics influence the
way we evaluate culturally and socially different worlds and realities. My focus in this essay
is on the worlds and realities created and transformed by people of color in a society and
globe that are becoming increasingly colorized in terms of demographics, power, and
authority.
My specific focus is on observations and examples from social science research on
Blacks, particularly evaluation of programs and projects that target Black populations. This
is because, even today in the age of increasing colorization of American demographics, Black
experiences remain as the basic sociological yardstick and the base of comparative analysis
that scholars, social commentators, and policy-makers use when addressing racial inequality
in the United States. Even as the color line increasingly becomes pluralized, in the United
States what remains most persistent is the White/Black dimension.

INTRODUCTION

In these last decades of the 20th century, we have witnessed some decline in the traditional
hierarchies of American- and European-White supremacy. Historically, authority has been
vested in ways that restricted the quality of life of White women and of people of color,
through the vices of colonialism and blatantly sexist and racist policies (Stanfield, 1992,
1994b, 1994c, 1996c). We have seen the Black civil rights movements, as well as Asian and
African rebellions against American and European imperial rule on the global level, emerge

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Slipping Through the Front Door 417

and then subside with the rise of the global cultural and economic power of Japan and East
Asia. In the United States, we are reminded that American White male supremacy is on the
ropes. Reminders include the changing color demographics of many cities and regions, along
with the ascent of White women and, to a lesser extent, women of color into places of
national political and economic prominence (see also Bowen & Bok, 1998). The resulting
status crisis is reflected in the rather desperate efforts in some parts of the country to turn back
the clock through anti-affirmative action movements and policies.

WHITE SUPREMACY IN THE ACADEMY AND ALLIED PROFESSIONS

Among the last bastions of resistance to the crumbling of traditional prejudicial authority
relations are the American and European academies, along with associated professional areas
such as evaluation. For centuries these exclusive sectors have taken legitimacy from tradi-
tional White male supremacy structures. As these structures crumble, the academy and allied
institutions have seen some changes. In the United States, for example, many universities and
colleges have developed diversity requirements and have attempted to recruit more White
women and non-White scholars. Such laudable efforts more than likely, however, do not
include integrating White women and especially American-born scholars of color into the
powerful inner-circles of academic communities and of disciplinary professional communi-
ties.
This is particularly apparent in the demographic composition of those who define and
fund research and, more fundamentally, the various sciences and humanities. And this is true,
too, I believe, to too great an extent in evaluation. Post-modern efforts to promote feminist
and cultural approaches to research in the sciences and humanities have not, for instance,
translated into much transformation of the gendered and the racialist nature of who does
science or humanities; who controls the grants and contracts; who does the grunt work; and
who are the “subjects.” Take in particular the case of research on Black people and other
people of color and its lucrative funding sources. In this arena, the contradictions between the
claims of multiculturalism in the academy and in grant applications, on the one hand, and
who really controls the money and the data, on the other, are increasingly paradoxical.
The university-community outreach movement is perhaps the latest manifestation of this
contradiction between multicultural claims and the actual continued Whiteness in the
definitions of and conduct of research. I recognize that much of evaluation practice takes
place outside of university settings. Nevertheless, I believe that the community outreach
movement is an illuminating object study even for evaluators working outside the academy,
whose funders and home organizations may bear many of the same characteristics. Com-
munity outreach, on many campuses, has become a 1990s version of the academic urban
affairs projects of the 1960s, especially in terms of the racialized authority relations that
dictate who has control of the dollars, the data, and the publishing agenda. For example, most
of the principal investigators in the community outreach partnership (COPC) movement,
which is subsidized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, are White
(and usually male). These projects commonly have a person of color, usually Black,
functioning on the project as the community liaison. Moreover, as I have observed as a peer
reviewer for university/college COPC proposals, even though community members are
supposed to be consulted in all aspects of COPC development, from grant writing to
implementation, they are rarely given real power in project decisions. And they are even

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418 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EVALUATION, 20(3), 1999

more rarely provided significant decision-making roles in the culture of sponsoring univer-
sities and colleges.
Similar problems exist in the paternal relations between researchers and community
people. This paternalism is seen even in the professional language that social scientists have
been known to use, such as “informants” and “human subjects.” It is also seen in the
assumption that, while neighborhoods are supposed to be completely open to researchers to
“collect data” from informants, researchers have no obligation to give community people
empowered access to the resources of academic institutions. It is assumed that at best what
is important is for the researcher to level with community people and to compensate them for
being involved in a study. Honesty about and compensation for research intentions may be
virtuous gestures. But they are marginal perks, in comparison to allowing community people
to sit on the tenure and review committees of those researchers who have studied them, or
to have guaranteed admission slots set aside for the qualified children of those adults who
consent to participate in a study, or to receive free health care in the nearby university clinic
for those residents who are involved in multiyear studies, or to benefit in other meaningful
ways from the institutions for whom they serve as “subjects.”
There continues to be resistance, both subtle and not so subtle, to the inclusion of
ethnically aware Black and other people of color in positions of power and authority,
specifically, to the positions where decisions are made about defining research and its
numerous rewards. Such resistance has done much to keep things as they have been for
decades. Norms and values that support White supremacy are prevalent in social research and
evaluation, and generate a number of problems enumerated below. But before we discuss
those problems, a general word about the relevance problems of contemporary academic
social sciences and their uses in evaluation research.

