Decolonizing Humanist Sociology: Towards a Revolutionary Humanist Sociology

Abstract

Both Humanist Sociology (HS) and decolonial theories center people, and humanity, in their consideration of the world. However, HS is rooted in Enlightenment rationalism that relied on dehumanizing the non-European world to justify colonization, enslavement, and exploitation. Instead, decolonial thought rejects liberal rationalism and positions the colonized as agentic knowledge producers towards their own resistance to and liberation from coloniality. This article articulates the connections between and divergences from decolonial thought, drawing specifically on decolonial scholars’ debates over the utility of humanism for their field. I interrogate the ways in which decolonial scholarship explicitly critiques humanism, and thus the theoretical foundations of Humanist Sociology, both in general and by drawing on decolonial scholars’ work. The article concludes with recent developments in Humanist Sociological thought and practice that offer possibilities for a revitalized Revolutionary Humanist Sociology centering the knowledge and actions of colonized groups, particularly through the work of scholars of color inside and outside of the US that begins to decolonize traditional Humanist Sociology.

Personal Reflexive Statement

I originally wrote this article during the summer of 2020, as the COVID pandemic and the uprisings following the Minneapolis Police’s murder of George Floyd unfolded. I revised the article during a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, and across historic Palestine, at the hands of the Israeli military, funded primarily with US tax dollars, alongside ICE kidnappings of residents and citizens in the US, particularly those who have spoken out on Palestine during the student intifada. Many sociologists and other academics have participated alongside their students on campuses seeking to bring attention to, first, the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality, and then, the genocide. In the case of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, in addition to supporting students, we have demanded our institutions divest from it, and have faced similar violent repression from academic institutions and the police they have called in, many times police departments which have trained with the Israeli military, as the Minneapolis Police Department which murdered George Floyd did. As many of us are aware, or have experienced ourselves, this violent repression has also included direct challenges to academic freedom and physical expulsion from campuses, of both students and faculty, echoing the scholasticide in Gaza that seeks to destroy not only every institution of higher learning and most primary and secondary schools, murder as many faculty and teachers as possible, alongside the destruction of all knowledge of Palestinians, their history, their culture, and their ability to survive as a people. Therefore, as we consider the revolutionary potential of humanist sociology, we must also consider the very real revolutions happening in the world around us, in opposition to multiple injustices in the US targeting our Palestinian, Black, Latinx, Arab, Asian, and Indigenous sisters and brothers and those doing similarly internationally, and what we can learn theoretically from these revolutions on the ground, past and present. Perhaps more importantly, we must consider how to elevate these on-the-ground thinkers into our own scholarship, and be guided by their actions inside and outside of the classroom, and in solidarity with our students and Palestinians in their ongoing intifada.

Decolonial Theory

Decolonial theory, ¹ interdisciplinary by definition, centers the voices of the colonized to explain the impacts of coloniality on their lives and subjectivities, the world system, and possibilities for resistance. Decolonial thinking both documents and is rooted in the emancipatory experiences and intersectional projects of colonized, subaltern subjects across the globe seeking to overthrow European colonization by implementing economies, politics, and social organization rooted in and conditioned by the epistemologies of the colonized (Cesaire [1955] 2000; Du Bois [1935] 1998; Fanon [1952] 2008, 1963, 1965; James [1938] 1989). These theories, therefore, center subaltern voices in understanding the impacts of interconnected systems of colonialism, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, all constitutive of racialized modernity. In doing so, it highlights the colonizeds’ rejection of colonial thinking and structures to epistemically and materially resist their social condition. Central to decolonial theory is the recognition of how racism and colonialism dehumanized and continues to dehumanize non-Europeans, placing them in the “zone of non-being” (Fanon [1952] 2008; Grosfoguel 2016). This ensured/s white supremacy and capitalist extraction and profit, whether through enslavement of Indigenous peoples, settler colonialism that stole land, or contemporary forms of neocolonialism operating through neoliberal capitalism that replaces the state with corporations to extract resources and profit from communities of color to maintain white supremacy and the co-constitutive racial hierarchy. To decolonize then, is to reject these Eurocentric epistemologies and structures, as the colonized seeking liberation have done since their forced and violent encounters with coloniality, modernity, and capitalism, through intersectional local, national, and international decolonial projects that envision global pluriversality as essential to overturning global capitalist liberal universalism.

