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STEPHEN STEINBERG teaches at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His latest book Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Distinguished Anti-Racist Scholarship.
Which deception is most dangerous? Whose recovery is more doubtful, that of him who does not see or of him who sees and still does not see? Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?
-- Søren Kierkegaard
IN THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE, PUBLISHED IN 1963, Betty Friedan came up with an ingenious formulation for the malaise she detected among middle-class suburban housewives. She called it "the problem that has no name." Implicit here is a critique of sociological practice. Except for a few pieces by those rare women in American sociology -- for example, Helen Hacker's 1951 article on "Women as a Minority Group" -- the categorical subordination of women was not even on the radar screen of the sociological establishment. "Sexism" had not yet entered the sociological lexicon. The idea that women were consigned to uphold the patriarchal family and the suburban dream was beyond the sociological imagination. The relegation of women to traditional roles was accepted by the male professoriat as an unquestioned fact of life.
Thanks to Daniel Horowitz's biography (Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique), we now know that Friedan was no ordinary housewife who arrived at her epiphany through experience and introspection. She was a seasoned political activist who had been schooled in radical thought at Smith College in the 1940s, worked as a labor journalist for two decades, and was steeped in the feminist thought and politics of the 1950s. By the 1960s Friedan was also a suburban housewife, but she brought a conceptual and ideological lens to this experience that allowed her to see clearly what was opaque to most others. Friedan knew better, but as a skillful rhetorician, she refracted social reality through the lens of the average suburban housewife when she wrote that this was a "problem that has no name."
Race in America presents quite another situation: a problem that has been misdiagnosed and mislabelled -- a problem with the wrong name. The term...