Strangely Hesitant about Anti-Blackness: A Comment on Quadlin and Montgomery

We raise concerns about Quadlin and Montgomery’s Social Psychology Quarterly article, “When a Name Gives You Pause,” a study of whether racialized names affect the time to dog adoption in a county shelter. Our comment is guided by the recent insistence of American Sociological Association leadership for greater critical introspection in sociological research. First, the study is ahistorical by overlooking histories of human-animal relations and naming in the construction of anti-Blackness. Second, the study is acontextual by contorting labor market research and color-blind perspectives in a manner that directs undue attention to the treatment of dogs without specifying the concrete disadvantages for Black people. The study’s narrow focus on adopters misrepresents organizational factors within animal shelters. These various oversights invest Quadlin and Montgomery’s article in a whiteness-centered sociological tradition. We urge divesting from this tradition and conclude with a call for sociology to be more educative and reflexive.