A mong the reasons why so much confusion surrounds the interpretation of the African-American experience is the failure of scholars to properly understand the unique characteristics of AfricanAmerican culture. Or, put in a slightly different way, too many insist on treating the dominant Anglo-American culture, its many European-American ethnic variants, and African-American culture as though they exist at the same conceptual level. In the years before 1967, when I naively thought I might grow up to be a sociologist, I often taught a course called Race and Ethnicity. It was a standard course in American sociology departments, much like Social Problems, Sociological Theory, Marriage and the Family, and Introductory Sociology in that no self-respecting sociology department would have been without it. Of course, it was taught in different ways, but the underlying assumption wherever I studied and taught was that race and ethnicity were much the same and that the same theories used to study U.S. immigrant populations could also be applied to U.S. Negroes. Although I dutifully taught the course in this way, I never quite convinced myself that blacks fit this framework. I seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time reinterpreting the black experience in ways that were foreign to me as an African-American in order to make it fit the sociological assumptions of the time. Part of the problem was that so little was known of black history in white universities before the 1970s. Sociologists were theorizing about a people of whose past they knew little. Shortly after I finally realized I was never going to be smart enough to be a sociologist and enrolled in graduate school in history, a number of my fe l low graduate s tudents and I were discussing our research interests. When I said I wanted to study African-American history, one said in surprise, "Why I didn't realize you people had any history." This statement is actually not as racist as it sounds. What he meant was that, as historians largely rely on documents in their research and blacks had left few of them, there could be no black history. Of course, when scholars went looking for these documents they found far more than they could handle, but prior to the 1970s most sociologists knew little about black history and so found it easy to prune the black experience to fit their ethnicity model. There were few black sociologists around to correct them, although some, such as Oliver Cromwell Cox in his Caste, Class, and Race (1948), did their very best.