GUEST: Aldon Morris is the Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University. His earlier books include

‘Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing For Change’.

The academic field of Sociology is defined as “the study of the development, structure, and functioning of human society,” and simply put, “the study of social problems.” Today the US has a rich and burgeoning field in academies across the country, studying myriad social problems through empirical measurement, research and statistics.

But it was not always so. There was a time when American scholars believed that humans and our social problems were determined by a set of so-called natural laws and social issues were simply explained by way of those natural laws. That approach to sociology buttressed existing ideologies around race and gender instead of questioning them. Then, came the African American scholar and scientist W. E. B. Du Bois, best known for his seminal work, The Souls of Black Folk. Although he is not given credit for his pioneering work on scientific sociology in the US, my guest Aldon Morris aims to change that with his new book.