William Darity Jr.
*William Darity Jr. was born on this date in 1953. He is a Black social scientist and economist.
William A. 'Sandy' Darity Jr. was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts. His parents were William A. Darity Sr. and Evangeline Royal Darity. He has one sister. Darity Jr. graduated with a bachelor's degree from Brown University in 1974. 1978, he completed a doctorate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1980, Darity became a staff economist of the National Urban League.
He began a long period as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1983. In 1989, while preparing the introduction for a volume of essays edited by Richard America, by economists gauging the size of a reparations fund for African Americans, Darity became convinced that a program of redress of this type is an essential step that the nation must take. With Samuel Myers Jr., Darity conducted a series of studies on the statistical measurement of discrimination in labor markets. In 1998, he published his most cited paper with Patrick Mason in the Journal of Economic Perspective, where they advanced a detailed critique of the two dominant theoretical approaches to discrimination in economics, the taste and the statistical models.
As early as 2003, he published a paper coauthored by Dania Frank Francis, "The Economics of Reparations." Subsequently, in 2008, he published "Forty Acres and a Mule in the Twenty-First Century" in Social Science Quarterly. In 2020, with A. Kirsten Mullen published From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, a book that synthesized and extended his previous work. He was then a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors in 1984. Darity Jr. was a director or on the board of the National Humanities Center, the American Economic Association, the Southern Economic Association, and the National Economic Association.
He was a professor at Grinnell College, the University of Maryland at College Park, the University of Texas at Austin, Simmons College in Boston, and Claremont McKenna College. From 2003 to 2005, Darity Jr. was a Professor at Spelman College. He has also taught or served as a fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Tulsa, and the Centro de Excelencia Empresarial (Monterey, Mexico). His 2005 Journal of Economics and Finance paper established Darity as the "founder of stratification economics."
Darity Jr. is also the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Previously, he was the Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of North Carolina. Darity was a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors in 1984, a fellow at the National Humanities Center (1989-1990), a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2011-2012), and a visiting senior fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation. For the 2022-2023 academic year, he is the Katherine Hampson Bessett Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute.
He is also a former president of the National Economic Association (1986), the Southern Economic Association (1996), and the Association of Black Sociologists (2015-2017). Darity's research spans economic history, development economics, economic psychology, and the history of economic thought and group-based inequality, especially concerning race and ethnicity. As a leading voice in the current national conversation on African American reparations, Darity argues recipients must be Black ancestors of enslaved Africans in the United States.
The monetary target must be sufficient funds to eliminate black-white differences in average wealth, the federal government must execute the program, and the primary form of outlays must be direct payments to eligible recipients. He is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University.
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