[Peace-discuss] Duster and Wells

[David Green]

As mentioned at last evening's meeting, Troy Duster,
grandson of Ida B. Wells, is President of the American
Sociological Association.  
  
Profile of the ASA President . . . 

Troy Duster: A Biography in History 
by Harry G. Levine, City University of New York-Queens
College, and Craig Reinarman, University of
California-Santa Cruz 

A recent Scientific American profile of Troy Duster
told of a 1997 meeting at the National Human Genome
Research Institute. The eminent geneticists agreed on
a mantra: “Race doesn’t exist.” They insisted that
because the DNA of people with different skin colors
and hair textures is 99.9 percent alike, the notion of
race had no meaning in science: 

Then sociologist Troy Duster pulled a forensics paper
out of his briefcase. It claimed that criminologists
could find out whether a suspect was Caucasian,
Afro-Caribbean or Asian Indian merely by analyzing
three sections of DNA. “It was chilling,” recalls
Francis S. Collins, director of the Institute. He had
not been aware of DNA sequences that could identify
race, and it shocked him that the information can be
used to investigate crimes. “It stopped the
conversation in its tracks” (Lehrman, 2003).

Years before the Human Genome Project had begun,
Duster had already been patiently explaining that
while genetic research cannot find race as a
biological reality, race remains very much a social
reality—with important biological outcomes, such as
sharply higher rates of hypertension and prostate
cancer in racialized populations. When the revolution
in molecular biology arrived, Duster warned that DNA
markers linked to ancestral origins would be used to
attempt genetic explanations of these conditions—a
dangerous pathway to the reinscription of the biology
of race. “In large part, thanks to Duster,” the
Scientific American article said, “Collins and other
geneticists have begun grappling with forensic,
epidemiological and pharmacogenomic data that raise
the question of race at the DNA level.” As a result,
says Collins, “Duster is a person that rather
regularly gets tapped on the shoulder and asked for
help.” 

Troy Duster has been doing this kind of thing for many
years on many issues—using solid data and telling
examples to shift scientific conversations, and
sometimes, political debates as well. He is, to use
Michael Burawoy’s four-fold schema, a professional
sociologist, a policy sociologist, a critical
sociologist, and a public sociologist. 

Distinguished Scholarship 

Duster’s research and writing have ranged widely
across the sociology of law, science, deviance,
inequality, race, and education. In addition to
numerous book chapters, he has published in an
extraordinary array of scholarly journals including
Nature, Social Problems, Science, Ethnicities,
Representations, the Bulletin de Methodologie
Sociologique, The American Sociologist, Philosophy and
Social Action, Politics and the Life Sciences, Crime
and Delinquency, Society, Social Psychiatry, The Black
Scholar, Les Temps Modernes, and The Japanese Journal
of Science. His research has been translated into
French, German, Italian and Japanese. 

His first book, The Legislation of Morality: Drugs,
Crime, and Law (1970), a classic in the drug field,
showed that when the demographics of opiate addiction
shifted, so did its definition and the law. When
addicts were predominantly white, middle-class,
middle-aged women, addiction was a health problem
dealt with privately by physicians. But when addiction
spread among more “disreputable” groups like poor
young men, it was redefined as a crime problem dealt
with publicly by imprisonment. 

Duster’s other books include the seminal Backdoor to
Eugenics (1990), which The Nation called a “lucid
landmark.” In his introduction to the second edition
(2003), Pierre Bourdieu applauds Duster for showing
the dangerous slide toward a “covert eugenics” that
has emerged as “old mythologies” about intelligence
and crime are “dressed in the biological sciences.” 

Duster’s most recent book is Whitewashing Race: The
Myth of a Color-Blind Society (2003; co-authored with
Brown, Carnoy, Currie, Oppenheimer, Shultz, and
Wellman). It received extraordinary critical acclaim,
won the Benjamin Hooks Award, and was a finalist in
2004 for the C. Wright Mills Award. “Framed as a
response to conservative analysts who claim that
racial problems are essentially solved,” wrote Andrew
Hacker, Whitewashing Race is “a brilliant, seamless
book on America’s deepest divide.” 

