Teaching the Veil: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Classical Theory Courses

By documenting the erasure of W.E.B. Du Bois’s scientific contributions to sociology, Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied was a catalyst for scholars to rethink how we teach and understand social theory and a call to recognize the racialized origins of our discipline. How can we incorporate these insights into our teaching beyond a token addition of Du Bois to classical theory courses? Drawing on comments from anonymous student evaluations and completed assignments including essay exams, final papers, and end-of-year reflections from one classical theory course, the authors argue that teaching classical theory requires teaching about race, ethnicity, and gender and outline three pedagogical principles. First, we assert that it starts with the syllabus. Second, we demonstrate how incorporating theorists’ biographies situates them in their sociohistorical contexts. Finally, active learning observational assignments reveal how research is a scholarly conversation and demonstrate the enduring importance, and limitations, of classical theories and theorists. Together, these pedagogical tools show how the classical theory canon is racialized. By providing conceptual and logistical tools scholar-teachers can use to incorporate race, ethnicity, and gender in classical theory courses, we highlight how issues of race and gender should not be relegated to substantive courses. Instead, they are central to understanding and teaching the foundations of sociology.