THE RELEVANCE PROBLEMS OF WHITE SUPREMACY IN SOCIAL

RESEARCH AND EVALUATION

Social research knowledge is disseminated in many ways, including curricula, grant propos-
als, publications, and evaluation reports. Even though research may have been rewarded by
academic peers and funding agency personnel, its dissemination is problematic when the
research has little or no relevance to worlds outside the academy–particularly to the people
“in the study.” In other words, there is a “relevance gap” between (a) what social scientists
do successfully for career building and (b) how much their data and interpretations are
isomorphic with the experiences of real people. This relevance gap, on average, widens with
the demographic discrepancies between the background and experiences of researcher and
“subject.”
The distance between the researcher and those under study, particularly when the
studied hail from powerless populations, has been increased by technical considerations,
including the increasing dependency on secondary data sets and meta-analysis in some
research areas. In many research areas, research can be done in the comforts of the library,
computer lab, or on the Internet. Correspondingly, it has become increasingly easy to do
research on human beings without talking to a single person representative of a population
or community under study—and still get an academic job, obtain tenure, and receive
endowed chairs, grants, and book awards. For instance, we are seeing a growing number of

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Slipping Through the Front Door 419

social scientists who claim to be poverty experts, but whose professional authority is derived
primarily from sophisticated secondary data analyses. Meanwhile, these researchers are
reluctant to venture out into a poor non-White neighborhood to have conversations with
people representative of those in their impersonal secondary data sets. Although the field of
evaluation may have fewer experts who are so totally disconnected from the real lives of the
people they study, I fear the problem exists in evaluation as well. This may be especially
true for evaluators in academic settings and in large contract-research firms, but the
ability to obtain structured data from a distance means that any evaluator can suffer from
this problem.
The continued ability to become a race expert, a poverty expert, or an urban expert
without first-hand contact has encouraged the continued tensions between campus commu-
nities and nearby neighborhoods and villages. The same tension exists, I believe, between
most of the infrastructure of evaluation (e.g., the funding agencies and the large contract
research firms) and the communities in which evaluations take place. The ability to claim
expertise without first-hand contact has also encouraged the persistent tendency for social
scientists to view those they study as commodities, as objects, while those studied view the
university professor (or evaluator) as an exploiter only interested in extracting data and then
disappearing.
What would happen if more of the social scientists specializing in research on the poor
or people of color would spend quality time with the people about whom they claim
professional authority? For one thing, they may find that many of their academic ideas about
the population they are supposedly authoritative on are irrelevant, obsolete, or popular but
biased folk-wisdoms. For instance, take the phrase “Black social class.” What is a social
class, anyway? Does social class as a sociological phenomenon actually fit the goings-on in
a “Black community?” How well does the concept of social class capture the empirical
experiences of Black middle classes in historically Black and in desegregating institutions,
sectors, and communities?
Similarly, does the trendy term “underclass” really empirically fit Black experiences? If
so, where and how? Does Wilson J. Wilson’s phrase “the truly disadvantaged” really fit his
Chicago sample? How well does it fit when applied to other ecological locations? Even
though there have been reams of studies done on Black social classes, how much is that vast
literature really relevant in the lives of Black people? How much of it is “knowledge” that
is relevant only in the context of the productivity norms of an academic community,
professional associations, and funding agencies? To what extent do these question make
problematic the concepts, such as Black social class, that evaluation researchers embrace
rather than ponder while engaged in intervention and outcome studies?
These questions, and others that follow regarding the adequacy of fit of so-called
universal social science concepts in accurately interpreting and representing the empirical
realities of Black and other people of color, involve what we can call relevance validity
issues. “Relevance validity” poses the question: Even if the design and data meet the
reliability and validity standards of Campbell and Stanley (1966) or of a particular social
scientific or policy-making community, do the data fit the realities of the people it supposedly
represents? This is an important question because, as pointed out earlier, it has become easier
for social scientists to build their careers based on the traditions and criteria of the academic
communities which legitimate and reward their work, without challenge by the possible
disagreements posed by those who have been studied.

