Joe Feagin
  • Ella C. McFadden Professor
  • Distinguished Professor

Biography

I was born in San Angelo, Texas at the end of the Great Depression. I grew up in Houston, Texas, where I completed high school. Graduating from Baylor University in 1960, I then moved to Boston, Massachusetts with my partner, Clairece Booher Feagin, to begin graduate work at Harvard University in social relations (sociology). Completing the Ph.D. degree in 1966, I became an assistant professor at the University of California in Riverside.

Four years later, I accepted an associate professor position at University of Texas, where I taught for twenty years. I served as Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (1974-1975). In 1990 I moved to the University of Florida, where I became the graduate research professor in sociology. In 2004 I came to Texas A&M as the Ella C. McFadden professor in sociology.

Over the years I have done research work on a variety of racism and sexism issues. Recent examples of this work can be seen in Racial and Ethnic Relations (Ninth edition; Prentice-Hall, 2011; with Clairece Booher Feagin); Latinos Facing Racism: Discrimination, Resistance, And Endurance (Paradigm Publishers, 2014; with J. Cobas); The White Racial Frame (Second edition; Routledge, 2013); Yes We Can: White Racial Framing and the Obama Presidency (Second edition, Routledge, 2013; with A. Harvey-Wingfield); White Party, White Government: Race, Class, and U.S. Politics (Routledge, 2012); Racist America (Second edition; Routledge, 2010); Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage (Routledge, 2007; with L. H. Picca).

My book with Harlan Hahn, Ghetto Revolts (Macmillan, 1973), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Living with Racism and White Racism have won the Gustavus Myers Center’s Outstanding Human Rights Book Award.

I am past president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), which included chairing the Program Committee for the summer 2000 ASA meeting in Washington, D.C.

Courses Taught at Texas A&M

  • SOCI 323: Sociology of African Americans
  • SOCI 611: Classical Social Theory
  • SOCI 615: Contemporary Social Theory
  • SOCI 662: Racism and Anti-Racism
  • SOCI 663: Black and Latino Americans
  • SOCI 667: Theories of Racial and Ethnic Relations

Research Interests

  • Racial and Ethnic Studies
  • Systemic Racism Issues
  • Anti-Racist Education
  • Gender Relations
  • Urban Political Economy

Educational Background

  • Ph.D. Harvard University

Awards & Honors

  • W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (American Sociological Association, 2013).
  • Arthur Fletcher Lifetime Achievement Award (American Association for Affirmative Action, 2013).
  • ASA Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities’s Founder’s Award for Scholarship & Service (2013).
  • Soka Gakkai International-USA Social Justice Award (2012).
  • Butler A. Jones Endowed Lecture, Cleveland State University (2007).
  • Fellow, Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality (Stanford University, 2006)
  • Center for Healing of Racism Ally Award (2006).
  • “Top Professor” (Lifetime Achievement) Award, Affordable-Colleges-Online.org (2013)

Selected Publications

    • Rethinking Diversity Frameworks in Higher Education. New York: Routledge, 2020. (with Edna Chun)
    • The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-Framing. Third edition. New York: Routledge, 2020.
    • Racist America. Fourth edition. New York: Routledge, 2018, with Kimberley Ducey.
    • Latinos Facing Racism: Discrimination, Resistance, And Endurance. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2014. (with J. Cobas)
    • White Party, White Government: Race, Class, and U.S. Politics. New York: Routledge, 2012.
    • Yes We Can: White Racial Framing and the 2008 Presidential Campaign. Second edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. (with A. Harvey-Wingfield)
    • Racial and Ethnic Relations. Ninth edition. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 2011. (with C. Feagin)
    • “The Obama Era, the 2012 Election, and Systemic Racism,” The Society Pages. September 19, 2012, at http://thesocietypages.org/specials/systemic-racism.
    • How the United States Racializes Latinos: White Hegemony and its Consequences. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Books, 2009. (edited, with J. Cobas, J. Duany)
    • Liberation Sociology. Revised ed. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Books, 2008. (with H. Vera)
    • Liberation Sociology. Third edition. Boulder: Paradigm Books, 2015. (with H. Vera; K. Ducey)
    • The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism. Second edition. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Books, 2015. (with R. Chou)
    • Jim Crow’s Legacy: The Segregation Stress Syndrome. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. (with R. Thompson-Miller and L. H. Picca)
    • How Blacks Built America. New York: Routledge, 2016.