Alienation, Race, and Education

Author(s): Russell Middleton

Source: American Sociological Review, Vol. 28, No. 6 (Dec., 1963), pp. 973-977
Published by: American Sociological Association
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 RESEARCH REPORTS AND NOTES
ALIENATION, RACE, AND EDUCATION *
RUSSELL MIDDLETON
University of Wisconsin
One of the problems empirical studies of
alienation must confront is the multiplicity of
meanings attached to the concept. Seeman has
suggested that there are five major meanings:
powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness,
isolation, and self-estrangement.' Most studies
have dealt with only one of these variants of
alienation-or at most two or three, singly or in
combination-and there is little evidence regard-
ing the relative frequency of different types of
alienation in the population or of their differen-
tial association with various causal factors. We
shall adopt, with some modifications, Seeman's
variants of alienation and examine their inci-
dence in a small southern city.
On the basis of the theoretical formulations
of the classic social theorists as well as the frag-
mentary previous empirical research, we hypoth-
esize that the different types of alienation are
highly correlated with one another. Further, we
hypothesize that each type of alienation is di-
rectly related to those disabling social condi-
tions that limit or block the attainment of cul-
turally valued objectives. We shall test this
hypothesis with regard to two of the most im-
portant disabling conditions in American society:
subordinate racial status and low educational
attainment.
One possible exception to the general hypoth-
eses is suggested by the vast literature pointing
to the alienation of the intellectual from the
dominant culture. Awareness of the more subtle
ways in which this dominant culture may thwart
human potentialities probably requires a rela-
tively high level of education and sophistication.
Cultural estrangement may therefore be in-
* Paper read at the annual meeting of the Ameri-
can Sociological Association, August, 1963. This
study was financed by the Research Council of
Florida State University. I am indebted to Charles
M. Grigg, Ivan Nye, Francis R. Allen, and Mal-
colm B. Parsons for their cooperation in the study.
I am further indebted to the National Science Foun-
dation and the Survey Research Center of the Uni-
versity of California for their support in the analy-
sis of the data.
1Melvin Seeman, "On the Meaning of Aliena-
tion," American Sociological Review, 24 (December,
1959), pp. 783-791.
973
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versely related to the disabling conditions speci-
fied and less highly correlated with the other
types of alienation.
METHOD
This study was conducted in a central Florida
city of 18,000 during the summer of 1962. All
residents above the age of 20 were enumerated,
and a simple random sample of 256 persons was
drawn. Since the number of Negroes in this
sample was inadequate for extensive analysis,
an additional 50 Negro subjects were randomly
drawn. The final sample thus consisted of 207
whites and 99 Negroes. Generalizations about
the community as a whole, however, are based
on the original sample of 256.
This study constituted a part of a larger co-
operative survey of attitudes on a variety of sub-
jects: civil defense, mental illness, political lead-
ership, and the employment of married women.
Since exigencies of the larger study permitted
us to include only a few items dealing with alien-
ation, a single attitude statement was formulated
for each of the variants of alienation. It would
have been desirable to construct scales for each
type of alienation, but the single items are useful
at least for exploratory analysis.2
The types of alienation and the attitude state-
ments associated with each are as follows:
(1) Powerlessness. "There is not much that I
can do about most of the important problems
that we face today."
(2) Meaninglessness. "Things have become so
complicated in the world today that I really
don't understand just what is going on."
(3) Normlessness. "In order to get ahead in
the world today, you are almost forced to do
some things which are not right." The most
commonly used measure of a sense of normless-
ness is Srole's anomia scale.3 The manifest con-
2 Prior to the study the six items were presented
without identification to 14 graduate students in a
seminar in sociological theory who had previously
read and discussed the work of Durkheim, Mer-
ton, Srole, Nettler, Meier and Bell, Seeman, and
Dean on the subjects of anomie and alienation. The
students, working independently, showed little hesi-
tation in classifying the items, and they were in
unanimous agreement concerning the type of aliena-
tion represented by each of the six items.
3 Leo Srole, "Social Integration and Certain Co-
rollaries: An Exploratory Study," American Socio-
logical Review, 21 (December, 1956). DD. 709-716.