Decolonial epistemologies begin with the colonizeds’ lives and worldviews that were violently disrupted by European settler colonists, with their conceptualization of colonialism, capitalism, and enslavement from the perspective of the colonized living under European colonial rule, whether as Indigenous or enslaved people, as constitutive of racialized modernity. Drawing on the experiences of the colonized, scholars such as Cesaire ([1955] 2000), Du Bois ([1935] 1998) Fanon ([1952] 2008, 1963). James ([1938] 1989), Nkrumah (1965, 1970), and Williams ([1970] 1984) document their successful resistance to oppressive European colonialism and enslaving in winning the Haitian Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, and independence (though not always sovereignty) in Africa and the Caribbean. This theorizing explicitly engaged and expanded Marxism, arguing that, as a European conception, it alone is insufficient to fully capture the extent to which racism has structured the modern world (Du Bois [1935] 1998 ² ; Fanon 1963; James [1938] 1989; Robinson 1983). Similarly, in 1965, Palestinian scholar Fayez Sayegh articulated the settler colonial aspects of Zionism in Palestine, positioning it alongside other instances of this phenomenon, and highlighting the violent dehumanization Indigenous Palestinians experience at the hands of their colonizers. Decolonial scholarship is therefore empirically and epistemically rooted in the Black, Latin American, Caribbean, and North African/East Asian diasporic traditions both interrupted and underpinned by centuries of enslavement, colonialism, and neocolonialism. Throughout these works, scholars documented Eurocentric colonial regimes’ capitalist designs subjugating and extracting labor and profit from Indigenous and enslaved African populations beginning in the late 15th century through settler colonialism and the new technologies of modernity embedded in these social formations.

Rejecting colonial conceptions of Europeans existing at the pinnacle of a global historical trajectory with all other groups and nations needing to “catch up,” these scholars repudiated Western historicism at the foundation of humanist thinking. This epistemology, they argued, justified coloniality implemented through capitalist modes of production imposing forced migration, labor camps, and family destruction for European benefit. Rather than benevolently ushering the colonized into history, civilization, and modernity, as humanists believed themselves to be doing, decolonial scholars reveal how, by enslaving and subjugating millions, colonialism interrupted and shattered (but never entirely destroyed) Indigenous knowledges and cultures, technologies, and civilizations for European subordination and exploitation (Du Bois [1896] 2007, [1935] 1998; Fanon 1963; Galeano [1971] 1997; James [1938] 1989; Sayegh 1965; see also Dunbar-Ortiz 2014; Estes 2019). This included colonial regimes’ imposition of novel, violent technologies to impose burgeoning local and global capitalist economies on Indigenous and other subjugated labor, which Fanon (1965) identified as essential forms of population management, capitalist production, and inscribed racial divisions in the colonial zone of nonbeing.

Second-wave decolonial scholars, of critical import for humanist sociologists given their explicit theorizing around it, built on earlier writings calling for a “new humanism” (Fanon 1963:7–8) to articulate Europeans’ discursive essentialization of racial differences concretizing their material coloniality of power (Quijano 2000). Mobilizing epistemic opposition to hegemonic Eurocentric colonial narratives, scholars engaged in delinking and epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2009) by articulating Eurocentric conceptions’ influence on the epistemology of nations perceived as being outside “the West” alongside opportunities for decoloniality through projects embedded in decolonial epistemologies. This scholarship rejected “histories” written by colonizers that, for centuries, presented the colonized as “pre-historic” (or outside history), barbaric, uncivilized savages who should look to Europe for religion, work ethic, language, technology, and knowledge. Instead, decolonial scholars described how academic “science,” rooted in Enlightenment Rationalism’s scientific mission of knowing and categorizing the world, erased actual histories, contending that they had none until European contact (Dussel 1977; Grosfoguel 2007; Mignolo 2007; Rodríguez Magda 2004). This represents an explicit rejection of how “modern liberalism defined the ‘human’. . . universalized its attributes to European man” by differentiating “populations in the colonies as less than human” (Lowe 2015:6), and positioned European man at the zenith of humanity’s rational, intellectual, and cultural development to justify and normalize exploitation inherent in capitalism and colonialism (Goldberg 2009; Grosfoguel 2011; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Melamed 2006; Mills 2015). ³

