Sociology and the race problem : the failure of a perspective / James B. McKee.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McKee, James B., 1919-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Black people.

African Americans.

United States--Race relations.

United States.

Race relations.

Physical Description:

376 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Urbana, Ill. : University of Illinois Press, [1993]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

1. Sociology and Race: The First Generation 22

2. From Biology to Culture: Redefining the Race Problem 55

3. From the Race Problem to Race Relations 103

4. Folk, Peasant, and Caste: The Retreat from Racial Change 145

5. Discovering the Black American 181

6. An American Dilemma: Race as a Moral Problem 222

7. Race Relations as Intergroup Relations 256

8. Desegregation and Social Practice 291

9. The Failure of a Perspective 337.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and ndex.

ISBN:

0252020227

0252063287

OCLC:

27144524