Talcott Parsons on Black Citizenship

Ethnonarcissists of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Last time we looked at the harsh paternalism of Edward Banfield’s model of assimilation, which openly speculated upon the salutary effects of elite prejudice toward high-time preference laboring classes.

Today we’re going to look at one of the most important figures in sociology, Talcott Parsons, and consider the emergence of a nascent vicarious group narcissism among old stock WASPs.

A LITTLE BACKSTORY

Skip this if you’re tired of CIA conspiracy theories.

Tracing his descent from some of the oldest New England families, Parsons grew up in a Congregationalist milieu with ties to the Social Gospel Movement. He became an immense figure in the field of classical sociology and dominated Ivy league social science for several years. Even today his influence is felt in computational models of social behavior and evolutionary psychology.

Parsons also had interesting connections to the American foreign policy establishment throughout his career. Prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Parsons participated in and oversaw a committee to study Japan, which included members of the O.S.S., the predecessor to the CIA.[i] The O.S.S. eventually offered Parsons a job in Europe in 1944, possibly because of his outspoken agitation against the rise of National Socialism in Germany, but Parsons declined.[ii] After the war, Parsons would come under fire for recommending ex-Nazis (top-secret dossiers on whom he accessed) for positions at Harvard.[iii]

Devotees of Anglo-Freemason-Nazi conspiracy theories can stop reading here to preserve their convictions.  Devotees of Anglo-Jew-Communist and Puritan-Progressivism conspiracy theories can continue reading to preserve theirs.

More interesting is that, in 1952, Parsons was placed under surveillance by the FBI for, among other reasons, defending a towering figure of our civil religion, Robert Bellah (then a student of Parsons’s) against accusations of communist sympathizing. We’ve already seen Bellah in the survey of our civil religion, and he will occupy a subsequent chapter in our survey of vicarious group narcissism.

Interestingly, the FBI’s informant noted that Parsons’s various research centers had been performing classified research on behalf of the federal government. Undoubtedly, Hoover was alarmed to have a potential communist sympathizer this close to the antechambers of power. The FBI file was nevertheless closed in 1955 after Parsons submitted a statement, but Parsons continued to be the subject of investigations into the 1960s, when he published the article reviewed in the next section.

Full Citizenship for the American Negro

It’s impossible to summarize Parsons’s work here but I’ll try to flesh out some of the elements of his systems theory essential to his 1965 article “Full Citizenship for the American Negro?”, which I intend to use as an example of one kind of vicarious group narcissism.[iv]

Parsons agreed with Weber and similar classical sociologists that religion was a significant factor in the development of social behavior. He was convinced like many of the thinkers we’ll consider in the future that there was an essential connection between secularized Protestant Christianity and the modern world, specifically the turns toward individualism, industrialism and political pluralism characteristic of the 19th and 20th centuries.[v] But he also stressed, consistent with sociologists like Marx, that non-ideological and non-moral forces like economic and technological innovation shaped the nature of contemporary social behavior and ideas.

For Parsons, the protestant respect for denominations, coupled with the effects of industry on the division of labor, migration on the demographics of the country, and the Enlightenment-derived American revolution on institutional attitudes toward liberty, diminished the importance of denominational beliefs themselves and created the conditions for the emergence of “common values” among protestants, Catholics, and Jews.

Through these various processes, and with protestant inclusivity undergirding common values, individuals are “differentiated” from their ancestral groups and religions, politics and law are “differentiated” from the church and rabbi, groups are “differentiated” from specific professions and classes, and so on. Modernity is therefore a process of “differentiation” within and away from archaic social structures.[vi]

Although Parsons made efforts to neutralize and systematize his theory, adopting “historicist” and “relativist” arguments (to use the language of Straussians), he was attacked by neo-Marxists as ethnocentric.[vii] Parsons maintained that the society into which groups assimilated in the modern world was not American but rather a “societal community”, which he defined as an “aspect of the total society as a system, which forms a Gemeinschaft, which is the focus of solidarity or mutual loyalty of its members, and which constitutes the consensual base underlying its political integration.”[viii]