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420 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EVALUATION, 20(3), 1999

WHITE SUPREMACY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE EVALUATION: TWO

PRINCIPLES

The social sciences and evaluation research are products of an American society with deeply
racialized roots. There have been recent attempts to deny this, either by claiming that sciences
are democratic and value-free paradigms and communities (Merton, 1979) or by contending
that racialism no longer exists in America due to the impact of a short-lived civil rights
movement. More sobering observations reveal otherwise. Historians such as Winthrop Jordan
and Ronald Takaki, theologians such as Cornel West, and social scientists such as Gunnar
Myrdal and Derek Bell have made it more than clear that White supremacy has been a
normative form of racial dominance in the United States since its colonial origins. Given its
diffusion throughout American society, White supremacy touches and shapes every one,
every institution, every community, and every ecosystem. No one, collectively or individu-
ally, escapes from the dynamics of socialization and stratification or from the impacts of
White supremacy. No one, including the social and other sciences and their human creators.
In this sense, White supremacy consists of more than negative attitudes and behaviors
towards racialized out-groups. It involves the very way this society is organized, and
significantly influences our views and treatments of self and others.
There are two principles of White supremacy that greatly shape the organization of
America, including the cultural logic of human relationship (and the lack thereof). Most
importantly, these principles indirectly help shape the definitions and functions of institutions
and communities, including academic communities and the communities of social scientists
and evaluation researchers they produce. These principles are: (1) race and racialism and (2)
racial categories.

Race and Racialism

Race is a mythology (Montagu, 1998), rooted in the false notion that social and cultural
characteristics and abilities, such as moral character and intellect, can be attributed to real or
imagined phenotypical traits. Thus, races are not created; they are made as human inventions.
People construct races as an ideological justification for power, control, and economic
exploitation. The engine of race-making is “racialism,” which refers to the attitudes and the
actions of stereotyping, exclusive practices, and the creation and maintenance of unequal
access to resources, education, gainful employment markets, investment capital, the polity,
and natural resources. In a society such as America, racialism has become so routinized
through many generations, that thinking and acting racially is normative on the part of all
who are born in this country or have lived here for more than a few years. It is in this sense
that racism organizes everyday life in America, shapes the moral character of Americans, and
determines whom we associate with and whom we do not associate with in marriage, church,
neighborhood, and school. This definition of racialism, in terms of complex processes of
socialization and societal organization, has been popular in Europe for quite some time
(Essed, 1991; Van Dijk, 1993). Meanwhile in the United States, we still tend to lean on
weaker definitions of racialism premised on attitudes and blatant negative behavior. These
weaker definitions cause false optimism, suggesting that some people escape from being
impacted by a society that is normatively racialist. (Please note that I draw the distinction
between being racialist, which is a consequence of being socialized in a society in which

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Slipping Through the Front Door 421

everything from language to whom we befriend and whom we trust, regardless of our
racialized categorization, is routinized in race mythology, and being racist, which involves
blatant or covert bigotry against racialized out-groups in attitudes or/and behavior.)
As an organizing principle of American society, racialism impacts the social sciences
and the academic and professional sides of evaluation research. This impact is seen in the
racialist sociological baggage fundamental to the development of institutions of higher
learning, professional associations, and academic journals. Implicit White supremacy norms
and values contribute, I believe, to Eurocentric concepts and measurement epistemologies,
techniques, and interpretations. Concretely, in the United States and elsewhere in the West,
and in West-influenced areas of the non-West, it has been considered normative to consider
Eurocentric notions and experiences as the baseline, as the yardstick to compare and contrast
the notions and the experiences of people of color. This is most apparent in Eurocentric social
scientific traditions in designing and implementing, and interpreting standardized tests and
survey instruments.
In the 1980s and 1990s there is deepening awareness that there are many types of
abilities, rather than one IQ scale on which everyone can be measured on with no qualifi-
cations. Even still, there is the temptation to continue to evaluate the achievement patterns of
students of color in academic enrichment programs with instruments based upon Eurocentric
norms and values. As much as the multiple intelligence and emotional intelligence move-
ments have gained widespread popular appeal, they have yet to change significantly the
evaluation practices of social scientists interested in intelligence and achievement patterns in
non-White populations (Ford, Obijakor, & Patton, 1995; Herrnstein & Murray, 1996).
There is still a deeper issue. Usually when we refer to the need to socially sensitize
research concepts and instruments, we conventionally mean content areas, the substance of
questions. A more fundamental concern should be to change the process, the form in which
questions are asked and analyzed. How effective are multiple choice or yes or no questions,
for instance, for populations seeped in oral traditions, who use narrative and metaphoric story
telling as a primary medium for disseminating knowledge (Stanfield, 1994a)? Answering yes
or no or selecting a, b, or c simply is not that easy for people with a more holistic way of
communicating. This is why, I believe, so many researchers have misconstrued what Black
respondents to yes or no, a or b or c questions mean since there is so much more they may
have meant than merely yes or no, or a or b or c. Even for populations not seeped in oral
tradition, life is too complex to be reduced down to yes or no. But, the difficulty with this
overly simplistic approach becomes even more serious when it comes to populations such as
ethnic Black people who do try to tell it all and become frustrated or passively-aggressive
resistant respondents when they can’t. This is why open-ended survey instruments work
much better than do tightly structured instruments.
Social scientists must also become more mindful of how the insidious racialism of the
social sciences has led us to negatively romanticize people of color. Not only are we
professionally socialized to ask negative questions about Black experiences, but we are also
socialized not to ask certain questions that might shed a more positive light on Black people.
For instance, while we may ask community residents about the needs of their community, we
rarely ask questions about strengths. In some quarters, perhaps including evaluation, this is
changing. But the focus of many interventions on social problems sustains the tendency to
focus on negatives. While we may ask questions about why Black youth or adults get into
trouble with the law, we rarely try to find the good kids and grown-ups with sterling moral
characters and ask them how and why is it they maintain their impeccable moral characters