974 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICALREVIEW
tent of this scale, however, appears to be a
combination of cynicism and pessimism-or, as
Nettler and Meier and Bell maintain, despair.4
Although pessimism and cynicism or despair may
ordinarily accompany anomia, they do not in
themselves constitute it, and the degree of asso-
ciation is an empirical question. The concept of
normlessness has also been used in several other
senses,5 but here we follow the more restricted
usage of Merton and Seeman, emphasizing the
expectation that illegitimate means must be em-
ployed to realize culturally prescribed goals.0
(4) Cultural estrangement. "I am not much
interested in the TV programs, movies, or maga-
zines that most people seem to like." Seeman
refers to this variant of alienation as "isolation,"
but to avoid the traditional connotation of social
isolation, we use the more explicit term "cultural
estrangement." Like many of the questions in
Nettler's scale for alienation,7 the present item
focuses on the individual's acceptance of popular
culture.
(5) Social estrangement. "I often feel lonely."
Although Dean, working with Seeman, devel-
oped a scale to measure social isolation,8 See-
man later decided that this was "not a very
useful meaning" and abandoned social isolation
as a type of alienation.9 In doing so, however,
he has abandoned a significant part of the tradi-
tion associated with the concept of alienation.
Nisbet,10 Pappenheim,11and Grodzins,12 for ex-
ample, follow TUnnies and Durkheim in empha-
sizing the loss of community in modern society
4Dorothy L. Meier and Wendell Bell, "Anomia
and Differential Access to the Achievement of Life
Goals," American Sociological Review, 24 (April,
1959), pp. 190-191.
5 See, for example, Dwight G. Dean, "Alienation:
Its Meaning and Measurement," American Sociolog-
ical Review, 26 (October, 1961), pp. 754-755.
6 Robert K. Merton, "Social Structure and Ano-
mie," in Social Theory and Social Structure, Glen-
coe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957, and Seeman, op. cit., pp.
787-788.
7 Gwynn Nettler, "A Measure of Alienation,"
American Sociological Review, 22 (December, 1957),
pp. 670-677. In addition to questions dealing with
political, religious, and familial norms, Nettler
asks such questions as the following: "Do you en-
joy TV?" "What do you think of the new model
American Automobiles?" "Do you read Reader's
Digest ?" "Do national spectator sports (football,
baseball) interest you?"
8 Dean, op. cit., pp. 755-756.
9 Seeman, op. cit., p. 789.
10 Robert A. Nisbet, Community and Power, New
York: Oxford University Press, 1962.
11Fritz Pappenheim, The Alienation of Modern
Man, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1959.
12 Morton Grodzins, The Loyal and the Disloyal,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956, p. 134.
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as the source of alienation. On the other hand,
Seeman's point that social isolation cannot read-
ily be separated from differences in associational
style-the fact that some men are sociable and
some are not-makes clear the desirability of
distinguishing social isolation from social es-
trangement. In his study of the aged, Townsend
makes such a distinction: ". . . to be socially
isolated is to have few contacts with family and
community; to be lonely is to have an unwel-
come feeling of lack or loss of companionship.
The one is objective, the other subjective and,
as we shall see, the two do not coincide." 13 Eric
and Mary Josephson also comment that not
all isolates are socially estranged, nor are all non-
isolates free from alienation.14 It is, then, the
feeling of loneliness that is crucial to alienation,
and the present item is designed to tap this
subjective sense of social estrangement.
(6) Estrangement from work. "I don't really
enjoy most of the work that I do, but I feel
that I must do it in order to have other things
that I need and want." One of the oldest themes
in the literature of alienation is that man may
become estranged from himself by failing to
realize his own human capacities to the fullest.
Seeman suggests the absence of intrinsically
meaningful activity as an indicator of self-
estrangement.15As used by social theorists from
Marx to Fromm, however, the concept of self-
estrangement is considerably broader-as broad,
in fact, as the concept of human nature. Fromm,
for example, discusses most of the other types of
alienation as aspects of self-estrangement or as
conditions leading to self-estrangement.16 As
Seeman points out, the notion of self-estrange-
ment also begs the question in that it implies
certain assumptions about human nature and
the ideal human condition. Nevertheless, the no-
tion of alienation from meaningful work has an
important place in the literature and deserves
separate treatment. We thus include the present
item to measure estrangement from work,
though one may choose to interpret it as an
index of self-estrangement.
