The ‘White’ Problem

In this chapter, Charles Mills looks at the historic framing of race as “the Negro problem” and its implications for the development of American sociology in particular. As black radical theorists of the socio-political order have always insisted: to the extent that there is a Negro problem, it has to be contextualized within the larger structural matrix of the white problem. But the failure to recognize white oppression as the environing and shaping causal background has necessarily misoriented inquiry from the start. Drawing on two prizewinning sociological texts, Stephen Steinberg’s Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (1995) and Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (2015), Mills argues that “epistemic injustice” as a concept has to be expanded to include possible foundational distortions in the structure of the disciplines themselves.

The Negro Problem Of Identity And Existence In The Novel “Invisible Man” By Ralph Ellison

This article attempts to study the Negro problem of identity and existence in the postwar American novel. The core of this study tackles the desperate quest, this man is living in a blind and racist American world, which denies his existence, and reduces him almost to a non-entity making him ever more restless, possessed and exhausted.

Manufacturing Racial Stigma

The Hollywood Jim Crow creates a resurgence of the Negro Problem previously articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in which Blackness becomes a race stigma in need of remedy. Black directors’ perspectives and career trajectories are steered in a direction to overcome Hollywood insiders’ presumption of the unbankable label—that movies with Black casts or lead actors do not make enough money and are risky investments. Directors brand their movies as human and universal, stating they are relatable to all moviegoers and not just a subsection of Black audiences. Some directors are pressured to work with mostly white or multiracial casts if they are to have increasing production budgets. This retreat from Blackness undermines the notion that Black directors in Hollywood would necessarily bring more Black movies to the screen.