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422 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EVALUATION, 20(3), 1999

in high-risk environments. We rarely ask questions about the positive social baggage young
people bring with them from poor though resourceful environments, such as indigenous
mentors and resilience as a socioemotional resource (Stanfield, 1996b). We ask more
questions about the learning disabilities problems of Black and Latino children and adults
than about exceptional members of those racialized populations. In these and other ways,
racialism provides a hidden influence on the questions that evaluators and others tend to ask.

The Myth of Racial Categories

Race and its experiential engine, racialism, help determine the organization of institu-
tions, communities, and society. Racial categorization refers to the ways people learn to think
about human beings defined in terms of races. Racial categorization is the language that is
used to convey what we are socialized to think about people who are sorted into racialized
boxes. Thinking in terms of racial categories is often called stereotyping. It involves people
being socialized to link social and cultural attributes to physical attributes that they see. This
process of thinking about people categorically begins very early in life as children come into
contact with many others who use categorical language, which always includes a qualifier
such as Black man, White man, Jewish child, Latino youth, and so on. When the qualifier is
used, it becomes a trigger in the mind that reminds the person of stereotypical profiles rather
than an individuated human being. And the perceiver then has and may act on expectations
based upon the profile. For instance, studies have shown that many Black boys have problems
performing well in primary school because administrators and teachers assume that they will
not perform well, and therefore they do not do well especially after fourth grade.
Reasoning based on racial categories is diffused throughout American society and the
western and westernizing world. Indeed, it is impossible for most Americans to think in other
terms about the characteristics and abilities of human beings. In the United States, we see
racial category reasoning expressed virtually as a fact of life in K-12, college, and graduate
and professional school textbooks and curricula, in academic scientific and humanities
communities, in the U.S. Census and other government data-gathering agencies, in popular
culture and the mass media, and in private survey and polling companies.
There are many reasons why we hold on to such myths even when we take progressive
stands on social justice issues. First, in race-centered nation-states and monarchies, such as
the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil, the myth of racial
categories is a powerful primary socialization that profoundly influences social perceptions,
social status, and social identity of all societal members (Bowser, l995). Whether they are
aware of it or not, the vast majority of members of this society are socialized to assume that
they belong to a race (or, increasingly, multiple races). The emotional investment in race
categorization is so fundamental, so intense, and so much part of who Americans are, that to
do away with it would be too traumatic for many people. It would mean, for instance, that
there would need to be radical change in all the cues we learn about whom to befriend, whom
not to befriend, whom to marry, whom not to marry, whom to trust, whom not to trust, who
is intelligent, who is not intelligent, who deserves promotion, who does not deserve
promotion, who should be our neighbors and who should live across town.
A second reason why the myth of racial categories lives on is because it often is, in one
way or another, profitable. Racial category myths are emotionally profitable to those who do
not wish to accept others different than themselves and are in need of justification. They are
profitable emotionally and socially to those with personal and collective needs to feel

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Slipping Through the Front Door 423