In the interviews the six items dealing wtih
alienation were interspersed with a large number
of unrelated questions. The respondents were
13 Peter Townsend, The Family Life of Old
People, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957,
p. 166.
14 Eric and Mary Josephson (eds.), Man Alone:
Alienation in Modern Society, New York: Dell,
1962, p. 14.
15 Seeman, op. cit., pp. 789-790.
16Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955. See also Erich
Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, New York: Fred-
erick Ungar, 1961.
 ALIENATION, RACE AND EDUCATION 975
TABLE 1. INTERCORRELATIONS OF TYPES OF ALIENATION *

Cultural Social Estrange-

Meaning- Normless- Estrange- Estrange- ment from
lessness ness ment ment work
Powerlessness .58 .61 .06 .54 .57
Meaninglessness - .59 .17 .46 .81
Normlesness - - .31 .48 .67
Cultural estrangement - - .08 .20
Social estrangement - - - - .71
* The number of cases is 256; the measure of association is Yule's Q. The values of X2 for all relation-
ships for which Q exceeds .30 are significant at the .05 level.

given the following instructions: "Although you
may not agree or disagree completely with any
of the following statements, please tell me
whether you tend more to agree or disagree with
each statement." Each agreement was taken as
an indication of alienation.
The chi-square test of significance, with the
rejection level set at .05, and Yule's coefficient
of association (Q) were utilized in the statistical
analysis of the data.
FINDINGS
Intercorrelations among the types of aliena-
tion are presented in Table 1. With the exception
of cultural estrangement, the association between
each type of alienation and each other type is
moderately strong, with Q's ranging from .46 to
.81.17 As expected, cultural estrangement is not
highly correlated with the other variants of
alienation; the only statistically significant rela-
tion is with normlessness, and even here the Q
is a relatively low .31. The type of alienation
most highly correlated with the other types is es-
trangement from work. This suggests that it may
indeed be a useful index to self-estrangement, if,
as Marx and Fromm have maintained, self-
estrangement is at the core of the phenomenon
of alienation.
whether each of the varieties of alienation is as-
sociated with conditions of deprivation. The im-
portance of racial status as an alienating condi-
tion is immediately apparent from the figures in
Table 2. The percentage of Negroes who feel
alienated is far higher than the percentage of
whites for every type of alienation except cul-
tural estrangement. Approximately two-thirds
of the Negro subjects agree with most of the
items indicating alienation, whereas a majority
of whites disagree with every item. The racial
difference is statistically significant in every in-
stance except cultural estrangement.
The difference is largest with respect to es-
trangement from work. No doubt this reflects
the occupational structure of the community,
for 72 per cent of the employed Negroes are
working in semiskilled or unskilled jobs, as com-
pared to only 14 per cent of the whites. A
marked difference between Negroes and whites
also occurs in the case of normlessness. More
than half the Negroes but only 16 per cent of
the whites perceive a conflict between success
goals and ethical means. This difference may
stem in part from the Negroes' recognition that
discrimination leaves few legitimate avenues to
TABLE 2. ALIENATION, BY RACE

If cultural estrangement is excluded, the five Per CentWhoFeel Alienated

remaining items constitute a Guttman scale with
a coefficient of reproducibility of .90. Although Type of Total
these five types of alienation may be distinct on Alienation Negroes* Whites Community
a conceptual level, there is apparently an under- Powerlessness 70 40 47
lying unity. Studies employing a measure of gen- Meaninglessness 71 48 52
eralized alienation thus may be feasible, though Normlessness 55 16 24
the nature of the relation of cultural estrange- Cultural
ment to the other types of alienation perhaps estrangement 35 34 35
Social estrangement 60 27 35
needs further clarification. Estrangement
Our present purpose, however, is to determine from work 66 18 28
Number of cases (99) (207) (256)
17For comparisonpurposes,phi coefficients(0)
were also calculated. Since p involves a more re- * The Negro sample is augmentedby an addi-
strictive definition of association than Q, the co- tional 50 cases chosen randomlyfrom the enumera-
efficientsare uniformly lower, but the patterns of tion of Negro adults in the community.Figuresfor
relationshipamong the variables are almost iden- the total community do not include the 50 addi-
tical. tional cases.

