Arthur Sakamoto 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. His research on this topic has been mostly unpopular among many American sociologists who seek to emphasize "structural racism" that supposedly promotes "White privilege." He is currently editing a volume for Theory and Society entitled "Stratification and Inequality among Sociologists." (October, 2025)

1. I'd be interested in the differences between the Old Left and today's wokeists in your specialty? Are there people who bridge both? 

In one of my former departments, there was a famous professor who was masterful at promoting Woke ideology in sociology in regard to racial and ethnic studies. Earlier in his long career, he had worked in the areas of urban studies and then feminism. However, promoting the ideology of “systemic racism” and “White privilege” was what became most successful for him in American sociology, and so he increasingly switched his focus to that market niche. In his many books, he naively portrayed Whites as seething racists who are constantly seeking to perpetrate violence, police brutality, segregation, political attacks, and cultural degradation of African Americans. Whites are deemed to be inherently evil creatures who are incapable of understanding that racism is deplorable. Superlative in a haughty rhetoric, he was truly skilled at interpreting any situation as being solely due to White people acting out their evil racist impulses. He was himself White, and he seemed to believe that he was some sort of messiah who was morally superior by virtue of being able to renounce and transcend the inherent evilness of his own racial group.

He gloriously excelled at cherry-picking and filtering all information to promote his ideology. In one of his books on Asian Americans, he portrays Asian Americans as being hapless victims of more White racism. The fact that Asian Americans systematically obtain higher socioeconomic attainments than Whites is of course denied or obfuscated in his book. It has become a citation classic because other ideologues in American sociology are constantly citing it in order to collectively promote their shared Woke ideology thereby aggrandizing their academic power. That is, because Asian Americans are a particularly obvious inconvenient fact for Woke ideology, his book on Asian Americans became very popular among Woke sociologists.

Because American sociology has come to greatly reward this type of propaganda, he was extremely successful in his career and was very highly paid (college deans are of course enamored by large citation counts). He received all kinds of grandiose awards, funding, and professional advantages. For a while, he even used his own textbook as required reading in his large class on racial and ethnic relations so as to directly increase his income through the sale of his own books. Because he wrote many popular books, an interesting question would be how much he earned from the sale of them all the while claiming that he abhors the sins of racist White capitalism.

 I remember when I was a young assistant professor trying to support the costs of my family while at the same time struggling to publish enough research to hopefully eventually gain tenure. At that time, he casually recommended to me that I should follow his lead and take a month off during the summer heat of Texas and spend it vacationing on a dude ranch in Colorado. Although I was always frugal enough to be able to pay all of my expenses, I marveled at that luxury which he seemed to take for granted that all sociologists could enjoy.

Towards the latter part of his career, he became so famous that he had a lot of power in his sociology department. He steadfastly used that power to dominate the department by advocating for the admission of graduate students, the hiring of new faculty, and the promotion of programs and procedures that allowed him to best augment his ideological influence. Of course, anyone who dared to seriously disagree with him was deemed a racist. He could not actually engage in any serious argument since any data that did not fit his ideology would be simply dismissed as inconsequential for any number of putative reasons (e.g., “that is so racist!”). In regard to any awards or rankings of graduate students, he would of course rate his own graduate students as the absolute very best since he viewed them as his disciples who would carry forth his Woke gospel.

He incessantly claimed that Whites are racist but then also asserted that Whites making generalizations about Blacks is a racist behavior that must be bemoaned. In other words, making negative generalizations about a racial group is racist except when he himself does so about Whites. When asked why he did not reside in the Black neighborhoods of the city (i.e., he lived in a big house in a predominately White neighborhood) he replied that he needed "peace and quiet" to concentrate on his writing. He evidently had no cognitive dissonance in writing about how Whites are racist for preferring to live in White neighborhoods, but he nonetheless seemed to believe that he was a saintly "anti-racist" who just happened not to want to live near purportedly noisy Black neighbors. 

After greedily acquiring millions of dollars in lifetime earnings from universities over the course of his career, he finally retired in his 80’s. He could never be compatible with the "Old Left" (and never cared to) because he became wealthy by writing contemptuously about Whites the majority of whom made much less money than he did. Since he earned a fine salary portraying working-class Whites as evil and stupid, he could never really embrace the traditional Leftist cause of advancing the lives of the poor (most of whom are White). In vilifying Whites by claiming that they are always exploiting Blacks, he was indirectly arguing against class inequality or economic exploitation as a fundamental problem because his own comfortable economic privilege was based on promoting "White racism" as being the most serious shortcoming of American society.