Jennifer Richeson

Despite our nation’s tumultuous racial history, Americans generally believe the country has made and continues to make steady, linear, and perhaps automatic, progress toward racial equality. During the CASBS fellowship period, Jennifer Richeson will work on a book tentatively titled, the mythology of racial progress. The goal of the book is to offer a comprehensive examination of the role that belief in, and perhaps allegiance to, this racial progress narrative plays in maintaining a profound ignorance regarding the actual state of racial inequality in our nation. Richeson is the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. Much of her recent research considers the political consequences of the increasing racial/ethnic diversity of the United States. Richeson also investigates how people reason about and respond to different forms of inequality and the implications of such processes for detecting and confronting injustice. She is an elected member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006, she was named one of 25 MacArthur “Genius” Fellows for her work “highlighting and analyzing major challenges facing all races in America and in the continuing role played by prejudice and stereotyping in our lives,” and, in 2019 she received an honorary doctorate from Brown University for work that “expands the boundaries of knowledge on interracial interaction and the living contexts of diversity.” She is also the recipient of 2020 SAGE-CASBS Award.