Early decolonial thinkers such as Steve Biko, Aimé Cesaire, Franz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Edward Said, “were fully aware that humanism had been used a legitimating ideology for racism and colonialism” but believed this was “a perverted form of humanism” (Pithouse 2003:110) since it both dehumanized the vast majority of the world and did so in service to modernity and colonialism. Said, who considered himself an anti-humanist humanist, writes, “there is nothing more consistent than a racist humanism, since the European has only been able to become a man through creating slaves and monsters” (Said 1993:193). It is also important to recognize that humanism itself, even if it takes into consideration all people, perpetuates a form of coloniality by positioning humans at the zenith of living beings, rather than equal to all living and non-living human kin, as articulated by Indigenous scholars (Betasamosake Simpson 2017; Coulthard 2014; Fenelon 2014; Kimmerer 2013; Norgaard 2019; The Red Nation 2021). This article will return to these scholars’ vision for a “new” “revolutionary” humanism given its utility for Humanist Sociology.

Rejecting Eurocentric humanism, decolonial thinkers analyzing Eurocentric modernity from the subalterns’ perspective recognized persistent colonial structures and ideologies in most now-independent, but still subjugated, nations. Scholarship in this era highlighted how neocolonial trade relationships, corporate interests, and global institutions, that is, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, replaced nation-state-based colonial systems through imposed programs of neoliberal restructuring and “development” (Escobar 2012; Galeano [1971] 1997). This global order perpetuated the exploitative colonial relationship between core and periphery (Wallerstein 1974, 1980). These scholars also expose how human rights paradigms rooted in humanist conceptions of individual man allow non-governmental “humanitarian” organizations to simultaneously ignore Indigenous knowledges to impose “better” European “solutions” to local problems and sublimate communitarian conceptions of social existence to retrench Eurocentric neoliberal individualism (Esteva and Prakash 1998; Maldonado-Torres 2017).

Finally, the third wave of decolonial thinking features contemporary interdisciplinary scholars such as Anzaldúa (1987), Byrd (2011), Coulthard (2014), Fenelon (2014), Gilroy (1993), Grosfoguel (2007, 2011), Hall (1993, 2017), and his Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, Hira (2012), Magubane (2004), Mills (2015), Maldonado-Torres (2007, 2016), Mignolo (1995, 2000, 2011), The Red Nation (2021), Rodney ([1972] 2011), Salaita (2016), Simpson (2014), and Wynter (2003). The majority of these scholars articulate, “pluriversalism” as an alternative to contemporary liberal universalism embedded in neoliberal capitalist arrangements to envision a world absent of both nation-state-based colonialism and Western-dominated corporate and institution-based neocoloniality. These scholars, building on their predecessors, challenged Eurocentric knowledge production by centering, instead, epistemologies of the colonized and recognized the epistemic violence committed by dominant power structures in suppressing or excluding subaltern narratives (Chakrabarty 2008; Fanon [1952] 2008, 1963; Freire [1968] 2000; Grosfoguel 2008; Kanafani [1967] 2022; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mignolo 2000; Said 1979, 1993; Sandoval 2000; Spivak 1988), particularly that of gender in the largely masculinized decolonial tradition and global heteropatriarchy (Lugones 2007, 2010). This wave also closely aligns with the concurrent development of Critical Race Theory centering the role of the law and the legal system in perpetuating white supremacy (cf. Bell 1992; Crenshaw et al. 1995; Delgado and Stefancic 2001; Harris 1993).

Decolonial scholars advocate border thinking (engaging subaltern and colonized epistemologies), and pluriversality to rescue and employ narratives and histories intentionally suppressed precisely because they challenge the universal project of Eurocentric modernity/coloniality (Anzaldúa 1987; Dussel 1977; Grosfoguel 2007, 2011; Mignolo 2000, 2008; Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006; Rodríguez Magda 2004). Pluriversality recognizes multiple understandings, worldviews, and possibilities of equality rooted in the cultures and histories of the colonized. It therefore rejects justice based on Eurocentric conceptions of the “universal” that often replicate existing structures of inequality and fail to account for varied conceptions of freedom grounded in communities’ specific histories, cultures, knowledges, and worldviews (Grosfoguel 2011; Mignolo 2000). These authors also substantiated the essential links between coloniality and modernity, their constitutive elements of technology, violent social management of colonized populations for profit extraction for white/European benefit, and the subsequent civilizational destruction during state-, corporation-, and NGO-based colonialism, all of which continued to be rooted in dehumanizing Eurocentric Enlightenment rationalist humanist conceptions of non-Europeans.