Duster has been an editor for Theory and Society,
Sociological Inquiry, Contemporary Sociology, The
American Sociologist, and the ASA’s Rose Monograph
Series. He is currently a member of the Social Science
Research Council, and has served on committees for the
National Academy of Sciences, the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, the American
Association of Law Schools, the National Science
Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the National
Institutes of Health, and he was Chair of the Ethical,
Legal and Social Issues Committee of the Human Genome
Project. 

Among other awards, Duster has received a Guggenheim
Fellowship at the London School of Economics, an
honorary Doctor of Letters from Williams College, and
the DuBois-Johnson-Frazier Award from the American
Sociological Association. He’s currently Professor of
Sociology and Director of the Institute for the
History of the Production of Knowledge at New York
University, as well as Chancellor’s Professor of
Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley,
where he has taught since 1970. 

Scratch a Theory . . . 

Troy is fond of saying, “Scratch a theory, you find a
biography.” It follows that careers like his don’t
come out of the blue. 

Troy’s grandmother, Ida B. Wells, was born as a slave
in Mississippi in 1862. As Phillip Dray (2002:53) has
written, Wells grew up in the exhilarating spirit of
Reconstruction “believing fervently in the promise of
black citizenship and accomplishment, and for the rest
of her life chose to behave as though that promise had
never been withdrawn.” In the 1880s, her sharply
worded articles about the challenges facing
African-Americans were published in many black
newspapers. The editor of the New York Age wrote of
Wells, “She has plenty of nerve, is as sharp as a
steel trap, and she has no sympathy for humbug.” 

In 1892, three black shopkeepers in Memphis were
lynched for competing too well against white
merchants. When local protests brought no results,
Wells wrote newspaper articles about their lives and
what had been done to them. The lynchings, she
explained, had been “an excuse to get rid of Negroes
who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep
the race terrorized.” She investigated lynchings
throughout the south and produced a series of articles
for the national black press challenging the widely
believed claim that lynchings were mainly responses to
black men raping white women. Her writings launched
the first national campaign against lynchings.
Frederick Douglas called her articles “a revelation”
and admitted that until he had read them he himself
had believed “that there was increased lasciviousness
on the part of Negroes” (Dray, 2002:67). 

Death threats forced Wells to move from Memphis to New
York City where she became an even more prominent
writer and speaker. Ida B. Wells was a star of the
first generation of writers who invented the field of
investigative journalism. She helped found the NAACP
as well as the National Afro-American Council, serving
as chair of its Anti-Lynching Bureau, and she worked
tirelessly alongside W. E. B. DuBois and other leading
lights of racial justice. She raised six children and
died in 1931, five years before her grandson, Troy,
was born. Wells was brave and brainy beyond measure,
but despite all her accomplishments she could not
leave her family the financial assets for a
comfortable life. 

When Troy was nine his father died and Troy was raised
in poverty by Wells’s daughter, Alfreda Duster, and
his three older brothers and sister, in the heart of
the ghetto on the south side of Chicago. His mother
was a community organizer who taught him many valuable
things, including: to get a good education, to
contribute to the community, to play bridge
skillfully, and to not mention his famous grandmother
so as to avoid putting on airs—a habit he retains to
this day. Even some long-time colleagues do not know,
or learned only from elsewhere, about Duster’s
extraordinary grandmother. In recent years, he has
been more public about Wells. With his siblings, he
established the Ida B. Wells Foundation to give awards
to journalists and researchers working in Wells’s
tradition of writing and speaking out for civil
rights, civil liberties, and social justice. 

Troy attended the local high school, was editor of the
school newspaper, and graduated first in his class. He
went to Northwestern University on an academic
scholarship, one of only three blacks in his class,
studying journalism and sociology. He was mentored by
Raymond Mack, who encouraged him to go to graduate
school at the University of California,Los Angeles,
where for two years he studied ethnomethodology with
Harold Garfinkel and methodology with W. S. Robinson.
Mack then invited Duster back to Northwestern, where
he wrote a dissertation on social responses to
abnormality and mental illness, receiving his PhD in
1962. He then did research in Sweden where he met—and
argued about race in America with—Gunnar Myrdal. 