superior (or inferior) to others. Racial category myths are profitable for the media and
politicians who can exploit them for mass audiences and votes. Racial category myths are
profitable to those who build careers as race experts in the academy and beyond. Racial
category myths are profitable to those who count races to monitor affirmative action policies
and to assess diversity trends in institutions and communities. For institutions, such as school
systems, universities, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and communities that
receive race-based financial assistance, race counting is a fiscal imperative. And as we all
know so well through studies of slavery, poverty, inequality in labor markets, and inner-city
community and American Indian reservation formation, racial myths historically have been
handy tools for justifying the institutionalization of economic domination and economic
exploitation.
It is no accident, then, that twentieth-century studies of racial issues, such as sociolog-
ical studies of Black experiences or race relations or racial prejudice, are very much rooted
in fallacious thinking based on “racial categories.” Nor is it even surprising that the civil
rights movements and policies coming out of the 1950s and 1960s, along with the debates
over affirmative action and multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s, are premised on
assumptions that races exist as singular or multiple categories. More important and more
troubling is the presumption that the races are ordered vertically from most to least able
intellectually and socially. This presumption about racial categories has for nearly one
hundred years generated frequent, high-profile pseudo-scientific claims (e.g., Herrnstein &
Murray, 1996) in academic and popular cultural circles about the place and abilities of Blacks
in the American nation-state. These debates remind us of how little progress there has been
to date.
One of the most obvious forms of insidious racialism, both in academic social scientific
research and its public policy uses, is the basic categorical assumption that all Black people
are the same, that they all belong to something called a singular “race.” This view ignores the
reality that race is a mythological construct, that it is enlivened only through human invention
in specific historical contexts in particular societies, and that it varies within societies from
region to region and community to community. Homogenous race thinking, that is, thinking
about Blacks in the United States as a singular race, has encouraged analysts to ignore the
historical and contemporaneous diversity of ethnic, national, linguistic, ethnoregional, cul-
tural, and cross-cultural variations in urban and rural Black populations. Given the inattention
to diversity within and across Black communities, it is not surprising that research conclu-
sions, such as those about the institutional and community foundations of Black poverty,
have been substantially oversimplified. From the standpoint of evaluation research, the
homogenous thinking about Black communities and about how Blacks fare in desegregating
institutions, communities, and sectors generate overly simplistic and in many cases, errone-
ous assessments of intervention programs. Consider, for instance, programs designed to assist
Black youth in their educational pursuits. We cannot accurately assess the complex reasons
why some Black youth succeed and others fail until we come to terms with differences in
their cultural, ethnic, nationality, and socioeconomic backgrounds, among other things. This
is especially important because, though the norms are changing, it has been commonplace for
many people in the United States who are distinctly of African descent to be socialized to
identify themselves in public documents, such as college applications, as being Black even
though they more than likely have other ethnic and national mixtures and “behave” in
culturally different ways though they fall in the same “racialized box.”
The presumed value of categorical race thinking in the evaluation branches of the social

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424 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EVALUATION, 20(3), 1999

sciences is more than apparent in the widespread use of categorical terminology in the
evaluation literature. This is just another illustration of just how much the social sciences and
evaluation research traditions are embedded within an American society and dominant
culture that views race-making to be a natural state of affairs. From this perspective, the
prevalence of racialized categorical language, data collection, and data analysis is an
empirical indication of how deeply ingrained race is in our lives, leading even the most
humane among us to habitually lapse into the routines of racialism.
It is only humanitarian to insist that the myth of racial categories be dismantled, along
with other myths that fashion domestic and international systems of inequality. But, in
reality, the myth of race is unfortunately such a powerful and profitable socialization agency
that its dismantling in most quarters in this country and abroad is not going to occur all that
easily. DuBois, at the beginning of the twentieth century, said that the problem of the century
would be the problem of the color line. This problem is not only still here for the twenty-first
century, but the problem of race is much deeper and more complex than in the days of
DuBois.
Nevertheless, if we are going to be more effective as social scientists in how we certify
students and how we do evaluation research, we have no choice but to incorporate anti-
racialist norms and values in how we think and in how we create and use epistemologies,
theories, and methods to examine and explain human experiences. This means doing more
than paying lip service to diversifying who gets and controls research funds, who gets to
publish and where, and how many community people we allow to come and sit at the table
as we write the grant. It means more than doing what has been called participatory research.
It means de-racializing assumptions in our textbooks and literature about people and who
they really are and wish to become. It means doing serious re-examination of the concepts
and research tools we use and the way they reflect our presumptions about the people they
are used to describe. Becoming anti-racialist also means constructing a new language that
describes human beings in ways other than those which construct misleading, if not false,
links between what they look like phenotypically or in mind and what their qualities and
abilities are as human beings. But before the language changes, the power and the privilege
dynamics, and the structures that the language produces and institutionalizes, must change as
well. Otherwise, any attempt to do away with the racialist just through erasing racialized
qualifier terminology will be nothing more than cosmetic, an empty symbol.

BRINGING IN INDIGENOUS CULTURES

The racialist and paternalistic traditions of social scientific work reproduce dominance and
subordination relations in the academy and in the worlds we study and evaluate. As I alluded
to earlier, one consequence is that knowledge about people of color, about their institutions,
communities, and individual lives, is confined to the ontologies of Eurocentric populations.
This is even the case when it comes to Eurocentric frames of references that are progressive
and liberating in their epistemologies, theories, and methods.
Indeed, one of the historical dilemmas of mainstream liberal social science perspectives
is that, on the one hand, they have done much to erode conservative, biological, and genetic
reasoning about human differences. During the twentieth century, liberal social scientists
have promoted social engineering solutions to the injustices experienced by Blacks and other
people of color. Consider the historical origins and evolution of evaluative traditions in the

