In ‘The Soles of Black Folk: These Reeboks were Made for Runnin’ (from the White Man)’ John Jackson Jr. writes:
[t]heories often serve to displace and subsume the subjects about which they comment and contend. The wonderfully complicated world in which we live is relegated to the calm, cool and calculated lines of sociological manuscripts that tie up loose ends of analysis such that “theory” ignores the ways in which lived lives exist beyond the hypothesis, outstretch it, outlive it…surely, to theorize is often a homicidal act, a killing of the heterogeneity of the world, a knife thrust into the very heart of life (Jackson 1997, 178)
Just something to think about as we come to so-called ‘conclusions.’
Tags: Racism;