Contemporary decolonial scholarship therefore rests on centuries of decolonial epistemologies centering the colonizeds’ understandings of their pre-colonial and colonial experiences to offer decolonial alternatives rooted in resistance to ongoing global coloniality that dehumanizes, exploits, and attempts to annihilate Black, Indigenous, and other people of color for Eurocentric profit. A robust engagement with insight from this now-centuries’ old tradition would deeply benefit Humanist Sociologists with scholarly interests in subaltern populations’ subjectivities, experiences, and resistance.

A Decolonial Critique of Early Humanist Sociological Theorizing

Vigorous debates around humanism’s Eurocentric roots in the last 50 years, including during the nascent period of HS, has resulted in humanism becoming “deeply unfashionable idea in the academy” (Pithouse 2003:108). ⁴ However, HS has never reckoned theoretically with the racist origins of its foundational humanist literature, nor has it attended to these debates among non-white humanists described above, with the exception of one book review of Lee’s foundational Towards Humanist Sociology (Szymanski 1974). By overlooking decolonial theories and movements, Humanist Sociologists, committed to social justice and transformative change, both failed to engage, and thereby erased, the revolutionary epistemologies and praxes of concurrent national and international movements (such as the Black, Chicano, and Indigenous power and dozens of South American, Caribbean, and African independence movements), unfolding simultaneously with its development. What follows is a brief critique of early HS theorizing, drawing on decolonial theories, particularly those addressing humanism.

As described earlier, decolonial thought critiques Western universities as sites of colonial thinking responsible for the imposition of hierarchies of humanity that sublimates “non-scientific” knowledges of the colonized as non-rational and therefore invalid. Universities, as colonial structures, and thus a racialized organization (Ray 2019), cannot be completely decolonized without being destroyed, or at least completely restructured and rebuilt from the ground up, eradicating silo-ed disciplines, reconsidering the need for pedigreed degrees (or degrees at all) for faculty and administration, and unbound to students’ financial ability to attend. Similarly, decoloniality calls for the end of imposed, and often hierarchical, categories, such as academic disciplines, arguing that the world cannot be separated into discrete disciplines. ⁵ While this decolonized future may be a long way off, much can be gained from considering how integrating decolonial thinking into existing disciplines, particularly activist academic organizations and subdisciplines, has the potential to guide scholars seeking liberation in solidarity with oppressed and colonized communities across the globe.

By deeply engaging decolonial thinkers, HS could reinvigorate itself, make itself more relevant (something in which humanist sociologists appear deeply interested both historically and today), and accomplish the goals it sets out for itself. To do this, HS must attend to underlying problems in early theorizing that still shapes the subfield, through its language of “aiding” “others,” its non-engagement with scholars of color in the US or outside it, and its subsequent early neglect of scholarship addressing the ways in which racial capitalism, coloniality, and modernity all shape contemporary inequalities. If potential members avoid the Association for Humanist Sociology (AHS) due to “humanist” in its name, explicitly and articulating and rejecting these epistemic foundations could reverse this.

As described elsewhere in these special issues, Humanist Sociology maintains three critical differences from mainstream sociology. First, it rejects “objective” or “value-neutral” sociology (A. M. Lee 1973, 1986). Second, it emphasizes human agency, “the importance of understanding and empathizing with people who are different” (Doane 2017:325), and rejects the dehumanization appearing in existing social science (Doane 2000, 2017; A. M. Lee 1973, 1978). Finally, it is “sociology committed to the service of humanity” (Doane 2017:324). In doing so, Humanist Sociology seeks to be “liberating, activist, emergent” (Ballard 2002:42) and to critique and reject elitism within mainstream sociological thinking and practice, including that of professional academic organizations.

Humanist sociologists, even though they articulated their vision concurrently with decolonial scholars, particularly the second wave, did not extensively engage with decolonial thought, or any non-Eurocentric theorization from non-white scholars, in the U.S. or abroad. Although the colonized recognized the links between capitalism, colonialism, and racism centuries ago, Humanist Sociologists, in overlooking these works, neglect the role of capitalism in shaping globalized systemic racism, and resultant material racial inequalities and violences within a global economic system. Perhaps resulting from this failure to engage non-white non-Eurocentric thinkers, early HS theorizing denied oppressed, colonized, and the subaltern agency, finding them often exoticized and pathologized, with their knowledges delegitimized or excluded altogether. In this thinking, the colonized and oppressed are positioned as needing “aid” from humanist sociologists, their epistemic superiors and (white) saviors, as they “serve humanity.” Perhaps unintentionally, Humanist Sociology’s theoretical foundations nevertheless reproduce white paternalism denying subaltern actors’ agency in shaping their own social world and implying the need for elite white academic intervention without input from or solidarity with those it purports to align. Below, I engage in a decolonial critique of this scholarship before offering alternatives rooted in decolonial thinkers’ “new” and “revolutionary” humanism alongside material efforts already enacting this within AHS.

