Spotlight on UC Press Black Authors

UC Press is committed to supporting the research and mission of Black scholars, and we’re so proud of our many award-winning and acclaimed Black authors. For this year’s ASA, we want to spotlight some the of Black sociologists and scholars in our publishing program who are making waves with their influential scholarship.

Please take a moment and help us give them a shout-out on social, with the #ASA2020 hashtag!

Andrea Boyles

Andrea S. Boyles is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Lindenwood University, Belleville. She is a feminist, race scholar, and the author of You Can’t Stop the Revolution (featured below) as well as Race, Place, and Suburban Policing: Too Close for Comfort.

Follow @DrAndreaSBoyles
Read Andrea Boyle’s blog: “The Case for Police Abolition: How I knew it was coming and addressed it“

You Can’t Stop the Revolution
Community Disorder and Social Ties in Post-Ferguson America

You Can’t Stop the Revolution is a vivid participant ethnography conducted from inside of Ferguson protests as the Black Lives Matter movement catapulted onto the global stage. Sociologist Andrea S. Boyles offers an everyday montage of protests, social ties, and empowerment that coalesced to safeguard black lives while igniting unprecedented twenty-first-century resistance. Focusing on neighborhood crime prevention and contentious black citizen–police interactions in the context of preserving black lives, this book examines how black citizens work to combat disorder, crime, and police conflict. Boyles offers an insider’s analysis of cities like Ferguson, where a climate of indifference leaves black neighborhoods vulnerable to conflict, where black lives are seemingly expendable, and where black citizens are held responsible for their own oppression. You Can’t Stop the Revolution serves as a reminder that community empowerment is still possible in neighborhoods experiencing police brutality and interpersonal violence.

Orly Clerge

Orly Clerge is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The New Noir (featured below), as well as coeditor of Stories from the Front of the Room: How Higher Education Faculty Overcome Challenges and Thrive in the Academy.

Follow @oclerge

The New Noir
Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia

Mary C. Douglas Prize for Best Book 2020
C. Wright Mills Award Finalist 2019

In The New Noir, Orly Clerge explores the richly complex worlds of an extraordinary generation of Black middle class adults who have migrated from different corners of the African diaspora to suburbia. The Black middle class today consists of diverse groups whose ongoing cultural, political, and material ties to the American South and Global South shape their cultural interactions at work, in their suburban neighborhoods, and at their kitchen tables. Clerge compellingly analyzes the making of a new multinational Black middle class and how they create a spectrum of Black identities that help them carve out places of their own in a changing 21st-century global city.

Dawn Marie Dow

Dawn Marie Dow is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Faculty Associate at the Maryland Population Research Center. She is the author of Mothering While Black.

Follow @Dawn_M_Dow

Mothering While Black
Boundaries and Burdens of Middle-Class Parenthood

William J. Goode Book Award 2020

Mothering While Black examines the complex lives of the African American middle class—in particular, black mothers and the strategies they use to raise their children to maintain class status while simultaneously defining and protecting their children’s “authentically black” identities. Sociologist Dawn Marie Dow shows how the frameworks typically used to research middle-class families focus on white mothers’ experiences, inadequately capturing the experiences of African American middle- and upper-middle-class mothers. At the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, work, family, and culture, Mothering While Black sheds light on the exclusion of African American middle-class mothers from the dominant cultural experience of middle-class motherhood.

Bill Drummond

William J. Drummond is Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. His award-winning career includes stints at the Louisville Courier-Journal, where he covered the civil rights movement, and the Los Angeles Times, where he was a local reporter, then bureau chief in New Delhi and Jerusalem, and later a Washington correspondent. He was appointed a White House Fellow by then president Gerald R. Ford and later became Jimmy Carter’s associate press secretary. He joined NPR in 1977 and became the founding editor of Morning Edition. At UC Berkeley, Drummond was awarded the 2016 Leon A. Henkin Award for his distinguished service and exceptional commitment to the educational development of students from groups who are underrepresented in the academy.

Watch his book talk with UC Press

Prison Truth
The Story of the San Quentin News

San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest prison and the nation’s largest, is notorious for once holding America’s most dangerous prisoners. But in 2008, the Bastille-by-the-Bay became a beacon for rehabilitation through the prisoner-run newspaper the San Quentin News. Prison Truth tells the story of how prisoners, many serving life terms, transformed the prison climate from what Johnny Cash called a living hell to an environment that fostered positive change in inmates’ lives. Award-winning journalist William J. Drummond takes us behind bars, introducing us to Arnulfo García, the visionary prisoner who led the revival of the newspaper. Drummond describes how the San Quentin News, after a twenty-year shutdown, was recalled to life under an enlightened warden and the small group of local retired newspaper veterans serving as advisers, which Drummond joined in 2012. Sharing how officials cautiously and often unwittingly allowed the newspaper to tell the stories of the incarcerated, Prison Truth illustrates the power of prison media to humanize the experiences of people inside penitentiary walls and to forge alliances with social justice networks seeking reform.