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social sciences, starting with the Atlanta and Philadelphia work of William E. B. DuBois
(DuBois, 1899/1998; Lewis, 1994). When we consider these origins, it is more than apparent
that much of the evaluative tradition is rooted in efforts to design, implement, and assess the
outcomes of intervention programs to assist Black people. On the other hand, liberal
American social scientific approaches, with their stress on assimilation and reform within the
system, tend to underestimate or ignore issues in great need of conceptualization and study
if we are going to have an accurate reading of what is going on in non-White institutions and
communities and in the experiences of people of color in desegregating areas of American
society.
The assimilation perspective in social research on Black issues has been premised on a
liberal social deficient model, which has been carbon-copied in many respects by post-1970s
conservative observers of Black experiences (Stanfield, 1994c). The dominant academic
assumption in most mainstream American social science literature has been and remains that
Blacks have no or little indigenous culture. This assumption continues, even in the midst of
the powerful grassroots Afrocentric movement sweeping through Black schools and churches
like wild fire (as it did in the face of the historical Garvey movements and Ethiopian pride
movements of previous eras). The ebonics controversy of recent history certainly highlighted
the reluctance of even middle-class Black leaders, as well as distinguished Black academic
scholars, to acknowledge the presence of ethnically unique Black cultures in the United
States.
The cultureless view of Black experiences helps to undergird liberal and recent con-
servative views about the resolution of issues in Black institutions and communities and
Black mobility in desegregating America. This view is quite unique in contemporary social
science research. While Euro-American ethnic populations and immigrants, regardless of
national origins, are thought to have at least some culture somewhere in the past or present,
social scientists remain resistant to the idea that Blacks with historical roots in the United
States have or ever had indigenous culture. Even Afrocentrists assume this, which is the
reason why they insist that Americanized Africans are in need of imported African traditions.
The reasons for this resistance to the idea and, more than that, the reality of indigenous Black
culture are complex. To explain them here would cause us to digress too far from our major
point.

THE RICH COMPLEXITY OF BLACK CULTURES

The point is that, regardless of the liberal tradition of social scientific research and regardless
of the similar claims of recent conservative social scientists writing on Black experiences,
there are indigenous cultures in historical Black communities and institutions. They are
cultures derived from the retention of African-descent values, norms, and traditions, and
drawn from the histories of involuntary African-descent slave and African-descent voluntary
immigrant populations with roots in African, Caribbean, Latin American, European, Asian,
South Pacific, and South American societies. They are cultured, including the values, norms,
and traditions of the dominant Euro-American population and of other non-White popula-
tions, such as American Indians, Latinos, Polynesians, and Asians. They are cultures created
and recreated through Blacks migrating south to north (or south to west, or north to south,
or west to south) and intermingling with African descent immigrant and other populations in
community and institutional settings.

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426 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EVALUATION, 20(3), 1999

Black cultures are not only rich, but they are varied and complex. Black cultures vary
according to the ecological history of the development of urban and rural human settlements.
This means that Black cultures vary according to the political and economic processes of
segregation and desegregation. They vary as a function of intra-ethnic and inter-national
intimate bonding and family formation. Black cultures vary as a result of the formation of
religious and civic institutions and social networks, the development of community-based
language systems. They vary according to the creation of and, indeed, the destruction of the
technological and economic foundations of communities due to local, domestic, and inter-
national trends. All of these processes influence what indigenous Black cultures “look like”
in a particular community. All of these processes may influence the kinds of indigenous
cultural norms and values that upwardly-mobile Black people carry with them as they enter
into and navigate their way through a desegregating society and world.
If social scientists are going to understand the complexities of who Black people are,
and if evaluators are going to understand the complexities of how Black people respond to
social policies and programs, it is imperative that they begin to take indigenous Black
cultures seriously. For instance, the success of Black mobility in desegregating America is
not just an outcome of luck or some program intervening just in time. And neither is it due
totally to Divine Providence, or luck, or sheer intelligence, or will power. Black mobility is
definitely not grounded in values that are simply carbon copies of dominant culture. We still
have yet to figure out just how and to what degree the indigenous culture of Blacks influences
the formation of communities, institutions, political behavior, economic development, and
mobility and participation in desegregated communities and institutions.
This fascinating issue, of the cultural, national, ethnic, and linguistic diversity in African
descent institutions, communities, and mobility patterns, needs to be explored not only in
contemporary institutions and communities, but also in historical settings as well. The
historical social sciences and indeed, mainstreamed biographical literature, is so embedded
in cultureless, assimilationist perspectives, that much of the classical Black community work
completely ignores the realities of indigenous cultures. This is particularly the case when it
comes to issues regarding Black people and social organizations and networks that have been
created through the values and traditions of Black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa
who settled in American rural and urban areas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and who may or may not be intimately bonded with Black Americans and with other
populations settled in the United States.
When we read through DuBois’ (1899) The Philadelphia Negro, Frazier’s (1939) Negro
Family, and Drake and Cayton’s (1945) Black Metropolis, there is no acknowledgment of
such diversity in the formation of the first large urban Black communities in the late
nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. It is only when we pick up and read Ira De Augustine
Reid’s (1939) long-neglected yet seminal study The Negro Immigrant, published in the late
1930s, that we get a glimpse of the diversity that exists. In Reid’s work we see the complex
cultural ways that segregated urban Black communities emerged and developed institutional
characteristics in the first thirty years of the twentieth century.