Humanist Sociology’s historical non-engagement with scholars of color publishing simultaneously—particularly those addressing structural causes of racism linked to capitalism—positions white professional sociologists as epistemically superior to non-white scholars and activists engaging with social justice in practice. As a result, HS’s core mission of “sociology for humanity” (emphasis added) replicates the “about them but without them” model (Nimako 2012) existing within the academy and reifies colonialist thinking around subaltern peoples, knowledges, and worldviews. Decolonial scholars, arguing against the Western rational enlightenment tradition, explicitly critique universities as centers of scientific colonialism (Grosfoguel 2011; Hira 2012; Mignolo 1995; Said 1979) and offer critically important models for humanist sociologists seeking to engage in liberatory scholarship.

Although rejecting “elite sociology,” (A. M. Lee 1973, 1986) there is little in the early HS writings centering the understandings of the “non-elite.” This is particularly important given humanism’s positioning of subaltern and colonized peoples as lacking the intellectual capacity of Europeans and in need of civilizing education and white guidance to develop toward Eurocentric conceptions of what constitutes an advanced and mature society. The absence of scholars of color in foundational HS literature is striking given the flourishing of decolonial scholarship and activism, including anti-colonial independence projects across the globe, occurring before or simultaneously with the early years of AHS. Although excoriating sociology’s tendency toward dehumanization, A. M. Lee’s (1973, 1986) early volumes did not actively humanize these populations, cultures, or knowledges by positioning them as equal and taking their potential contributions to Humanist Sociology seriously. Similarly, ignoring contemporary scholars of color such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Cedric Robinson, Patricia Hill Collins, and Angela Y. Davis, likely perpetuated the marginalization of scholars of color within sociology even as HS claimed to do the opposite. Finally, without decolonial conceptions of liberation and emancipation from racial capitalism and coloniality, Humanist Sociologists’ “solutions” often reflected pervasive ideologies of assimilation and integration rather than radical de- and re-constructions so central to decoloniality.

Of particular note is the erasure of W. E. B. Du Bois, regularly subject to epistemic apartheid within sociology, but who embodied the decolonial mandate over a century ago (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Morris 2015; Rabaka 2010; Weiner 2018; Wright 2016). Decrying “car window” sociology Du Bois ([1903] 1995:179) that white scholars deployed to generalize about Black life with only a cursory glance, Du Bois mobilized an empirical program devoted to understanding and theorizing colonized people’s lives from their own perspectives. Challenging ivory tower armchair scholarship, he also created and disseminated sociological findings to the public through myriad forms, such as graphic data visualizations, poetry, short stories, and national popular and mainstream media of both Black and white presses (Wright 2016).

Decolonial projects outside the academy would have represented fruitful places for early Humanist Sociologists to consider. In addition to those described earlier, such as the Haitian Revolution, anti-colonial movements across Africa, Asia, South America, and in the Caribbean, The Combahee River Collective (1974–1980) issued their statement in 1977 addressing phenomena—racism, sexism, capitalism—that Humanist Sociologists explicitly oppose. Yet their masterful document appears nowhere in early HS writings. Similarly, in describing the 1960s’ impact on the discipline, discussion of the [white] counterculture protesting the Vietnam War and their subsequent creation of alternative social forms (Du Bois and Wright 2012:16–17) does not extend to, for example, the deep epistemic and material work groups such as the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement engaged in both conceptualize their colonized position and act to change it. Finally, while there are tangential references to Black–white racism in this early literature, there is no mention of other racial groups, in the US or abroad, how different racisms impact these groups, or why the knowledges, cultures, and histories of these groups matter for either Sociology or the US as a whole.

