From empirical hypothesis to moral commitment: how American sociology’s central framework became unchallengeable

Abstract

This paper traces how a specific assumption—that racial disparities indicate institutional discrimination—migrated from a legal principle established in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971) into the sociology’s foundational premise, reshaping how the discipline thinks about group identity, harm, justice, and knowledge. The paper shows how this assumption was transmitted through professional socialization, fused with a moral commitment that made challenging it professionally costly, and rendered unfalsifiable through three mechanisms: the victim-blaming charge, the complicity charge, and the absorption of alternative explanations. The paper is not an argument that institutional discrimination is a myth. Rather, it’s an argument that sociology no longer treats the question of what causes inequality as open and that has significant consequences.