COLORIZED POWER, AUTHORITY, AND PRIVILEGE

I have argued that we all have been socialized in a social science box with White supremacy
roots. I have also argued that this box has ideologically biased our theoretical work, our

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Slipping Through the Front Door 427

research designs, and evaluation strategies in studies of people of color. I also argue that, to
get out of the influence of this box, we must go beyond the examination of the basic
influences of indigenous cultures in institutions and communities. Liberals and conservatives
join hands when it comes to their belief in the United States as a democratic, capitalistic
nation-state. At best, racialism is a dilemma, a contradiction, an individual state of mental
illness or undemocratic attitudes, beliefs, or behavior (Stanfield, 1994c). For most liberals
and conservatives who believe that racialism does exist, they assume that is best eradicated
through education and through other ways of exposing people to the positive histories and
social qualities of those of other so-called races. This assumption also underlies liberal
arguments for school and housing desegregation and for affirmative action.

THE NEED FOR STRUCTURAL APPROACHES TO RESEARCH

The liberal and conservative perspectives, which converge on the common ground of White
supremacy to fashion the contemporary conventions of social science research on people of
color, discourage empowerment epistemologies, theories, methods, and intervention evalu-
ation strategies. Mainstream social scientists have always tended to be averse to critical
structural explanations about and solutions to the oppressive plight of people of color and
their institutions, communities, and social and economic mobility. It has been, to provide an
example, more the norm to explain racialism and its impacts in psychological and in other
individualized terms, rather than to offer explanations with regard to structural frameworks
of the authority relations of White supremacy. It has been, to offer still another example,
much easier to explain the poverty and underachievement of children in poor urban or rural
schools in terms of social deficiency or cultural deficits, rather than in terms of the marginal
resources of their schools and the racialized politics of local, state, and federal governments.
It has been the academic custom to discuss the perpetual crisis of Black middle classes
in terms of personality and conspicuous consumption, with no careful study of the systematic
ways in which even most affluent Blacks are locked out of investment capitalism. The media
and politicians have conveniently placed the problematics of welfare on the shoulders of
undereducated and highly unemployable beneficiaries, rather than on the backs of those
sectors which refuse to redistribute resources to the poor and needy, such as medical and
agribusiness corporations, corporate slum landlords, and even local colleges and universities.
Even the recruitment and retention problems of persons of color in universities, corporations,
and elite private clubs are usually interpreted in individual, assimilationist terms. We rarely
are encouraged to pause and consider that diversifying curriculum and adding color here and
there on college campuses and other institutions does not transform segregated institutions
into empowered desegregated, integrated entities unless the diversity, unless the addition of
pepper in the salt, is done in the seats of power and privilege of the institution.

THE NEED FOR EMPOWERMENT

People are empowered when they have the power to contribute to the operations and
transformations of the institutions that employ them, the institutions in which they otherwise
participate, and the communities in which they live, work, and play. They are not empowered

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428 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EVALUATION, 20(3), 1999

when they are simply invited in to participate or work or play in an institution in which they
lack influential access to key decision-making roles and circles.
Explanations and solutions involving power and privilege have usually been dismissed
by mainstream social scientists as being radical. If people of color advance them, they are
labeled as militants. The idea of people of color being more than equal to those of European
descent, of their being in superior political, social, and economic positions, is antithetical to
both American liberal and conservative thinking about inequality. This in part explains the
waves of contemporary anti-Asian sentiment in America that are played out in the media, in
anti-Asian street violence, and in the anti-affirmative action movement in California. Simi-
larly, the widespread fear of Black power acquisition movements through the centuries has
been legendary. This fear by those in the dominant group of other people being in control of
their own lives, in seats of power and authority in larger society and on international levels,
is most unfortunate. It is especially unfortunate because it is more than apparent that the
assimilationist and reformist conventions of social science research are simply inadequate.
Yes, it is the case that assimilationist and reformist ideas conform to the norms of
academic research and to the dominant political culture, all of which allow us to keep the
grants and consultant fees coming in at a steady flow. But, because these conventional
perspectives ignore power- and privilege-based explanations and solutions to the issues and
problems of people of color, they cannot help but make social scientists less and less relevant
in the next century already here.

A SHIFT IN THE BALANCE OF POWER

As I stated in a different way early in this essay, the nation-state and the globe which
surround us are changing radically every minute. While American social scientists, specif-
ically those who claim expertise on people of color, and their academic institutions and
research agencies continue to ground their analyses in assimilationist and reformist perspec-
tives, there is a deepening gap between what we claim and the nature of the non-White world
over which we claim intellectual authority.
Much more importantly, we are also moving into a century in which the colored people
who used to be passive human subjects are now the major political and economic players in
local, national, and international affairs. How much longer are they going to tolerate social
sciences which portray their community of origins in pathological terms? How much longer
are people of color, elected to important political offices which control the purse strings of
institutions of higher learning and funding agencies, going to tolerate universities and
research institutes that continue to conduct research which degrades their communities of
origins?
There are already so-called third world countries, and indeed local non-White commu-
nities in the United States, refusing to allow researchers in their borders unless they are
stringently evaluated and monitored and leave something of substance in the community once
they leave. In addition, as institutions of higher learning in major urban areas continue to
colorize their student populations, non-White students, along with White students who
understand the implications of colorized changes around them, will increase the pressure on
faculty to diversify their curriculum, to revise their textbooks, and to hire more non-White
faculty and administrators as key decision-makers. Young scholars of color these days realize
their market value in an academic marketplace in desperate need of their presence and skills.

