Dear RSF:

Please join us next Wednesday, 2/27, for a presentation by Richard Benjamin entitled “The State of ‘Whiteness’: Race, Socio-Politics, and the Next America”.   

Dr. Benjamin is a contributing writer to the New Yorker.  During his year at the Foundation, he is working on a monograph, The White People Deadline:  Race, Status Threat, and Policy, that investigates how racial divides and white decline (both real and perceived) shape national concerns.  The issues he is investigating include intra-white conflict, gun control and the economic social safety net.   Specifically, he focuses on how social and legal regimes designed to disadvantage blacks and Latinos have backfired to harm society as a whole.  Benjamin will draw data for the project from the GSS (General Social Survey) and the ISSP (International Social Survey Programme), as well as from personal semi-structured interviews.

Richard Benjamin received a Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Government and English/American Literature from Wesleyan University