Wealth Matters: Examining Racial Wealth Inequality ​ - 10:30 am

PANELISTS

Moderator

Cedric Herring is Professor of Sociology and Public Policy, a Hrabowski Innovation Fellow, and Director of the Language, Literacy, and Culture PhD Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He has published 9 books and over 80 articles on race, diversity, and inequality in journals such as the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, and Social Problems. His most recent book (with Loren Henderson) is Diversity in Organizations: A Critical Examination. A former national President of the Association of Black Sociologists, Dr. Herring was awarded the Joseph Himes Lifetime Achievement Award for his scholarship. He has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and others. He has shared his research in community forums, in newspapers and magazines, on radio and television, before government agencies, business organizations, non-governmental organizations and at the United Nations.

Dr. Herring is also Co-Principal Investigator (with Dr. Loren Henderson) of the Baltimore Metropolitan Area Study on Race, Inequality and the City. This project, in collaboration with William “Sandy” Darity of Duke University and Darrick Hamilton of the New School, includes a survey of race and wealth inequality in the Baltimore metropolitan area and the nation.

Thomas Shapiro, Director, Institute on Assets and Social Policy and the Pokross Professor of Law and Social Policy at The Heller School for Social Policy, Brandeis University. Professor Shapiro's primary interest is in racial inequality and public policy. He is a leader in the wealth and race field with a particular focus on closing the racial wealth gap.  With Dr. Melvin Oliver, he wrote the award-winning Black Wealth/White Wealth, which received the 1997 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from
the American Sociological Association. The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality, 2004, was widely reviewed. He co-authored a groundbreaking study, The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide. In 2011 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study the wealth gap in South Africa.
Dr. Shapiro’s widely anticipated book Toxic Inequality: How America’s Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, & Threatens Our Future was released March 2017.

Loren Henderson (PhD, University of Illinois) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and a Hrabowski Innovation Fellow at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research interests include diversity issues, stratification and inequality, health disparities, and race, class, gender, and sexuality. Dr. Henderson is coauthor of a book entitled Diversity in Organizations: A Critical Examination. In addition, she has published research that looks at various forms of social
inequality that revolve around issues of difference. Among her recent publications are “Credit
Where Credit is Due? Race, Gender, and the Credit Scores of Business Startups” (The Review of Black Political Economy); “Wealth Inequality in Black and White: Cultural and Structural
Sources of the Racial Wealth Gap” (Race and Social Problems); “Separate and Unequal: The Impact of Socioeconomic Status, Segregation and the Great Recession on Racial Disparities in
Housing Values” (Sociology of Race and Ethnicity); and “From Affirmative Action to Diversity:
Toward a Critical Diversity Perspective.” (Critical Sociology). Dr. Henderson is an elected
representative on the Executive Committee of the Association of Black Sociologists. She has
made presentations of her research before government agencies, in the media, and at the United Nations.
 

Louise Seamster is a Postdoctoral Teaching Associate at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She received her MA and Ph.D in sociology in 2016 from Duke University, and an additional MA in Liberal Studies at the New School for Social Research.  Her work focuses on race and political economy, particularly in the arenas of urban development, urban politics and debt. She is the coeditor of several special issues on race and politics, and has published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Political Science and Social Theory, Social Currents, and Sociology Compass.