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.