His evolutionary theory of American history resembles something like the following. At its founding, America’s societal community was comprised of a core of Anglo-Saxons with a few negligible groups like Jews and Catholics. The “Negro” community, though substantial in number, was of course excluded from the societal community. Because of the factors discussed above, the nascent American societal community underwent a series of differentiations eroding the power of parochialism through the empowerment of the federal government, and empowering individuals through the Bill of Rights both before and after the Civil War.[ix] This meant that America was trending away from “ascriptive” identities and roles (roles and identities that you have by virtue of birth) toward “achievement”-based identities and roles.[x] These developments in turn prepared America for the inclusion of large European immigrant classes that would soon flood its shores.

Thus, the constitution of our societal community is a living one which is ever evolving through differentiation and inclusion.[xi]

Inclusion, not Assimilation

By 1965, some WASPs like Parsons were hesitantly coming to terms with the reality that not everyone was going to assimilate and become a WASP. Although there were qualified holdouts like the time preference-focused Banfield discussed above, gone was the optimism that animated Henry Ford’s melting pot ceremonies. For this reason, Parsons introduced the concept of “inclusion” to replace “assimilation”, whereby the process of differentiation caused the inclusion of groups, which nonetheless retained some elements of their “identity” (his term).[xii]

An included group did not have to become as similar as possible to Anglo-Saxons, Parsons stresses, to enjoy equal civil rights and relatively equal social standing with the rest of America, provided that they participate in a sufficient amount of different roles within our societal community (e.g., in different professions, industries, leisure groups, etc.)[xiii]

Parsons offers a temporal formula for including a group in the societal community. A group to be included goes through a sequence of first obtaining equal civil rights (rights to property, due process, etc.), then equal political rights (the franchise and representation in government), and then social emancipation (the allocation of resources necessary to exercise the other rights). The New Deal provided some aspects of social emancipation in America by distributing financial assistance, but by “resources” Parsons means additional factors like individual capacities necessary to make use of civil and political rights, such as education, intelligence, and self-esteem.

Catholics and Jews

To analyze Negro inclusion, Parsons first provides a survey of the history of Catholic and Jewish inclusion in our societal community. He notes that in contrast to the Negro, each white ethnic group immediately enjoyed full civil and political rights and only needed to secure social emancipation.

He surveys some of the reasons that Jews and Catholics were initially resisted by heritage Americans, as well as some of the reasons that they were ultimately included. One reason that they were included is that the “ascriptive” economic status of Eastern European Jews and Catholic peasants wasn’t present in America. This meant that Jews and Catholics weren’t isolated as moneylenders or peasants in America, and thus they played more roles in our economy and came to be accepted socially.

An obstacle to their inclusion was in each case religious orthodoxy. Such orthodoxy caused other Americans to view Jews as clannish and foreign, and Catholics as disloyal and subversive (because of their commitment to the Church). However, Jews eventually came to embrace American society to such an extent that their religion effectively became a denomination in the protestant sense. A Jew could become a “good citizen, neighbor, business competitor, and occupational associate of the Protestant with neither relinquishing his religious identity.”  Parsons boasts that, “[s]ocially, American Jews have been included very fully, but have by no means been assimilated.”[xiv]

Catholic inclusion was less one-sided than Jewish inclusion, in the sense that they didn’t simply have to develop the capacities to make full use of their rights. The Catholics needed some benevolent nudging. Parsons notes that Catholic political machines like Tammany Hall first had to be destroyed before Catholics could achieve full inclusion, but points to the election of John F. Kennedy as proof of their acceptance. Indeed, Parsons treats the inclusion of each group as more or less complete (excepting “extreme orthodox” Jews, who are content with a self-imposed separate-but-equal formula).[xv]