Duster’s first professorship was at the University of
California-Riverside. In the aftermath of the 1965
Watts riots, Duster was asked to speak at a large
public meeting in conservative, white Orange County.
His remarks were brief and polite, but still he
received threatening phone calls and found garbage
dumped on his lawn. Friends say this eventually
convinced him to move to the University of
California-Berkeley and take a position at the Center
for Research and Development in Higher Education. Even
before becoming a professor at Berkeley, he was
regularly asked to address the Academic Senate to help
faculty understand racial controversies on campus. 

Duster’s many years of service at UC Berkeley included
being Chair of its Sociology Department, and founding
and directing (for 17 years) the Institute for the
Study of Social Change. He also directed Berkeley’s
path-breaking Diversity Project and authored a major
report on the effects of a generation of affirmative
action. In countless committees and behind-the-scenes
negotiations, he has been an indefatigable advocate
for opening up higher education to those historically
excluded. He also served as Chair of the Board of
Directors of the Association of American Colleges and
Universities, and was principal author of ASA’s 2003
official statement on race. 

Mentor 

Over the years, Duster has actively mentored a great
many PhD students, over 65 of them Asian, African
American, Latino, or Native American. As the child of
Alfreda Duster and Ida B. Wells, he embraced the
women’s movement as part of the struggle for civil
rights and social justice. At the Institute for the
Study of Social Change and elsewhere, his quiet
generosity created humane environments where many
students, researchers, faculty, and visiting scholars
could do productive work. In Berkeley and New York he
has hosted innumerable seminars, dinners and informal
get-togethers where students at all stages mingle with
top experts from almost every field. 

In the past 15 years, Duster has given more than 250
public speeches and invited lectures around the world,
from community colleges to world conferences. He
travels so much he is recognized by the staff in many
frequent flier lounges. After taking a position at
NYU, he joked about coming out of the closet as
“bi-coastal” in order to reassure California friends
that he would not be spending all his time in New
York. Given how frequently he is airborne or on other
continents, it may be more accurate to describe him as
“multi-coastal,” or even “post-coastal.” 

Public Intellectual, Private Life 

How can Duster do all the things he does with such
aplomb? Among other reasons, he is culturally
multilingual—he is a code-switcher. He can talk to
white audiences about racism and the need for
affirmative action, to administrators about student
needs, to geneticists about how society works, and to
sociologists about how genes work. 

Duster also seems able to see around corners and three
or four chess moves ahead of ordinary mortals. His
sociologist switch is rarely turned off, and whether
engaged in research or just walking down the street,
almost nothing escapes his analytic attention. He is a
dazzling student of social life, from the microscopic
level of the utterance to the macroscopic realm of
historical conjunctures. His brain seems to click
happily along at all levels all the time, and he’s
never so far into any one paradigm that he forgets
he’s in a paradigm. 

Duster is a public intellectual with a rich private
life. In his Berkeley brown-shingle home, he built a
kitchen that allowed his many friends to gather around
while he crafted gourmet meals without missing a
conversational beat. When he became a ceramic artist,
he built a potter’s atelier, complete with kiln in the
garage. He adores music, plays the cello occasionally,
and younger family members eagerly await Troy’s high
quality hand-me-down stereo gear. Close friends say he
never met a gadget he didn’t like. Before the iPod
existed, he had a 20-gigabyte mp3 player with a large
library of music that he takes on all trips. His
preferred communication device is a Blackberry, which
contains both addresses and salad dressing recipes. He
even manages to keep running a now-antique Ford
pickup. 

Troy Duster is an extraordinary blend of playful and
passionate, a man with a great capacity for
intellectual engagement and enjoying life. He is
humorous, upbeat, charming, and graceful—a
cosmopolitan at home in the world, and down home, too.
He’s many other things as well, and this year, the
hundredth anniversary of the American Sociological
Association, he’s the President. 

References 

Dray, Philip. 2002. At the Hands of Persons Unknown:
The Lynching of Black America. New York: The Modern
Library. 

Lehrman, Sally. 2003. “The Reality of Race,”
Scientific American. January 13. 



 
 



		
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