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A growing number of them refuse to accept appointments in universities where they cannot
express their unique ethnic points of view in grant proposals, in publications, and certainly
in faculty meetings.
These observations raise serious questions about ethics and relevance that are quite
relevant to the evaluation community. How ethical is it to view oneself as an authority in the
study of the racialized oppressed, when one has had marginal or no contact with or real
interest in the lives of the people involved? Should there be a way of insisting, per chance
in the guidelines of contracting agencies or in the code of ethics of the American Evaluation
Association, that evaluators need to have real-life experiences with those populations
involved in impact or outcomes evaluation studies?

THE PEOPLE OF COLOR CENTURY: CONCLUDING QUESTIONS AND

CONSIDERATIONS

Even though racialism in the twenty-first century will be much more complicated than in the
past four hundred years, that new century is already the century of People of Color. The
vestiges of Jim Crow apartheid and other forms of White supremacy can easily make one
skeptical about such claims, for these forces are after all the source of a number of
contemporary reactionary movements to turn back the clock. Nevertheless, it seems clear that
such vestiges of ages no longer here, and their supportive movements, will eventually totally
crumble. This seems to be a safe prediction in light of the colorization of demographics
locally, nationally, and internationally, and the increasing political and economic conditions
of people of color with the assistance of phenomenal globalized technological revolutions.
One hundred years from now, this country and this world will not look anything like they do
today in terms of the demographic compositions of institutional power and authority.
How do evaluators respond to the processes of change and transformation occurring
locally, nationally, and internationally? How do social scientists change the institutional
frameworks of research education and certification? How do they make these frameworks
much more concerned with approaching anti-racism issues more from the standpoints of
power and privilege, rather than from deficit models? How do concerned scholars revise
community outreach work so that it comes more from the standpoint of empowerment than
from paternalistic class or racial stereotyping? How do we make government agencies,
nonprofit organizations, other agencies that fund social research, evaluation firms, and
businesses that contract consulting social scientists much more forward-thinking, escaping
nineteenth-century notions of America and of people of color as “minorities”?
The answer to these questions is in part found in professional associations of social
scientists, such as those involved in evaluation research, examining the conventional epis-
temologies, theories, and methods of their crafts, and becoming much more concerned with
approaching people of color in their own terms. It also means commitment to developing a
new generation of social scientific reasoning. We need frameworks that are futuristic, rather
than being tied to a past that has already virtually slipped out the door behind us, leaving us
with conventional wisdoms that no longer fit the present and will have no or little meaning
in the decades to come.
With respect to the evaluation community, this charge is much more complicated than
mere gestures of empowerment. It is not enough, for example, to appoint more people of
color to powerful committees in the Association, or to appoint community people to tenure

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430 AMERICAN JOURNAL OF EVALUATION, 20(3), 1999

and promotion committees in universities. It is also much more complicated than being more
culturally sensitive about how we question people of color and code their ethnographic
experiences. It is not even about changing terminology. Saying “people of color” rather than
“minority” does not help the dehumanizing pains of inequality go away; it does not mean we
are moving towards a color-blind society, no matter how much we may desire for such
transformation.
What is being proposed here is that the world is dramatically changing in unprecedented
ways, and that these changes mandate that we create more ethnically and transnationally
inclusive research traditions and institutions of higher learning in the United States—if we
wish to be competitive. Given the longstanding infrastructure of White supremacy at the core
of American higher education and the social sciences, applied and pure, that imperative may
not be apparent to many in power. Without seeing the need for dramatic change, they
continue to be racialist or explicitly play the game of exclusion and exploitation of people of
color and women. But, with or without them, this country and world are changing. We are
no longer in the balkanized spaces of the twentieth century and earlier. It is to the benefit of
the racialized powerful in this land, as well as to those rising to increasing power and
authority, to understand that the people of color century now embracing all of us requires us
all to be willing to be inclusive rather than exclusive in our careers and personal lives. It
further requires us to fervently confess, confront, and conquer the racialism that, as a tragic
part of becoming human in America, prevents all of us from fully becoming the good,
dignified people we all strive to be professionally and privately.

NOTE

1. This is the revised version of a plenary session paper presented at the 1999 American
Evaluation Association in Chicago, Illinois. Special thanks to the Journal Editor Melvin Mark
and three blind peer reviewers.

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