Was There a Distinct "African American Sociology"?(Essay‪)‬

As a scholar of Black Studies in general and of the history of African Americans and European Americans in the social sciences in particular, I was struck with befuddlement by a superficially simple yet devilishly complex question: Why should one pursue my narrow line of work? One might answer--I thought at one time--that the aforementioned project is essential purely for the well-rounded scholar's edification. At other times--I thought--one might also answer that, history can be instrumental in gauging how much progress the social sciences have made in diversifying the composition of their students and their theoretical and research concerns since their origins as academic disciplines in the United States of America at the turn-of-the twentieth century. Finally, as I once argued, one could even argue that history could and should also demonstrate how retrograde the social sciences are in the above concerns (Williams 1977).