It's clear today that Parsons was a bit premature in this conclusion, as can be seen in the rise of secular Jewish ethnonarcissism tied to the Holocaust and Israel, and with the attitudes of heritage Americans toward Catholics in, for example, Gore Vidal’s 2001 article on the Oklahoma City bombing, which suggested a conspiracy by the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei in the FBI and on the Supreme Court.[xvi] Parsons’s unwarranted optimism here dovetails with his image of a halcyon liberal America that flourished prior to the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which he maligns as “egregiously discriminatory” and in need of overturning.[xvii]

The Negro

While Catholics and Jews began as urban underclasses in America, they rapidly diffused into all aspects of society and assumed countless of its plural roles. The Negro’s situation was similar only to the extent that they comprised an urban underclass. Unlike Jews and Catholics, the Negro had to first secure civil and political rights before seeking social emancipation.

Parsons notes that even though these rights were recently achieved through the Supreme Court and legislation, the Negro was still caught up in a vicious cycle at the bottom preventing him from developing or accessing the capacities necessary to make full use of the rights. The absence of total social emancipation for the Negro meant that he was denied the opportunity to make valuable contributions to the societal community.[xviii]

Consistent with his evolutionary theory, Negro social emancipation was first sought by Parsons’s father’s own Social Gospel movement through legal efforts to address de facto discrimination, and then through the distributive efforts of the New Deal.[xix] The third phase, according to Parsons, consists in efforts to develop other capacities for Negroes like mental health (self-esteem), family cohesion, and group solidarity, all of which Jews and Catholics already possessed when they arrived (according to Parsons).

But this situation cannot be remedied merely through external efforts alone, Parsons contends. The Negro must assert himself by demanding that the country adhere to the common values it supposedly espouses, because the “ultimate social grounding of the demand for inclusion lies in commitment to the values which legitimize it.”[xx] In the context of contemporary American extremism, this means that there is a difference between pointing out unfair treatment for the purpose of achieving egalitarian inclusion and pointing out unfair treatment for the purpose of achieving separation.

Parsons’s Endorsement of Black Omnipotence or Grandiosity

Unlike the Jews and Catholics who dealt with suspicions of clannishness and disloyalty in their quest for inclusion, the Negro is burdened with the symbol of inferiority as such, carried by the color of his skin.[xxi] Given that Jews and Catholics had evolved the American societal community to include disparate religions and white ethnic groups, the Negro was in an extraordinary position to eliminate symbolic racial inferiority and thereby achieve total inclusiveness for the societal community.

But Parsons goes one step further, drawing the astonishing conclusion that the end point of Negro emancipation is not just Negro inclusion but the elimination of “status-inferiority” as such. He develops what amounts to a WASPy non-economic Marxist theory of history and positions the Negro as the vanguard of global liberation, whose grandiose role is to carry the world toward the utopian endpoint of Parsons’s evolutionary process of modernization where all groups will enjoy equality of opportunity without the burden of symbolic status-inferiority.

The Negro, for Parsons, “can become the spokesman for the much broader category of the disadvantaged” and become the head of a sort of “American style “socialist” movement.”[xxii] We still hear echoes of this position today (though they may originate in non-Parsonian theories) in calls for Black Americans to ally with and lead “non-white” peoples around the world against American exceptionalism and white supremacy.[xxiii]

Parsons gushes about the world-historic importance of the Negro that is all but guaranteed by the inexorable machinations of Parsons’s logic of historical development, provided that the Negro develops the appropriate kind of group solidarity and self-esteem:

This seems to me to constitute a crucially important focus for the future of the collective Negro identity. The Negro community has the opportunity to define itself as the spearhead of one of the most important improvements in the quality of American society in its history – and to do so not only in pursuit of its own obvious self-interest, but in the fulfillment of a moral imperative.[xxiv]

Parsons cautions, however, that the Negro identity must be one consistent with what’s been espoused by Negro churches, and states unequivocally that “Black Muslims” cannot be included. Parsons never goes beyond general references to “extreme orthodox Jews” and “Black Muslims” when describing what can’t be included, stressing only that,

the individual [member of an excluded group] need not cease to be a member of [his group], but the latter must relinquish certain of the controls over him which they previously exercised. This reasoning applies to aristocratic groups as much as it does to negatively privileged ones like the Negro.”[xxv]

