Sociology and the Race Problem

The Failure of a Perspective

• Author(s): James B. McKee,
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Pages: 376
• ISBN_10: 0252063287
  ISBN_13: 9780252063282
  
• Language: en
• Categories: History / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies) , Social Science / General , Social Science / Ethnic Studies / American / African American & Black Studies , Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social , Social Science / Sociology / General , Social Science / Black Studies (Global) , Social Science / Race & Ethnic Relations ,

Description:...
Tracing developments in the sociology of race relations from the 1920s
to the 1960s, McKee maintains that sociologists assumed the United States
would move unimpeded toward modernization and assimilation, aided by industrialization
and urbanization. The fatal flaw in their perspective was the notion that
blacks were culturally inferior, backward, and pre-modern, a people who
had lost their own culture and couldn't grasp that of their new society.
Designed to detail a failure the author says is widely acknowledged but
little examined, this book will be of interest to both specialists and
general readers.
"Masterful. . . . McKee transports the reader back to the intellectual
world in which the early sociologists worked and does not simply treat
them as evil racists. His approach is informed by the sociology of knowledge."
-- Lewis M. Killian, author of The Impossible Revolution, Phase
2: Black Power and the American Dream