This failure to engage deeply with either historic and contemporary decolonial thinkers finds Humanist Sociology unable to account for structural explanations of racism and its links to capitalism, even though many early humanist sociologists engaged Marxism as a theoretical paradigm. Humanist Sociologists relying on these Eurocentric notions rooted in Enlightenment rationalism took for granted capitalism and coloniality and lacked the theoretical tools necessary to consider how these larger, international forces impact communities they study and write about. Instead, early Humanist Sociologists explained racism as psychological, de-linked from structural racism, particularly racial capitalism that articulates the ways in which a global racial color line was developed during modernity to ensure profit (cf. Du Bois [1935] 1998, [1939] 2004, [1945] 2007; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Quijano 2000; Robinson 1983). While early HS is clearly Marxist in its orientation (cf. Katz Fishman and Benello [1986] and early issues of Humanity and Society ⁶ ), it largely overlooks, for example, inequalities between Black and white workers and how racial capitalism, specifically, perpetuates structural inequalities in the US (and internationally).

While both HS and decolonial theory seek to center people, particularly those who have been historically dehumanized, they diverge considerably in their theorization. Decolonial scholars explicitly critique the humanist tradition that divided the world between colonizers and those exploited through colonization and recognized agency among the colonized regarding their own condition and resistance in subverting and/or removing these structures. Therefore, the use of the term, “other,” alongside “aid” and “help” and “for” throughout HS’s foundational work (cf. A. M. Lee 1973, 1986) finds it perpetuating colonial conceptions of oppressed peoples, particularly non-whites, in need of interventions from elite sociologists even as it argues that it explicitly rejects this. This language assumes an elite position of sociology (and academics in general) even as it rejects this elitism. Conceptualizing a sub-discipline as doing something “for” “others,” rather than in solidarity with equally rational and agentic people perpetuates epistemic inequalities between sociologists and non-scholars and ignores the reality of “others” (i.e. non-whites) within sociology addressing oppression in their scholarship and activism, thereby foreclosing the possibility of solidarity within and outside of academia. Finally, advocating a Western model of aid reliant upon humanist conceptions of “others” as in need of Western intervention using Western concepts, understandings, and technologies, perpetuates colonial relationships and entrench material differences while simultaneously destroying subaltern cultures.

Centering subaltern knowledges to understand the role of humans in the natural world, how modern inequality is structured, the specific needs of the oppressed, and accountability to them, in considering how to resist these structures is essential to decolonial scholars. Early HS, however, re-entrenches the privileged position of elite academics and assumes their knowledge to be supreme. A. M. Lee (1978) argues for a “Sociology for the service of humanity” by studying how “people can protect themselves from undesirable manipulation by those in positions of power, of how to achieve more livable homes and communities, of constructive alternatives to family, civil, and international violence” (p. 36). With few exceptions (cf. Dolgon and Chayko 2010), recent HS theorizing addresses broad concepts of stratification, inequality, and social change without addressing their grounding in systemic racial capitalism or consideration of the oppresseds’ response to it (Du Bois and Wright 2002; Scimecca 1995). For example, Du Bois and Wright (2002) reaffirm that HS is “grounded in attention to creating a society that meets human needs” (p. 7) and “creating social resources individual actors can use in their lives” (p. 25). Human needs, however, are not universal and assuming them to be such is a hallmark of liberal humanism, as is the hegemonic belief that oppressed groups “need” assistance in interpreting or fulfilling their needs. Decolonial scholars insist on the agency of those experiencing oppression to articulate their own interpretations of their needs and what is inhibiting them from reaching them. Decolonial scholars also document colonized peoples’ agency in resisting colonial racist social systems for centuries, including kidnapping in Africa, settler colonialism, genocide, enslavement, and myriad other ways that capitalism and colonialism to extract resources from their land, labor, and communities. Put simply, the colonized do not need Humanist Sociologists to tell them what they need and assuming this to be the case perpetuates colonial conceptions that find the oppressed subjected to research offering “solutions” that are “about them but without them” (Nimako 2012) to further entrench inequalities and Eurocentric hegemony, including that which places humans at the pinnacle of the natural world, rather than co-existing alongside and within it (Betasamosake Simpson 2017; Kimmerer 2013).

Fanon believed that the “intellectual must take a side with the people” by rejecting historicism that places Europeans at the pinnacle of “civilization” (Pithouse 2003:120). For Humanist Sociologists who believe similarly, this also means centering the colonized and oppressed in their own liberation, for example recognizing how the formerly enslaved brought about Emancipation, rather than viewing this as a benevolent gift enacted by whites. This would shift HS thinking about Sociology “for” “others” to one that recognizes the subaltern’s agency in identifying and accomplishing Humanist Sociologists’ goals.

