Racism is discrimination and prejudice against people based on their race or ethnicity. Racism can be present in social actions, practices, or political systems that support the expression of prejudice or aversion in discriminatory practices. The ideology underlying racist practices often assumes that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups that are different in their social behavior and innate capacities and that can be ranked as inferior or superior. Racist ideology can become manifest in many aspects of social life. Associated social actions may include nativism, xenophobia, otherness, segregation, hierarchical ranking, supremacism, and related social phenomena. Racism refers to violation of racial equality based on equal opportunities or based on equality of outcomes for different races or ethnicities, also called substantive equality.
Racial color blindness refers to the belief that a person's race or ethnicity should not influence their legal or social treatment in society.
Patricia Hill Collins is an American academic specializing in race, class, and gender. She is a distinguished university professor of sociology emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also the former head of the Department of African-American Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Collins was elected president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and served in 2009 as the 100th president of the association – the first African-American woman to hold this position.
David William Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Wilma A. Dunaway is Professor Emerita of Sociology in the Government and International Affairs Program at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia.
David Brion Davis was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and founder and director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Ira Berlin was an American historian, professor of history at the University of Maryland, and former president of Organization of American Historians.
Robin Blackburn is a British historian, a former editor of New Left Review (1983–1999), and emeritus professor in the department of sociology at Essex University.
Howard Winant is an American sociologist and race theorist. Winant is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Winant is best known for developing the theory of racial formation along with Michael Omi. Winant's research and teachings revolve around race and racism, comparative historical sociology, political sociology, social theory, and human rights.
France Winddance Twine is a Black and Native American sociologist, ethnographer, visual artist, and documentary filmmaker. Twine has conducted field research in Brazil, the UK, and the United States on race, racism, and anti-racism. She has published 11 books and more than 100 articles, review essays, and books on these topics.
George M. Fredrickson was an American author, activist, historian, and professor. He was the Edgar E. Robinson Professor of United States History at Stanford University until his retirement in 2002. After his retirement he continued to publish several texts, authoring a total of eight books and editing four more in addition to writing various articles. One of his best known works remains White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History, which received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize and the Merle Curti Award as well as made him a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award.
Walter Johnson is an American historian, and a professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, where he previously (2014–2020) directed the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.
Dorceta E. Taylor is an American environmental sociologist known for her work on both environmental justice and racism in the environmental movement. She is the senior associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion at Yale School of the Environment, as well as a professor of environmental justice. Prior to this, she was the director of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Michigan's School of Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), where she also served as the James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Professor of Environmental Justice. Taylor's research has ranged over environmental history, environmental justice, environmental policy, leisure and recreation, gender and development, urban affairs, race relations, collective action and social movements, green jobs, diversity in the environmental field, food insecurity, and urban agriculture.
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory is a 2001 book by the American historian David W. Blight. The book was awarded the Frederick Douglass Prize for the best book on slavery of 2001.
Thavolia Glymph is an American historian and professor. She is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Duke University. She specializes in nineteenth-century US history, African-American history and women’s history, authoring Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2020). Elected the 140th president of the American Historical Association, she is the first Black woman to serve in that office.
Crystal Marie Fleming is an American sociologist and author. She is full professor of sociology and Africana studies at Stony Brook University. Fleming is the author/editor of four books about race and white supremacy.
Racial capitalism is a concept reframing the history of capitalism as grounded in the extraction of social and economic value from people of marginalized racial identities, typically from black people. It was described by Cedric J. Robinson in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983, which, in contrast to both his predecessors and successors, theorized that all capitalism is inherently racial capitalism, and racialism is present in all layers of capitalism's socioeconomic stratification. Jodi Melamed has summarized the concept, explaining that capitalism "can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups", and therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the "unequal differentiation of human value."
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life is a 2012 anthology book co-authored by sociologist Karen Fields and her sister, historian Barbara J. Fields. The book examines the origins and production of race and racism in the United States. Published by Verso Books, Racecraft is organized as a collection of three original essays and six republished essays examining race. The book draws an analogy between race and witchcraft, arguing that both concepts function as mystical, yet seemingly rational explanations for real events.
Karen E. Fields is an American sociologist. She is the sister of historian Barbara J. Fields.
Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America's World War II Military is a book by American historian Thomas A. Guglielmo, published on October 1, 2021, by Oxford University Press. The book explores the complex and multifaceted nature of racism and resistance within the United States military during World War II, as well as their long-term implications for the poswart desegregation of America's armed forces and the civil rights movement. Guglielmo, a historian and Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University, conducted extensive archival research for the book, which won the Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Award in 2022.