Parsons’s Motivations

We’ve seen that the individual psychological definitions of group narcissism are too limited to effectively document the phenomenon. A person can be well-adjusted and normal while upholding an omnipotent group self-image. For the same reasons, a person can be motivated to endorse the omnipotent group self-image of a separate group. In Parsons’s case, he has obvious moral (see the moral tone he takes against the 1924 Immigration Act) and theoretical (his systems theory) reasons for promoting Black group self-esteem and grandiosity, but the article betrays other motivations which connect to Parsons’s backstory.

At the outset of the article we find the following statement:

Unfortunately, the American role in international leadership has been severely compromised in the last generation by our competition and conflict with the communist movement. Our hypersensitivity to the threat of internal subversion places us in danger of being identified internationally with the older European “colonial” powers and their imperialism. The relationship of these issues to race and color is patent. The suggestion will be made in this paper that the movement for inclusion of the Negro into full citizenship in the national community may prove to be a crucial aspect of this complex set of processes, and may present a great opportunity to claim a place for fuller leadership in this setting… This movement…has been stimulated largely by the rise of new nonwhite nations, particularly those of Africa.[xxvi]

Later he re-emphasizes this point:

This role of the Negro movement and the community behind it has significance far beyond the internal American scene. The whole world has now become more or less polarized between the developed and the underdeveloped nations. This polarization largely coincides with the freeing of large areas of the world from colonial status, a process which has moved with great rapidity in recent years, and with their emancipation from inferior status in terms of both political dependence and economic and educational development. Not least, this axis also relates very closely to a color line – the Asian and African new nations are largely nonwhite.”[xxvii]

Negro liberation is not just important for assuming leadership in international affairs, however. It’s also an opportunity to clarify the tumultuous situation at home and unify the country with a clearly defined, unambiguous case of moral necessity, similar to the way in which the George Floyd incident was misrepresented in the media:

Now, in a period of rising economic affluence, and, it may be said, moral ambivalence both about [Negro inclusion] and about the confusion over the American position in world affairs, the nation has been presented with a notable opportunity to define a clear and simple issue of conscience.[xxviii]

Evidence that Parsons could be cynically promoting a Negro vanguard can be found in his claim that the Negro complaint about America’s failure to live up to its own values is the “most radical grievance entertained by any major non-WASP group…It raises a clearer, more drastic moral issue than the other cases…”[xxix] Certainly the Native American grievance would be equally or perhaps even more special than the Negro’s, but because Native American grievances are often accompanied by demands for separatism and sovereignty instead of inclusion, Parsons elects not to amplify the grandiosity of their claims.

Negro inclusion is also paramount for Parsons because of its relationship to the issue of class conflict. In multiple instances Parsons observes that America’s embrace of transient immigrant underclasses has permitted the nation to avoid the Marxian class dynamics of Europe, because the immigrant underclasses initially become synonymous with the working class and then achieve equality of opportunity and diffuse into the plurality of roles America offers.[xxx] The Negro “question” for Parsons is essentially the same issue: they’re an urban lower class that needs to achieve the capacity for upward mobility and diffusion.

Therefore, Negro inclusion is important because it provides an opportunity to reduce class tensions by diffusing the Negro underclass into American society. More importantly, however, is that Negro inclusion allows America to complete the system of WASP historical idealism, which, as a reminder, proceeds as follows.

The American revolution placed America in a leadership position with respect to liberation from European despotism. The inclusion of Catholics and Jews further perfected the American claim to equality and liberty. The Negro is now positioned to complete the historical process by eliminating symbolic inferiority as such.

