"In order to effect your revolution, you will not need a revolutionary
mindset, a revolutionary script, or a revolutionary tongue.
You will need a revolutionary . . . patience."
- Lucius Turner Outlaw, Jr.

My Godfather (I call him Uncle Lou) tossed this gem to me after participating in Boston's First Annual Black Arts Festival. It has become my personal creed. The problem of human oppression is at least as ancient as human existence, and if we have any hope of salvation, it is reasonable to think we will need to be patient in while we insist on progress. It is also worth noting that a problem so old does not manage to outlive George Burns by being simply rectified. A healthy respect for the human capacity to create cultures of injustice is another reason I find myself studying in a cramped ivory tower, in addition to other forms of activism. A year before my Uncle Lou dropped this knowledge on me, I heard Bobby Seales tell a crowd of young activists "don't be stupid. We're where we are today because, when I was your age, we thought we had all the answers. We didn't even know the right questions." In these pages are some of the questions that I'm trying on for size.

Social Structure, Social Categories, and Social Change

Each of the following research topics falls, roughly, into three categories. By social structure I am talking about the pieces of an environment that shape social action. So, for instance, the social structure of a classroom can be described in terms of the physical environment (i.e. what posters are on the walls,) the rules of the classroom (i.e. you must be called on before speaking,) or in terms of the unspoken values of the classroom (i.e. it's cool to make the teacher look stupid, so long as she doesn't get mad enough to assign more homework.) In my work, I try to identify the structures of everyday life that influence social justice and understand how our environment shapes our thought and our lives.

It may be a little more intuitively obvious what is meant by the term social categories, because we are used to thinking in these terms. Two things interest me most about social categorization. Firstly, I am interested by the fact that how we categorize someone effects how we actually perceive them. In terms of social justice, the consequences of this process can be seen in the Amadou Diallo trial, among other places, and with tragic effect. The second facet of social categorization that interests me most is the way in which, having taken on a role, we change our actions to enact that role, or "perform it." For instance, if men are in a situation where they are assumed to be superior to women, it is likely that they will "perform" this superiority by acting self-assured, haughty, or "like they normally act" some would say. When, how, why, and to what effect this happens has profound import for mediating intergroup conflict.

Lastly, all of my research is done with an eye toward effecting social change. With this in mind, I believe that it is important to understand why and when people are willing to mobilize for things they believe in. Under what circumstances are activists "rallying the troops" rather than "rabble rousing"? What allows people to be content while enduring stark inequality and fatal standards of living?

As you may have noticed, there are significantly more question marks than periods in my research. Below is a partial listing of problem spaces for which my lab is attempting to change the punctuation.