Sociology and the Race Problem: The Failure of a Perspective

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