All the approaches to scholarly engagement discussed in Chapter Three looks towards a more outward-facing academy, although there are significant differences in what that should entail. Institutional racism, especially in the Macpherson inquiry (1999), provides a way into understanding public engagement by social scientists; it also sets the scene for assessing the impact of social science in policy and practice, and the academic–policy interface. These issues are developed in this chapter and the following two chapters.

The discussion cannot, however, be just about what scholars take to the public, in view of the discussion in Chapter Three, which argued that the university as well as the history of disciplines such as sociology are themselves implicated in, or maybe even foundational to, racial exclusion. Hence, racism and institutional racism can also be used to reflect on sociology itself. The interrelationship between them is what this chapter is about. It seeks to chart and explore several aspects of sociology – the link between US and British sociology, the different public stance adopted by their respective professional associations for sociologists, and the connections between sociology, social movements and the media. The origins and context of the term ‘institutional racism’ – which reached its fiftieth anniversary in 2017 – provides a way of reflecting on the development of race scholarship in Britain, and on the quite diverse public roles of the national sociological associations in the UK and the US, insofar as they reveal differing public and scholarly engagements with racism. Consequently, institutional racism provides a lens into the discipline of sociology itself, which it sheds light on or ‘speaks back’ to in ways that sociologists can find uncomfortable.

While there is a great deal written on sociology and on institutional racism, in this chapter I bring them together in different ways that reveal a set of connections that are less evident than they could be. On the one hand, the discipline, along with other social sciences, adopted and adapted the term, institutional racism, for social analysis and to critique systematic discrimination in society. On the other hand, it also fell out of favour in sociology and, rather like its public profile, the term has risen and then disappeared from social science, only to rise and fall again in the years after the Scarman inquiry (1981) and, particularly, after the Macpherson inquiry (1999).