“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
Toni Morrison, Beloved
I am a Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. I work in the area of cultural sociology. My research is interdisciplinary; it is broadly concerned with hegemony, specifically the relationship between knowledge and power in the construction and reproduction of racial inequalities in the modern western world and the social justice response to them. I center the subjugation of blackness and racial capitalism in my examinations of oppression and inequalities. I write about the construction of knowledge and power relationships in the languages, media systems, technologies, and research methodologies that occur in the institutions of policing, journalism, the social sciences, and higher education.