Marcus Hunter

Marcus Anthony Hunter is Chair of the Department of African American Studies, Associate Professor of Sociology, and he holds the Scott Waugh Endowed Chair in the Division of the Social Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the co-author of Chocolate Cities (featured below), as well as Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America and the president of the Association of Black Sociologists.

Chocolate Cities
The Black Map of American Life

ASA, Community and Urban Section, Robert E. Park Award 2019

From Central District Seattle to Harlem to Holly Springs, Black people have built a dynamic network of cities and towns where Black culture is maintained, created, and defended. But imagine—what if current maps of Black life are wrong? Chocolate Cities offers a refreshing and persuasive rendering of the United States—a “Black map” that more accurately reflects the lived experiences and the future of Black life in America. Drawing on film, fiction, music, and oral history, Marcus Anthony Hunter and Zandria F. Robinson trace the Black American experience of race, place, and liberation, mapping it from Emancipation to now. As the United States moves toward a majority minority society, Chocolate Cities provides a provocative, broad, and necessary assessment of how racial and ethnic minorities make and change America’s social, economic, and political landscape.

Nikki Jones

Nikki Jones is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Chosen Ones (featured below), as well as Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence.

Follow @socprofjones
Read Nikki Jones’ blog, “Why we need to defund, not defend, the police“

The Chosen Ones
Black Men and the Politics of Redemption

CHOICE Book Award 2018

In The Chosen Ones, sociologist and feminist scholar Nikki Jones shares the compelling story of a group of Black men living in San Francisco’s historically Black neighborhood, the Fillmore. Against all odds, these men work to atone for past crimes by reaching out to other Black men, young and old, with the hope of guiding them toward a better life. Yet despite their genuine efforts, they struggle to find a new place in their old neighborhood. With a poignant yet hopeful voice, Jones illustrates how neighborhood politics, everyday interactions with the police, and conservative Black gender ideologies shape the men’s ability to make good and forgive themselves—and how the double-edged sword of community shapes the work of redemption.

Aldon Morris

2021 ASA President
W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award 2020

Aldon D. Morris is Leon Forrest Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University and the author of The Scholar Denied, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, and other books.

Read his recent Scientific American Op-Ed: “We’ll Never Fix Systemic Racism by Being Polite“
Read our Q&A with Aldon Morris

The Scholar Denied
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology

2017 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, American Sociological Association History of Sociology Section (and many more)

In this groundbreaking book, Aldon D. Morris’s ambition is truly monumental: to help rewrite the history of sociology and to acknowledge the primacy of W. E. B. Du Bois’s work in the founding of the discipline. Calling into question the prevailing narrative of how sociology developed, Morris, a major scholar of social movements, probes the way in which the history of the discipline has traditionally given credit to Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago, who worked with the conservative black leader Booker T. Washington to render Du Bois invisible. The Scholar Denied is based on extensive, rigorous primary source research; the book is the result of a decade of research, writing, and revision.

Zandria Robinson

Zandria F. Robinson is Associate Professor in Rhodes College’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. She is co-author of Chocolate Cities (featured below), as well as This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South. Robinson is also the coeditor of Repositioning Race: Prophetic Research in a Postracial Obama Age.

Check out Robinson’s website

Chocolate Cities
The Black Map of American Life

ASA, Community and Urban Section, Robert E. Park Award 2019

Celeste Watkins-Hayes

Celeste Watkins-Hayes is Professor of Sociology and African American Studies, and Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. She is the author of also the author of The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform.

@watkinshayes
Check out her website

Remaking a Life
How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality

Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award 2020

Remaking a Life uses the HIV/AIDS epidemic as a lens to understand how women generate radical improvements in their social well being in the face of social stigma and economic disadvantage. Drawing on interviews with nationally recognized AIDS activists as well as over one hundred Chicago-based women living with HIV/AIDS, Celeste Watkins-Hayes takes readers on an uplifting journey through women’s transformative projects, a multidimensional process in which women shift their approach to their physical, social, economic, and political survival, thereby changing their viewpoint of “dying from” AIDS to “living with” it.

Adia Harvey-Wingfield

Adia Harvey Wingfield is Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a regular contributor to Slate, Harvard Business Review, and the Atlantic. Her previous book is No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men’s Work.

Read her recent HBR article: “We Built a Diverse Academic Department in 5 Years. Here’s How.”

Flatlining
Race, Work, and Health Care in the New Economy

C. Wright Mills Award 2019

In Flatlining, Adia Harvey Wingfield exposes how hospitals, clinics, and other institutions participate in “racial outsourcing,” relying heavily on black doctors, nurses, technicians, and physician assistants to do “equity work”—extra labor that makes organizations and their services more accessible to communities of color. Wingfield argues that as these organizations become more profit driven, they come to depend on black health care professionals to perform equity work to serve increasingly diverse constituencies. Yet black workers often do this labor without recognition, compensation, or support. Operating at the intersection of work, race, gender, and class, Wingfield makes plain the challenges that black employees must overcome and reveals the complicated issues of inequality in today’s workplaces and communities.