Lee here. This essay is by Arthur Sakamoto who is Acting Director of the Academy of Geography, Sociology and International Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is a sociologist who received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988. He previously held tenured positions in the sociology departments at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin. His areas of specialization include social stratification and inequality, racial and ethnic relations, demography, and East Asian societies. Over the course of several decades, he has published widely on the socioeconomic characteristics of Asian Americans finding that, on average, they typically have higher levels of education, occupational status, and income than Whites. He is currently editing a volume for Theory and Society entitled “Stratification and Inequality among Sociologists.”
The centerpiece of this essay is the letter (posted below) that Arthur sent to a journal that had rejected his article. Anyone who publishes a fair amount in the peer reviewed literature gets rejected all the time. In my experience, I’d say about half the time, the rejection is completely reasonable, about a third of the time the rejection is a semi-surreal mix of reasons that are both reasonable and unreasonable, about 10% of the time, most of the reasons are really bad, and, in a small minority somewhere in the single digits, egregiously unreasonable.
Arthur wrote the letter not because of the rejection per se (he, like most of us, has had many), but because their reasons for doing so were so bad. Arthur informed me that this the only time in his long career that he has ever sent such a letter to a journal editor.
This came to my attention because Arthur (and his team) submitted the paper shown below (after rejections at other journals) to The Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (JOIBS).
I am not going to give too many details because the paper has not yet been accepted. However, I will say this: I received two very positive reviews (from very accomplished social scientists). And I read it carefully myself, and concurred with the positive evaluations of the reviewers. It is not yet accepted because, despite our positive overall evaluations, there were a few issues raised in the reviews that we requested that the authors consider addressing before making a final decision.
After receiving this initial round of reviews from us, Arthur informed me of the back story, which included his letter to a prior journal that rejected his paper objecting to their handling of his paper. I thought the story was sufficiently interesting to warrant posting here.
Here is the title and abstract of the version submitted to JOIBS:
Socioeconomic Differentials among White Ethnics in the American Community Survey, 2017-2021
ABSTRACT
We investigate socioeconomic variation among Whites in the United States. Using data from the American Community Survey, we explore educational attainment, wages, poverty, affluence, and household income by ancestry groups among non-Hispanic, single-race Whites. The results indicate that persons who identify as White report a wide variety of ethnic ancestries. Some ethnic groups have relatively high socioeconomic attainments while others have low outcomes, including a few ethnic groups with poverty and high-school dropout rates that are similar to Blacks. Some of the socioeconomic variation between White ethnic groups is explained by demographic control variables such as age, nativity, region, and disability, but notable socioeconomic differentials frequently persist. Indeed, some of the between-ethnic differentials are as large as the differentials between Whites overall and Blacks. A great deal of socioeconomic variation within specific ethnic groups is furthermore often evident. This substantial heterogeneity in socioeconomic characteristics is inconsistent with the critical demography paradigm which tends to portray Whites as a homogenous and uniformly advantaged group. Our findings suggest that the demographic heterogeneity of Whites—which includes substantial variation in both ethnic identity and socioeconomic characteristics—is a more realistic assessment in the contemporary era of rising class inequality.
Arthur Sakamoto
After 35 years of getting critical decisions from editors, I finally wrote the following letter of complaint to a population studies journal.
Your reviewers largely dismiss or ignore the empirical evidence and substantive argumentation presented in my revision and its accompanying memo. Revising this manuscript again would be pointless as that would just invite another round of disparaging rejection.
However, the analysis in JOURNAL-ms#-xxxxR1 [Lee’s note: This is the article Arthur submitted for possible publication] is not fundamentally problematic. I have published many similar papers over several decades including in your JOURNAL. The limitation of JOURNAL-ms#-xxxxR1, from the point of view of your ideological reviewers, is that the empirical results do not provide much support for Critical Race Theory. The rejection of JOURNAL-ms#-xxxxR1 is more akin to political censorship than scientific review.
For example, your reviewers seem to agree that any mention of Asian Americans is unacceptable in a discussion of racial and ethnic inequality in America. But there is actually no logical or scientific rationale for a taboo against considering Asian Americans in a discussion of racial and ethnic inequality. To the contrary, ignoring them is contradictory.
That social norm about ignoring Asian Americans is simply policed by ideologues who benefit from promoting Critical Race Theory which is mostly inconsistent with the facts regarding Asian Americans. In my manuscript I argued that that the consideration of Asian Americans in theorizing racial and ethnic inequality has been neglected. Your reviewers’ rejection of JOURNAL-ms#-xxxxR1 is yet another example of sanctioning the inclusion of Asian Americans.
The homepage of the website for your sociology association has a grandiose statement about its commitment to promoting “diversity and inclusion.” I regret that this supposed commitment obviously did not apply to the review of JOURNAL-ms#-xxxxR1.
Reviewers are usually not so crass as to clearly state that they are demanding an obvious blanket statement of ideological commitment. However, after two rounds of dealing with them, I clearly sensed that that was what was being required for publication. Below are some of the comments from the reviewers that were received.
Regarding the ostensible bigger picture contribution, I think the authors need to revise their assessment of the “critical demography paradigm”--is really as one-dimensional as the authors present it to be? I strongly suggest the authors revise throughout the manuscript and take great care to not reduce “white privilege” to socio-economic status or the contained attainment/material metrics this analysis is based on. [Also, you need to] demonstrate better or more explicit sensitivity to the fact that the white “color line” is always being redrawn and is an always-moving target across the history of American race relations, with some groups having easier access to its core privileges while others only enjoy more partial envelopment at different times….There are differential proximities to the fuller comforts of whiteness and white privilege, and these change over time for different groups.
The availability of whiteness and white privilege—which can include access to material benefits focused on here—has always been fluctuated with a changing white color line and how different white ethnic groups may possess different proximities to its fuller fledged privileges or white incorporation across different junctures of civic history. Here, in the intro, the authors rightfully describe the changing color line and immigration histories. Rather than point to issues pertaining to blacks and Asians here, for one thing, the manuscript should instead be focused upon or just expand to those pertinent to framing these data which are on white Americans. Whats unique about whiteness, and what distinguishes the groupings/lineages analyzed here?
I found it odd that the Discussion section began with a discussion of Asians and the “model minority” hypothesis as Asians are not the focus of the paper.
Previously, this paper was submitted to another population studies journal and was desk-rejected with the following explanation:
The motivation for the paper is not well-substantiated. While heterogeneity among whites is certainly important to understand well, it’s not well argued why your measures and methods capture a racialized process. Patterns of ethnic immigrant settlements, timing of immigration, the spatial correlation of those factors with spatio-economic trends across places, and so much more are not captured in your approach. Plus, your results show considerable variability (inconsistencies) in ethnic group disadvantages across outcomes and across men and women. Those results raise many more questions about the mechanisms of disadvantage beyond that of racialization.
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https://hkbu.academia.edu/ArthurSakamoto
I have many publications on racial and ethnic inequality in the US. They may be found at the above website. If you are unable to access it, then I can email you a copy of any paper if you are interested.
I am teaching a class on Popper and falsification next week. I think I'll incorporate this amazing inoculation against falsification: "White privilege is real, but who is white is moving. Whoever has good outcomes, that is the group with white privilege". I think Freud would be jealous.