For Parsons, this system is the answer to the communist threat:

The whole trend of development in American society constitutes the sharpest challenge to the Communist diagnosis of the modern world, and, increasingly, Western Europe has also moved in many respects in the “American” direction.[xxxi]

Just as successful Negro inclusion will put the seal on the Marxian error in diagnosing American society, so the United States, with strong Negro participation, indeed leadership, has the opportunity to present a true alternative to the Communist pattern on a world-wide basis, one which is not bound to the stereotype of “capitalism.”[xxxii]

For this important reason, Negro group narcissism must be built up and tailored. It would be foolish, Parsons points out, to call for total assimilation (as opposed to inclusion) of the Negro and “throw away a very precious asset, not only for the Negro, but for American society as a whole.”[xxxiii]

Further speculation

It’s easy to speculate that Parsons’s promotion of black Americans to the most morally important group in the world might be nothing more than cynical foreign policy strategizing. But Parsons is transparent about his passionate belief that the American project created something exceptional and morally superior to European backwardness. His roots, after all, are in the Social Gospel movement.

Another reason could be that he wanted to write a sort of apologia that first of all mollified the suspicions of the FBI that had been surveilling him, and second, grafted an issue about which he was passionate onto the Anglo-American program of opposing communism, thereby enhancing the issue’s importance for policymakers.  

Regardless of his motivations, Parsons’s position on Negro inclusion lends support to two claims that many find strange or objectionable today. The first is that the genealogy of American progressivism and leftism is to be found in America’s Puritan roots (in its strongest form, this is a thesis that should be rejected for reasons we’ll explore later).

The second is that American foreign policy is “communist” or favorable to or consistent with Marxist goals (in its weakest form, a thesis that is irrefutable, notwithstanding Parsons’s anti-communist rhetoric). Given his outstanding impact on American social policy in the 20th century, it’s undeniable that Parsons was at least partially responsible for spreading a theory that called for the “weakening of parochial particularism” -- a theory very much analogous to Marxism in that the goals of its imperatives were also an inevitable consequence of a historical process of “differentiation” and “modernization”, by which the world’s oppressed would eventually be freed from the chains of traditional hierarchy and authoritarianism.[xxxiv]

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[i] Buxton, William J., Nichols T. Lawrence. “Talcott Parsons and the "Far East" at Harvard, 1941-4& Comparative Institutions and National Policy”

[ii] https://peoplepill.com/people/talcott-parsons

[iii] Porter, Jack Nusan. “Talcott Parsons and National Socialism: The Case of the "Ten Mysterious Missing Letters"”

[iv] Parsons, Talcott. “Full citizenship for the Negro American?”. It’s difficult to pinpoint when this was published. It shows up in a 1968 anthology called Sociological Theory and Modern Society, but the content suggests it was written before the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act.

[v] Nietzsche had already made this observation. See, e.g., Daybreak, 92.

[vi] We’ll delve into this more in the chapter on Treatment of Group Narcissism.

[vii] Dillon, Michele. Introduction to Sociological Theory. 2nd Edition. 172

[viii] 423

[ix] 426

[x] Here we see the character content civil religion recast in sociological or “relativist” terms. I suspect one could develop a total Progressive WASP political philosophy by synthesizing Parsons, Bellah, Ronald Dworkin, and Rawls (Parsons cites Rawls approvingly in the article).

[xi] 435

[xii] 429

[xiii] 429

[xiv] 442

[xv] 454

[xvi] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2001/09/mcveigh200109

[xvii] 439. In future posts, we’ll discuss the ways in which Parsons’s religious genealogy and history are wrong, and address the failures of inclusion after the civil rights movement.

[xviii] 434

[xix] 451

[xx] 436

[xxi] 448

[xxii] 448

[xxiii] See, e.g., This Juneteenth, BLM Should Reflect on Its Global Impact | Times

[xxiv] 462

[xxv] 453

[xxvi] 428

[xxvii] 463

[xxviii] 459

[xxix] 459

[xxx] 446

[xxxi] 463

[xxxii] 464

[xxxiii] 464

[xxxiv] 458