William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr.

Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics
Duke University, Sanford School of Public Policy

William A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment. In 2005, he launched the subspecialty of stratification economics. Darity is the 2022 W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, aned he became a Fellow of the National Academy of Social Insurance in 2021. He received the Samuel Z. Westerfield Award from the National Economic Association in 2012. He and A. Kirsten Mullen are co-editors with Lucas Hubbard of The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice (2023) and coauthors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (2020). From Here to Equality is the recipient of the inaugural 2021 book prize from the Association of African American Life and History, the 2021 Lillian Smith book prize, the 2021 American Book Fest award for Social Change, and the 2020 Ragan Old North State award for nonfiction from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. The Black Reparations Project is the recipient of the 2023 Phillis Wheatley Book Award in the Historical, Current Events, Nonfiction Category. He also coedited the 2022 publication, The Pandemic Divide: How COVID-19 Increased Inequality in America with Gwendolyn Wright and Lucas Hubbard.