Decolonizing Humanist Sociology, Theorizing Revolutionary Humanist Sociology

Decolonial scholars offer us important non- and anti-Eurocentric conceptions of what it means to truly reject dehumanization of colonized and oppressed peoples, center their knowledges in understanding the role of humanity alongside and within the natural world, intertwined colonialism, capitalism, and racism perpetuate their oppression and global coloniality, and build toward a decolonial future. Given Humanist Sociology’s rejection of dehumanization and demands that sociologists take a position alongside the marginalized in contemporary struggles, aligning these two bodies of work offers the possibility of epistemic and material solidarity with decolonial scholars and movements, nationally and internationally. Indeed, a close look at AHS’s actions, reveals this already to be in motion. Therefore, the remainder of this article addresses recent evidence of this, alongside humanist calls for a Revolutionary Humanism to propose a Revolutionary Humanist Sociology, albeit one that decenters humans as the zenith of the species as Indigenous scholars advocate (Betasamosake Simpson 2017; Kimmerer 2013; Norgaard 2019; The Red Nation 2021).

Decolonial scholars, themselves embedded in the Western academy, recognized the role of humanism in dehumanizing colonized peoples in modernity’s service to colonialism, and called for a “new,” “true,” “planetary” humanism that rejected the slavery, colonialism, and violence bound up in Eurocentric humanism’s denial of humanity to the colonized (Fanon [1952] 2008; Gilroy 2000; C. J. Lee 2013; Maldonado-Torres 2017; Pithouse 2003). ⁷ Revolutionary humanism is “liberated from the constraints of Western imperialism and its political, intellectual, and ontological legacies” and “unburdened by preceding hierarchies of racial, cultural, economic, and political discrimination” (Hardt and Negri 2017; C. J. Lee 2013:178 and 196; Löwy 2007; Pithouse 2003). This allows scholars to expand humanist conceptions positing Europeans as universal man to all of humanity and, also, the European canon to include scholars in the global periphery, particularly the Global South (Biko [1996] 2002; Cesaire [1955] 2000; Deane 2019; Said 1993). ⁸ In doing so, “perhaps, as Edward Said suggested, we can learn from the implementation of humanist universalism in practice, and insist on its potential to combat racism. . . without necessarily abandoning all the precepts of humanism” and, as Fanon suggested, places “the anticolonial struggle in the context, not only of national liberation, but of human liberation” (Lester 2012:144, emphasis in original; Alessandrini 2005:439; Said 2004). Following this, we might also consider how dethroning human beings from their position of privilege among all living species would enable a revolutionary reconception of the planetary world with humans as simply one among many living and non-living kin.

Revolutionary humanism appears to be far closer to that which is actively practiced by AHS members. Indeed, as early as 1981, the conference theme addressed “Emancipatory Political Practice” (Ballard 2002:46) and the literature in which AHS is rooted often belies its members’ radicalism in scholarship and practice. Past presidents, active members, and articles published in the organization’s journal, Humanity and Society, address links between capitalism and racism (though not as much colonialism; Adair 2015, Doane 2000, 2017; Embrick and Henricks 2014). Beginning in the late 1980s, and increasing significantly into early 2000s, articles published in Humanity and Society expand on Marxism to integrate decolonial scholars addressing racism as a critical constituent aspect of capitalism, including its links to slavery and neo-colonialism, modernity, and gender within subaltern studies, and Indigenous resistance, largely outside the US or in US colonies (see, for example, Davids 1994; Dello Buono 1991; McKelvey 1988; Michalowski 1993; Powell Rader 1993; Tyler 1994; Warder 1995).

More recent Humanist Sociologists have argued that they must engage in public debate on these critically important issues, change the discourse within sociology that minimizes and therefore perpetuates racism to “build structures of liberation in order to confront structures of oppression” through projects that theoretically and methodologically center the marginalized (Doane 2000:233–34). AHS has done this by supporting resolutions addressing the release of political prisoner and Black Panther Alfred Woodfox in 2014. In the same year, it became the first academic sociology organization and only the second academic organization in the US to sign onto the BDS call in support of Palestinian liberation (AHS n.d.). This is significant, particularly given how organizations and scholars doing so have faced serious retribution in their careers and personal lives due to the “Palestine exception” when it comes to social justice (Barghouti 2011; Hill and Plitnick 2021; Maira 2018; Salaita 2015; Williams and Embrick 2020). AHS members have also restructured the conference format, intentionally siting these in affordable locations with long traditions of activism, engaging local activists at the conferences, and diverting financial and other resources into these communities. Humanist Sociologists interested in a revolutionary humanism therefore have the foundations to build toward a sociology that holistically engages “multiple perceptions, narratives, understandings, cultures, and histories of colonized peoples around the globe, the role of persistent coloniality in the United States and internationally, international implications of U.S.-based coloniality vis-à-vis global colonial structures, and pluriversal epistemologies. This must include decolonial ways of thinking and knowing, in relation to and apart from extant structures of White supremacy, particularly conceptions of White supremacy by the colonized, and resistance to coloniality through movements confronting intertwined mechanisms of racial capitalism” (Weiner 2018:12).

