The Death of White Sociology

by Joyce A. Ladner

Edited by Howard University professor Joyce Ladner, The Death of White Sociology offers brilliant descriptions of black identity with excellent essays from writers like Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who take aim at the "social science fiction" of Euro-American sociological analysis, as well as political scientist Ron Walters's "Toward a Definition of Black Social Science" and E. Franklin Frazier's unsentimental critique, "The Failure of the Negro Intellectual." In a new foreword, Ladner notes that when the anthology was originally published in 1973, it "provoked healthy debates over a range of issues: Does Black sociology exist? If so, what are its theoretical assumptions, and what is the range of subject matter it covers?" The writers gathered within these pages provide diverse answers to those questions, examining--and refuting--Eurocentric distortions of what and who black people are. --Eugene Holley Jr.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1973