Nothing to See Here? From race to place, sociology is extraordinarily incurious about ‘normality’

Normality is a diffuse but powerful category with which sociology has a difficult relationship. Firstly, what’s considered normal in our society isn’t studied extensively; our focus is typically directed to the supposedly extraordinary. Secondly, the category itself is sometimes reproduced uncritically in sociological literature. I realised this during a research project focusing on the Berlin police force, where I continuously encountered the discursive figure of a “normal” citizen or neighbourhoods in interviews with police officers, and decided to shed light on the dominant, yet hidden construction of normality.

While I was at a suburban police station as part of the study in autumn 2020, a police officer taking calls asked me why we had chosen their policing district. It was “normal”, he explained; there wasn’t much happening there. When I told him about the other three districts we were including in the study, he remarked that one of them, Brooks Hall, was “like hell”, and said he had only been there once, 17 years ago, and had avoided it ever since.

The contrast the police officer made between Brooks Hall and his “normal” district of Dorsten Heights was not unique. Dorsten Heights was in fact the only district where officers used the word normal to describe the area and its inhabitants. In interviews, police officers described people living there as “normal citizens” or “normal public”. In contrast to their suburban, rather bourgeois and comparably white neighbourhood, the officers often referred to Brooks Hall as a diverse, non-bourgeois inner-city neighbourhood, which is highly policed and characterised as a crime hotspot in local and national media.

Policing in Berlin is generally linked to territorial differentiation and unequal allocation of policing resources, resulting in a higher policing intensity and special focus on certain inner-city, poorer and diverse neighbourhoods. This is a tendency that is also reflected in sociology itself. The number of studies focusing on Brooks Hall far outweigh studies on Berlin’s suburban, wealthier and whiter neighbourhoods. Of course, this is not an isolated phenomenon. As Junia Howell points out in her critique of urban sociology in the context of the United States, neighbourhood studies tend to focus on marginalised neighbourhoods, implicitly differentiating them from an unspecified and unstudied normal neighbourhood. Asking us why we would include the police officer’s normal district in our study was, therefore, a reasonable observation.

But normal is not a neutral term. Normality is a powerful concept, as it sets the standards from which so-called deviation and stigma depart, which happens in the context of broader social structures of inequality. While looking into sociological literature on normality, I came across few empirical studies on the matter and realised that excluding constructions of normality are not only a problem in policing, but are also reflected in sociological literature. Thus, while analysing what the dominant construction of normality in the Berlin police force was, I found that a similar analysis was necessary within sociological literature.

In the introduction to her book Multiple Normalities: Making Sense of Ways of Living, Barbara Misztal wrote that “normality is a basic but almost undetectable part of the organisation of our life”. It is for that reason that studying “the normal” is a complex undertaking, and accordingly, there is a lack of sociological research on normality. This may also be linked to a general disinclination in sociology to study a constructed “commonplace”, an uncontested norm, which is inherently linked to power relations in society and sociology itself.

Allan Horowitz wrote that sociology pays more “attention to crime than conformity, homosexuality than heterosexuality, blackness than whiteness … The conventional, usual and expectable is usually taken for granted and … rarely studied”. This observation reflects two things: first, that dominating (Western) sociology tends to study down in terms of power relations, and second, there is an underlying understanding of normality that places marginalised groups outside of normality and therefore reinforces that very understanding itself. This (unintentional) reproduction of normality constructions can also be found in Erving Goffman’s stigma theory, which posits concepts of stigmatisation and passing as normal as a relational process. However, even if it is central to his stigma concept – as one is stigmatised when not read as normal – the concept of normality remains unclear and thus seems to be self-evident. Referring to his readers as “we normals”, Goffman marks out his position as a normal sociologist who shares a normality with his readers, implicitly defining his own position and perspective as normal.

It has been the critical race, feminist and queer theorists who have questioned constructions of normality in both society and sociology by linking it to deeply rooted power relations such as racism. Categorising a person or neighbourhood as normal does not happen in an ahistorical powerless society, but occurs in a society that is structured by whiteness, and where, as John Solomos and Les Back remind us, “whiteness is equated with normality and as such it is not in need of definition. Thus, being normal is colonised by the idea of being white.”

Drawing on concepts of normality that take power relations into account, I believe that generalised, seemingly self-evident assumptions about normal persons (and neighbourhoods) stabilise broader unequal structural conditions in which policing and doing sociology take place. While it’s important to study stigmatisation, we can’t turn a blind eye to studying constructions of normality, since they depend on and mutually reinforce each other. Normality must be seen to be as central to the problem of social inequality as stigma and stigmatisation.

We must look closely at how normality is constructed, what its function is and how it feeds into social relations. While being aware that knowledge holds significant power, we have to ask ourselves why neighbourhoods like Brooks Hall are studied over and over again, and instead focus on studying the parts of society that hide behind the image of normality. We must carefully navigate between empirically revealing and understanding the common ideas and functions of normality, while not reinforcing uncritical understandings in the research itself. We must look at normality both empirically and conceptually – after all, as Audre Lorde said, it is “with this mystical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society”.