They put the cart before the horse—even if testing is implicated in anti-Blackness, that doesn’t imply throwing it out
Randolph, et al, 18—Department of Behavioral Sciences, Winston-Salem State University (Antonia, with Victor Erik Ray, Megan Underhill, and David Luke, “Response to Weddington: More Lessons from Afro-Pessimism,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, November 1, 2018, dml) [inserted the word “to” for grammatical integrity—insertion denoted by brackets]
Perhaps most perplexing, Weddington seems to at once abandon the empirical project of sociology and simultaneously claim an empirical mantle. Paraphrasing Wilderson (2010), Weddington (2018) argues that
a reliance on “facts” places a false burden on the project of Afro-pessimism, such that the reliance on empirical analysis of black populations exists to inaugurate an ongoing but ultimately futile industry of applying faulty theories and concepts to populations of black slaves. (p. 6)
To our knowledge, however, the only way to decide if a theory is faulty is to test it. It is a basic assumption of social science that theories are incomplete and we are attempting [to] refine, through repeated testing, better theories that explain more about social life. Indeed, our tools are imperfect and sometimes implicated in constructing the very racial structures we hope to turn them against (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva 2008). The answer to these problems is not the rejection, a priori, of the possibility of testing. Rather, we should search for better tools. Sociology as a knowledge project loses tremendously if we refuse to examine the empirical status of theoretical ideas.