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976 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICALREVIEW
success open to them. Observation of the dis-
crepancy between the whites' professed ideals
and their actual behavior, particularly in rela-
tion to Negroes, may also give Negroes a rather
cynical perspective on society.
In Table 3 we may examine the effect of edu-
cation on alienation within each racial group.
Among the Negroes, those who have had 12 or
more years of education are in every instance
less likely to feel alienated than those with less
education, though the differences are statistically
significant only for social estrangement and es-
trangement from work. There is a similar pat-
tern among the whites, with significant differ-
ences for powerlessness, meaninglessness, and
estrangement from work.
TABLE 3. ALIENATION,
Negroes *
Type of Less Than 12 12 or More Years
Alienation Years Education
Powerlessness 73
Meaninglessness 76
Normlessness 59
Cultural estrangement 39
Social estrangement 67
Estrangement from work 73
Number of cases (74)
* The Negro sample is augmented by an additional 50 cases chosen randomly from the enumeration of
Negro adults in the community.
As one would expect, the inverse relation be-
tween education and a sense of meaninglessness
is particularly strong, but much more so among
the whites than among the Negroes. The percent-
age difference between high and low educational
groups among the whites is more than twice that
for the Negroes. Why is education not a more
significant factor in relieving Negroes of the
sense that they "really don't understand just
what is going on?" We might speculate that the
Negroes' greater sense of powerlessness is re-
sponsible. Even educated Negroes may feel little
interest in attempting to understand things they
believe are beyond their control. This interpre-
tation is supported by the fact that education
has more effect on powerlessness among whites
than it does among Negroes. For each of the
other types of alienation, however, the percent-
age difference between educational groups is
greater among the Negroes than among the
whites.
Use of the scale for general alienation, which
consists of all of the items except cultural es-
trangement, permits us to gain an overview of
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the relation between alienation and race and edu-
cation. If, on the basis of this scale, the sample
is divided at the median into groups of high and
low alienation, the association between subordi-
nate racial status and alienation is Q=.79. Ap-
proximately 6 per cent of the Negroes and 28
per cent of the whites show no alienation with
regard to any of the five types in the scale; 28
per cent of the Negroes and only 1 per cent of
the whites feel alienated in every respect.
The association between education and general
alienation is -.67 for the white group and -.56
among the Negroes. Thus, education appears to
be of somewhat greater significance among
whites than among Negroes. For Negroes in a
southern community racial status is far and
BY RACE AND YEARS OF EDUCATION
Per Cent Who Feel Alienated
Whites
Less Than 12 12 or More Years
of Education Years Education of Education
60 57 34
56 80 35
40 22 14
24 42 31
40 37 24
44 33 12
(25) (60) (147)
away the most salient fact; the whites tend to
treat Negroes categorically, regardless of educa-
tion, occupation, or reputation. Yet, education
affects most types of alienation, even among the
Negroes. On the other hand, there is no signifi-
cant educational difference among Negroes in
the incidence of pessimism. The highly educated
Negroes are almost as likely as the poorly edu-
cated to agree with the statement, "In spite of
what some people say, the lot of the average
man is getting worse." Killian and Grigg report
similar findings for Florida Negroes in connec-
tion with Srole's anomia scale, of which this item
is a part.'8
CONCLUSION
Among the adults of a small city in central
Florida five types of alienation-powerlessness,
meaninglessness, normlessness, social estrange-
18 Lewis M. Killian and Charles M. Grigg, "Ur-
banism, Race, and Anomia," American Journal of
Sociology, 67 (May, 1962), pp. 661-665.
 SIMILARITY OF CONNECTED OBSERVATIONS
ment, and estrangement from work-are highly
intercorrelated, but a sixth, cultural estrange-
ment, is not closely related to the others. The
hypothesis that social conditions of deprivation
are related to alienation is generally supported.
