This essay analyzes racialized exclusions in sociology through a focus on sociology’s deep epistemic structures. These structures dictate what counts as social scientific knowledge and who can produce it. A historical analysis of their emergence and persistence reveals their connections to empire. Due to sociology’s initial emergence within the culture of American imperialism, early sociological thought embedded the culture of empire’s exclusionary logics. Sociology’s epistemic structures were inextricably racialized, contributing to exclusionary modes of thought and practice along the lines of race, ethnicity, and social geography that persist into the present. Overcoming this racialized inequality requires problematizing and unsettling these epistemic structures by (1) provincializing the canon to create a transformative epistemic pluralism and (2) reconsidering common conceptions of what counts as “theory” in the first place.

本文通过关注社会学深层的认知结构来分析社会学中的种族隔离。这些结构决定了什么可以算作社会科学知识，以及谁可以产生它。对它们的出现和持久性的历史分析揭示了它们与帝国的联系。由于社会学在美帝国主义文化中的初步出现，早期的社会学思想将帝国的排斥逻辑文化嵌入其中。社会学的认识论结构不可避免地种族化，沿着种族，种族和社会地理学的观点，一直沿用至今，形成了排斥的思想和实践模式。