The Sociological Tradition of E. Franklin Frazier

The thesis of this paper is that the core of E. Franklin Frazier's empirical and theoretical work points to the issue of assimilation as a central problem facing Black Americans. As such, Frazier addresses the critical question of what Black Americans will become racially and culturally. This question is couched within what I argue to be the central focus of Black Studies as a field of study, i.e., the problem of cultural hegemony. By cultural hegemony I mean the systemic tendency of one culture to negate another.' Cultural hegemony, of course, is not limited to Black Studies as an object of intellectual inquiry. However, a focus on cultural hegemony is critical to Black Studies because the experience of structured inequality has had a profound tendency to distort intellectual inquiry and ideational processes among Afro-Americans and thus this group's capacity to transform its subordinate status in society.2 A growing Afro-American intellectual tradition continually points to the above dilemma. For example, W.E.B. DuBois spoke of a world that yields Afro-Americans no true self-consciousness, but only lets them see themselves through the revelations of a White world.3 Carter G. Woodson assailed this dilemma when he spoke of the mis-education of Afro-Americans. For Woodson, education

Epistemology · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Social and Cultural Dynamics

• The Dialectics of Cultural Survival and the Community Artist

  Open Access•Clovis E Semmes•Journal of Black Studies•1994

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