Location: Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (map)
William Julius Wilson
Guest Lecturer and Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University
Race and Affirming Opportunity in the Barack Obama Era
William Julius Wilson is the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University. He is the Director of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. One of the nation’s most distinguished sociologists, Professor Wilson has spent his career examining race, urban poverty, and policy in the U.S.; he has advised Presidents Clinton and Obama on these issues. His book, Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions, published in 1978, won the American Sociological Association's Sydney Spivack Award. The Truly Disadvantaged by Wilson was selected as one of the 16 best books of 1987 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review; it also received The Washington Monthly Annual Book Award and the Society for the Study of Social Problems' C. Wright Mills Award. Wilson’s When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor was selected as one of the notable books of 1996 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review and received the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award. When Work Disappears was also an inspiration for the second season of HBO’s series The Wire. His most recent study is More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (2009) in which he presents the controversial argument that intertwined cultural and institutional forces are responsible for the persistence of racial inequality.
Free and open to the public. A question and answer session will follow the lecture. Please feel free to bring a lunch.
A recording of the talk will be made available at Widener Library.