Race/Class Divide Author Dalton Conley to Speak at Illinois Wesleyan
October 4, 2004
BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Prolific author, director of New York University’s Center for Advanced Social Science Research (CASSR), and New York University Professor of Sociology and Public Policy Dalton Conley will speak about “White Matters: Race, Class and Privilege in America.” He will deliver his speech on Thursday, Oct. 28 at 7:30 p.m., in the Center for Natural Science, 201 Beecher St., Bloomington.
Conley will also participate in a special question and answer session entitled “Mom Always Loved You Best: Sibling Class Divergence and the Future of the American Family” at 4 p.m. in the Beckman Auditorium of The Ames Library, 1 Ames Plaza, Bloomington.
The event is free and open to the public.
Conley, whose essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon, among other publications, is also the author of Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth and Social Policy in America, Honky, The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances, and The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why.
After “growing up as the white minority in Manhattan’s largely black and Puerto Rican Lower East Side,” Conley learned early about race in America. Today, he is known for asking tough questions about the relationship between race, class, and privilege in America, and offering startling answers about everything from the American family to Civil Rights. “Having grown up as a white minority in a community of color and in a community of housing projects at that, I’m able to see, in a way that many whites take for granted, the advantages that distinguish me from my neighbors,” said Conley.
Conley also works as an adjunct professor of community medicine at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and previously taught in the departments of sociology and of African American studies at Yale University. He works as a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