Conclusion

Calls from across sociology, particularly since the murder of Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and Sandra Bland, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the student intifada seeking an end to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza (and academic complicity), including recent Presidential Addresses by Bonilla-Silva (2019), Romero (2020), and Morris (2015) respectively, have argued that sociological scholarship must be centered on social justice and accountable to the communities in which they site their research, as critical race scholars have long demanded (cf. Guinier and Torres 2002, also Sneed et al. 2019). Similarly, multiple recent sociologists articulating broader coloniality within the discipline of sociology offer critically important alternatives to these phenomena, particularly advocacy of scholarship rooted in the Global South (Alatas 2006; Alatas and Sinha 2017; Al-Hardan 2018, 2022; Go 2016; Steinmetz 2013).

The recent proliferation of scholarship utilizing Du Boisian methods, explicitly engaging decolonial thinkers, addressing the role of racial capitalism and settler colonialism in a variety of institutions, structures, and experiences of colonized and oppressed peoples in the US and abroad, and links between white supremacy, racial capitalism, and white ideologies (Al-Hardan 2013; Beaman 2018; Beardall 2024; Bloom 2015; Bracey 2015; Correa and Thomas 2019; Fleming 2018; Ghaneyem and Beardall 2024; Henricks and Harvey 2015; Hunter 2018; Hunter and Robinson 2018; Laster Pirtle 2019; Martinez-Cola 2019; Matlon 2015; Moore and Bell 2017; Mueller 2020; Pulido 2016; Ray et al. 2017; Seamster 2018; Seamster and Purifoy 2020; Selod 2018; Thomas 2020; Weiner 2024) suggests the possibility for a renewed interest in humanist sociology and a simultaneous expansion of AHS membership.

The political project of Humanist Sociology must eschew sociology’s whiteness, positioning white knowledge and methods as superior to non-white, non-“Western” methods that perpetuates epistemic apartheid within the discipline (cf. Ladner 1998; McKee 1993; Romero 2020; Staples 1976; Treitler 2019; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). This would allow Humanist Sociology, rooted in Marxism and already committed to subaltern agency and transformative social change, to more fully address international and interdisciplinary scholarship broadening critiques of US imperialism, settler colonialism, racial capitalism and resultant epistemological and material inequalities, in the US and abroad. This is an opportune moment for Humanist Sociologists to highlight the work they’ve done in decolonizing sociology by acknowledging the position of the US in the global context of racial capitalism, coloniality, and imperialism, centering subaltern subjectivities, explicitly address how humanism has perpetuated epistemic and material inequalities, and then call for a revolutionary humanism centered on the knowledges, experiences, and resistances of the colonized.

Scholarly revolutionary humanism, for it to truly attend to decoloniality, must be committed to the abolition of coloniality. Revolutionary humanist sociology, by necessity comparative and international (“planetary” in Fanon’s words), has significant potential for enhancing sociologists’ theoretical leverage when considering myriad inequalities. For example, a decolonial perspective would allow far deeper theoretical engagement with anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist resistance exemplified by the Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Standing Rock anti-Dakota Access Pipeline, and student intifada movements. However, social movement scholars represent only one subdivision of sociology that would benefit from a revolutionary humanism embedded in decolonial thinking. Deep theoretical engagement with longstanding Indigenous resistance to centuries of apocalyptic settler coloniality from across the Global South, from Bolivia to Palestine to South Africa, is essential to understanding contemporary racial inequalities in, for example, health, education, and mass incarceration in the United States. A Revolutionary Humanist Sociology centering decolonial scholarship and praxis, would therefore not only enhance the social action and justice orientation of humanist sociology’s founders, but chart a path for all sociologists committed to inextricably linked liberatory and emancipatory scholarship and praxis.