Subordinate racial status and limited education
are strongly associated with all but one type of
alienation. Several other factors, such as occu-
pation of head of household, family income, sex,
marital status, and size of community of origin,
also tend to be related to alienation, but the co-
efficients of association are not as high as for
race or education.
By far the most striking finding of the study is
the pervasiveness of alienation among the Negro
population, a point which is also dramatically
clear in James Baldwin's essay, "Down at the
Cross." In addition to each of the other types
of alienation, Baldwin senses a cultural estrange-
ment among American Negroes so extreme that
"there are some wars . . . that the American
Negro will not support, however many of his
people may be coerced.... 19 William Worthy,
correspondent of the Baltimore Afro-American,
has pointed out that the greatest amount of pro-
Castro sentiment in the United States is to be
found in Harlem among lower-class Negroes, and
Black Muslim publications have advocated a
policy of "Hands Off Cuba!" This evidence of
estrangement from American culture is not con-
sistent with the findings of this study, which
show that Negroes are no more likely to be cul-
turally estranged than whites. The discrepancy
may be due to the circumscribed nature of the
item used here to determine cultural estrange-
ment, since it deals only with attitudes toward
the popular culture of the mass media. Negroes
may feel a deep estrangement from basic aspects
of American culture and yet turn to the soporific
fare of the mass media as a means of escape
from the problems and tensions of life.
19 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, New
York: Dial Press, 1963, p. 117. At a recent informal
meeting between Attorney General Robert F. Ken-
nedy and James Baldwin and a group of his friends,
". . . a once-injured, often-jailed young Freedom
Rider waggled a finger in the astonished Kennedy's
face and told him he wouldn't take up arms against
Cuba. 'He was surprised to hear there were Negroes
who wouldn't fight for their country,' Baldwin said
later in his two-room downtown Manhattan flat.
'How many Negroes would fight to free Cuba
when they can't be freed themselves?' That was pre-
cisely the message the Negroes wanted to get across
-a message of anger, of quickening urgency, of
deepening alienation." "Kennedy and Baldwin: The
Gulf," Newsweek, 61 (June 3, 1963), p. 19.
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977
THE SIMILARITY OF CONNECTED
OBSERVATIONS *
HAL H. WINSBOROUGH
Duke University
E. L. QUARANTELLI
Ohio State University
DANIEL YUTZY
Ohio State University
THE PROBLEM
Many problems in social research require
investigating populations whose elements are in-
terconnected through patterns of structural
links. In sociology, many kinds of elements are
linked in many ways. For formal organizations,
the organization chart represents a linking of
offices in accordance with who is supposed to
give orders to whom. In a sociometric network,
individuals are linked by friendship choice. In
studies of kinship, individuals are linked by birth
and marriage. In studies of the urban hierarchy,
cities may be linked by metropolitan dominance.
For a wide variety of variables it is important
to investigate the similarity or dissimilarity of
linked elements. For instance, one might want to
know whether departments in a bureaucracy
linked by the flow of work have similar levels
of morale. To take another example, one might
be interested, in the study of a small community,
to investigate whether families linked by kin-
ship have similar socio-economic status.
Frequently these kinds of questions are not
easy to answer using current procedures. Most
statistical techniques depend on the possibility
of defining perfectly interconnected groups
within the structure. In a sociogram, for in-
stance, if cliques exist in which all within-clique
choices are made and no between-clique choices
are apparent, then one may easily investigate
the relationship between clique membership and
some variable measure. The significance of differ-
ences between clique means can be tested by a
one-way analysis of variance and the magnitude
of the relation between clique membership and
the variable score measured by a correlation ra-
tio. In most kinds of investigation, however,
* Data for this study were gatheredin an investi-
gation supportedby U.S. Public Health ServiceRe-
searchGrantD-1445, from the National Institute of
Dental Research,Public Health Service.The authors
are indebted to Donald Burdick, Department of
Mathematics, Duke University, and Arthur E.
Mace, TheoreticalPhysics Branch, Battelle Mem-
orial Institute, for their assistance in connection
with the statisticalaspects of this paper.