Sociology and the Race ProblemTracing 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.