(1894 – 1962) African American sociologist who made important contributions to understanding black experience. Frazier generally used an assimilation model, arguing that Africans had been stripped of their culture during the process of enslavement in Africa, the middle passage, and slavery in the Americas, and tended to see black culture negatively The Negro Church (1962) was becoming more like its white counterpart, while the Black Bourgeoisie (1957) was characterized by people who had “escaped into a world of makebelieve.” Frazier’s ideas were picked up by people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose arguments about the black family being a “tangle of pathology” were based on The Negro Family (1939). Though these ideas were largely discredited as “blaming the victim” in the 1970s, they have found their way back into mainstream political discourse, especially in arguments about the underclass and the need for welfare reform.