This biographical article is written like a résumé .(February 2016) |
Lawrence D. Bobo is the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences and the Dean of Social Science at Harvard University. His research focuses on the intersection of social psychology,social inequality,politics,and race. [1]
Bobo graduated magna cum laude from Loyola Marymount University with his Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology in 1979. He then received his Master of Arts degree in 1981 and Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1984,both in sociology,from the University of Michigan. [2]
Bobo is the middle child of three sons born to Dr. Joseph R. Bobo,Sr.,a graduate of Meharry Medical College and once the chief of minor trauma at USC County Medical Hospital in Los Angeles,California and Joyce Cooper Bobo,a longtime teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
His mother is the daughter of Ann Nixon Cooper,the 106 year old Atlanta Black woman mentioned by Barack Obama in his victory speech given in Grant Park,Chicago upon his election as president in 2008. [3] He wrote of his relationship with her in a blog-post for The Root at the time of her death. [4]
He grew up in the San Fernando Valley,living in Pacoima when young and in Granada Hills in his teenage years,attending public schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District from kindergarten through graduating high school. After high school he attended college at Loyola Marymount University where he became president of the Speech and Debate Club in his Junior Year,once moderating a campus debate between Republican Congressman and LMU alum Robert K. Dornan and famed attorney Gloria Allred.
Bobo is married to Marcyliena H. Morgan,the Founding Director of the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute in the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
They live in the Brattle District of Cambridge,Massachusetts in a home originally designed by Lois Lilley Howe in 1898. [5] Bobo and Morgan re-modeled the home,contracting with distinguished Boston Architect Mary Ann Thompson [6] and consulting on the design of the kitchen with eminent chefs Jody Adams and Aaron Sanchez. The re-modeled Victorian has received recognition [7] and awards. [8]
Bobo has held tenured appointments in the sociology departments at the University of Wisconsin,Madison (1989–1991),University of California,Los Angeles (1993–1997),Stanford University (2005–2007),and Harvard University (1997–2004,2008–present).
He is a founding editor of the Du Bois Review , [9] published by Cambridge University Press. He is co-author of the book Racial Attitudes in America:Trends and Interpretations and senior editor of Prismatic Metropolis:Inequality in Los Angeles . His most recent book Prejudice in Politics:Group Position,Public Opinion,and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute was a finalist for the 2007 C. Wright Mills Award.
Bobo is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences [10] as well as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences [11] and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a Guggenheim Fellow,an Alphonse M. Fletcher Sr. Fellow,a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences,and a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar.
Bobo's h-index is currently 53 and Citation count is 26,881. [12]
As of 2024,he chairs American Institutes for Research's board of directors.
Bobo is also known for the journal article Somewhere Between Jim Crow &Post-Racialism:Reflections on the Racial Divide in America Today that details the effects the 'post-racialism' perspective has on the world.
Bobo's article is significant because it details the evolution of racism over time and how it has furthered into a permeable existence. When we claim to live in a 'post-racialism' world we deny the existence of discrimination. Implications of the 'post-racialism' world are overlooking the newly formed progressive attitudes that have taken the place of prejudice and discrimination.
Bobo shares three perspectives for post-racialism,the first stating "One of these meaning attached to the waning silence of what some have portrayed as a "black victimology" narrative. From this perspective,black complaints and grievances about inequality and discrimination are well worn tales". [13] Bobo's first perspective is relevant to the current political state and an NPR article supports Bobo's claims,discussing the African American slavery reparations bill in Congress having difficulty passing. Republicans stating,"Spend $20 million for a commission that's already decided to take money from people who were never involved in the evil of slavery and give it to people who were never subject to the evil of slavery". [14] Demonstrating the 'post-racialism' perspective in real time that racism is seen as a past tense with the post-racialism perspective.
Next,Bobo's second perspective is the genetic makeup of Americans shifting away from the previous black and white divide. It has become generally more acceptable for interracial couples and biracial children in today's world and the 'post-racialism' perspective embraces this in a positive way. Bobo states "Americans increasingly revere mixture and hybridity and are rushing to embrace a decidedly "beige" view of themselves and what is good for the body politic. Old fashioned racial dichotomies pale against the surge toward flexible,deracialized,and mixed ethnoracial identities and outlooks". [13] Emphasizing the forward-thinking Bobo's article has in reference to society;however,this integration of race still allowed the one drop rule to occur. The one drop rule states one drop of African American blood,meaning ANY African descendants,will obligate you to identify as African American.
Additionally,Bobo's third perspective of 'post-racialism' is color blindness,moving beyond the barriers of race as a nation. You will be unable to see discrimination if you do not see race to see the prejudice that takes place in the United States. Recognizing that racial groups face discrimination is necessary to progress and develop change by taking accountability for past wrongs. Furthermore,African American achievement signaled a shift into 'post-racialism',Barack Obama for instance,the president of the United States,is symbolic of 'post-racialism' to some analysts according to Bobo. If a person within a marginalized group could reach a status of high achievement than there is the naïve assumption that racial discrimination cannot exist. On the other hand,in his book he mentions the previous studies gathered data on the racial attitude within the United States,the study was used to support Jim Crow laws and insisted that black people were inferior to white people,stating "Accordingly,blacks were understood as inherently inferior to whites,both intellectually and temperamentally. As a result,society was to be expressly ordered in terms of white privilege,with blacks relegated to secondary status in education,access to jobs,and in civic status such as the right to vote." [13] However,according to the Gallup Poll within Bobo's book these ideas have since significantly declined since the 1940s indicating a large public shift in attitudes toward race.
