ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the beginning of the professionalization of social science disciplines in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century as the advent of white mainstream social science. At Chicago, Park established the study of racial and ethnic matters as a central concern of sociology and helped to integrate a few black students into the budding social science discipline, two very important moves for the early development of US sociology of 'race relations'. Instead, Eurocentrism, white racial framing, repetition of weak racial theory and methods, biased relationships to racial-power structures, and the marginalization or exclusion of black social scientists and other social scientists of color centrally define the history of the mainstream social sciences. Gunnar Myrdal was one of the most influential white social scientists of the twentieth century. Researching Jim Crow America, he was responsible for aggressively promoting a Eurocentric assimilation theory.
