About
Douglas S. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. He is co-author of American Apartheid (Harvard University Press, 1993), which won the Distinguished Publication Award of the American Sociological Association. More recently he coauthored Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb (Princeton University Press, 2013), which won the Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. He is also coauthor of The Source of the River (2003, the first analysis of minority achievement in selective colleges and universities based on a representative sample, as well as the follow up book Taming the River (2009), which examined the determinants of persistence and grade achievement through the first two years of college (both from Princeton University Press). Massey has also published extensively on Mexican immigration, including the books Return to Aztlan (University of California Press, 1987) and Miracles on the Border (University of Arizona Press, 1995), which won a 1996 Southwest Book Award. His latest two books on immigration are Beyond Smoke and Mirrors (Russell Sage, 2002), which won the 2004 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for the best book in social demography, and Brokered Boundaries: Constructing Immigrant Identity in Anti-Immigrant Times (Russell Sage 2010). His most recent book is Young, Gifted, and Diverse Princeton: Origins of the New Black Elite (Princeton University Press 2022), coauthored with Camille Charles, Rory Kramer, and Kimberly Torres. Massey has also served on the faculties of the University of Chicago where he directed its Center for Latin American Studies and Population Research Center, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he directed its Population Studies Center and chaired its Graduate Group in Demography. During 1979 and 1980 he undertook postdoctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley and Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1978. Massey is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and Academia Europea. He is Past-President of the Population Association of America, the American Sociological Association, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
Featured Work
Young, Gifted, and Diverse: Origins of the New Black Elite.
Despite their diversity, Black Americans have long been studied as a uniformly disadvantaged group. Drawing from a representative sample of over a thousand Black students and in-depth interviews and focus groups with over one hundred more, Young, Gifted and Diverse highlights diversity among the new educated Black elite—those graduating from America’s selective colleges and universities in the early twenty-first century. Differences in childhood experiences shape this generation, including their racial and other social identities and attitudes, and beliefs about and interactions with one another. While those in the new Black elite come from myriad backgrounds and have varied views on American racism, as they progress through college and toward the Black professional class they develop a shared worldview and group consciousness. They graduate with optimism about their own futures, but remain guarded about racial equality more broadly. This internal diversity alongside political consensus among the elite complicates assumptions about both a monolithic Black experience and the future of Black political solidarity.