In addition,Bobo talks about the wealth disparity between white and black families in the United States. According to the Brandeis University study cited by Bobo,displays African Americans falling,even the highest earned,significantly behind white family's wealth. Bobo elaborates on the importance of generational wealth and the benefits it can have for future generations stating,"To the extent that wealth bears on the capacity to survive a period of unemployment,to finance college for one's children,or to endure a costly illness or other unexpected large expense,these figures point to an enormous and growing disparity in the life chances of blacks and white in the United States." [13] Bobo is recognizing the implications of marginalization on the basis of race have on communities socially and financially and on the generations of black people today.
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.
Racial color blindness refers to the belief that a person's race or ethnicity should not influence their legal or social treatment in society.
William Julius Wilson is an American sociologist, a professor at Harvard University, and an author of works on urban sociology, race, and class issues. Laureate of the National Medal of Science, he served as the 80th President of the American Sociological Association, was a member of numerous national boards and commissions. He identified the importance of neighborhood effects and demonstrated how limited employment opportunities and weakened institutional resources exacerbated poverty within American inner-city neighborhoods.
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.
Reverse racism, sometimes referred to as reverse discrimination, is the concept that affirmative action and similar color-conscious programs for redressing racial inequality are forms of anti-white racism. The concept is often associated with conservative social movements and reflects a belief that social and economic gains by Black people and other people of color cause disadvantages for white people.
Jennifer A. Richeson is an American social psychologist who studies racial identity and interracial interactions. She is currently the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University where she heads the Social Perception and Communication Lab. Prior to her appointment to the Yale faculty, Richeson was Professor of Psychology and African-American studies at Northwestern University. In 2015, she was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. Richeson was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. Since 2021, she has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Joe Richard Feagin is an American sociologist and social theorist who has conducted extensive research on racial and gender issues in the United States. He is currently the Ella C. McFadden Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University. Feagin has previously taught at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, University of California, Riverside, University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Florida.
Laissez-faire racism is closely related to color blindness and covert racism, and is theorised to encompass an ideology that blames minorities for their poorer economic situations, viewing it as the result of cultural inferiority. The term is used largely by scholars of whiteness studies, who argue that laissez-faire racism has tangible consequences even though few would openly claim to be, or even believe they are, laissez-faire racists.
James A. Davis (1929–2016) was a distinguished American sociologist who is best known as a pioneer in the application of quantitative statistical methods to social science research and teaching. Most recently, he was a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Chicago.
Symbolic racism is a coherent belief system that reflects an underlying one-dimensional prejudice towards a racialized ethnicity. These beliefs include the stereotype that black people are morally inferior to white people, and that black people violate traditional White American values such as hard work and independence. However, symbolic racism is more of a general term than it is one specifically related to prejudice towards black people. These beliefs may cause the subject to discriminate against black people and to justify this discrimination. Some people do not view symbolic racism as prejudice since it is not linked directly to race but is indirectly linked through social and political issues.
Mary C. Waters is an American sociologist, demographer and author. She is the John L. Loeb Professor of Sociology and the PVK Professor of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Much of her work has focused on immigrants, the meaning of racial and ethnic identity, and how immigrants integrate into a new society. Waters chaired the 2015 National Research Council Panel on The Integration of Immigrants into American Society.
Christopher Sandy Jencks is an American social scientist.
Post-racial United States is a theoretical environment in which the United States is free from racial preference, discrimination, and prejudice.
William A. "Sandy" Darity Jr. is an American economist and social sciences researcher. Darity's research spans economic history, development economics, economic psychology, and the history of economic thought, but most of his research is devoted to group-based inequality, especially with respect to race and ethnicity. His 2005 paper in the Journal of Economics and Finance established Darity as the 'founder of stratification economics.' His varied research interests have also included the trans-Atlantic slave trade, African American reparations and the economics of black reparations, and social and economic policies that affect inequities by race and ethnicity. For the latter, he has been described as "perhaps the country’s leading scholar on the economics of racial inequality."
A racialized society is a society where socioeconomic inequality, residential segregation and low intermarriage rates are the norm, where humans' definitions of personal identity and choices of intimate relationships reveal racial distinctiveness.
David O’Keefe Sears is an American psychologist who specializes in political psychology. He is a distinguished professor of psychology and political science at the University of California, Los Angeles where he has been teaching since 1961. He served as dean of social sciences at UCLA between 1983 and 1992. Best known for his theory of symbolic racism, Sears has published many articles and books about the political and psychological origins of race relations in America, as well as on political socialization and life cycle effects on attitudes, the role of self-interest in attitudes, and multiculturalism. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in which the court held that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. With its companion case, Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court effectively overruled Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which validated some affirmative action in college admissions provided that race had a limited role in decisions.
Tali Mendelberg is the John Work Garrett Professor in Politics at Princeton University, co-director of the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, and director of the Program on Inequality at the Mamdouha S. Bobst Center for Peace and Justice, and winner of the American Political Science Association (APSA), 2002 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award for her book, The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages, and the Norm of Equality.
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Thomas Fraser Pettigrew is an American social psychologist best known for his research on American civil rights, and is one of the leading experts in the social science of race and ethnic relations.