Sociology and the Race Problem: THE FAILURE OF A PERSPECTIVE

McKee, James B.

ISBN 10: 0252063287 / ISBN 13: 9780252063282

Published by University of Illinois Press, 1993

About this Item

Used - Very Good.

Seller Inventory # 2-P-50951

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Sociology and the Race Problem: THE FAILURE OF A PERSPECTIVE
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252063287
• ISBN 13: 9780252063282
• Binding: paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

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

From the Back Cover

Why have sociologists failed to understand twentieth-century American race relations? James McKee finds answers in assumptions underlying sociology's perspective on race in American life and in the discipline's demeaning image of blacks. 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. The major wave of black rebellion in the 1960s finally made it obvious that sociologists had been wrong.