Page 233 - Contribution To Phenomenology

226 STANFORD M LYMAN & LESTER EMBREE

celebrates the Enlightenment ideal of the individual by making it the unit
to be investigated. However, sociologists have rarely treated the socius as
a "person" in the American Constitutional sense, i.e., one who is entitled
to due process and the equal protection of the laws, regardless of status,
race, color, or religion.^^ Examination of the socius sought to show the
relationship of that unit to other units in an aggregate. Thus, a particular
socius shares a status or an attitude with another socius by reason of his
or her race or generation or other measurable characteristics. Thus
quantification could be seen as advancing the project of the Enlighten-
ment—except, that the emergence of the individual as an entity
independent of all ascriptive associations is something that has never been
found. Nor has that status been investigated thoroughly.
But there was an essay written in 1955 by Leonard Broom and John
Kitsuse, two sociologists, called "The Validation of Acculturation,"^^ Their
essay asked the question. How would one recognize a fully acculturated
person? Their answer, which I beUeve resonates with American as-
similationist approaches, was this: An acculturated person would be one
who could neither credit nor blame his or her status in society on
anything inherited, on his or her race, ethnicity, or religion. Such a
person would have to boast about individual merit or lament the lack of
same. It's all a matter of individual merit and accomplishment Exactly. So
it's neither transmitted culturally nor biologically hereditary? Yes, the
acculturated person could not say, "Fm Black and that's why I didn't get
a good job," or "I'm Jewish and that's why . . . J' Or Fm the son of a
rich man and for that reason have had many advantages. The full
validation was the emergence of the meritocratic individual, who would
have to stand or fall by claiming "If I did not get the job, I guess I was
not good enough." Of course their theory assumed that the society would
have eliminated all biases based on birth, heredity, race, color, and
heritage.
If one looks at Parsonian sociology, i.e., the perspective associated with
the late Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), America's ideal is summed up in the

^^ See Stanford M. Lyman, "Race Relations as Social Process: Sociology's
Resistance to a Civil Right's Orientation," in Race in America: The Struggle for
Equality, edited by Herbert Hill and James E. Jones, Jr., (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1993), 370-401.
^^ Leonard Broom and John Kitsuse, "The Validation of Acculturation: A
Condition of Ethnic Assimilation," American Anthropologist 57 (February 1955), 44-
48.