Matilda White Riley

Introducing 2023 ASA President Prudence Carter

Prudence Carter has conquered many firsts in her bold and brilliant career. In 2001, she became the first African American woman to join the faculty in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. Six years later, she was recruited by the Stanford Graduate School of Education as a tenured associate professor, and rose to become the Jacks Family Professor of Education and Sociology. Her meteoric rise as a scholar is matched by her astounding rise as a leader. In 2016, Prudence was appointed as Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Berkeley—becoming the school’s youngest and first African American woman dean. After stepping down as dean last year, she returned to her ever-true alma mater Brown University to become the inaugural Sarah and Joseph Jr. Dowling Professor of Sociology.

Conquering Firsts and Opening Doors

Conquering firsts is what Prudence Carter does. As the first, she ensures that she is not the last by opening the door for others. Why is this important? Through her research and experiences, Prudence recognizes that questions go unasked, assumptions remain unchallenged, and intellectual perspectives become narrow in institutions and disciplines that lack diversity.

Allow me to pause for a moment to add that I have known Prudence since we were budding sociologists in graduate school at Columbia University. Through our vibrant exchanges during graduate school and the many that followed, I have been (and continue to be) inspired by Prudence’s brilliance, her unwavering commitment to close opportunity gaps, and her bold vision for an educative and transformative sociology. During our journey as sociologists, I have marveled as I watched Prudence deftly dismantle tropes, reframe narratives, and advocate for more just, inclusive, and culturally flexible policies.

One of her co-authors, Sean Reardon, had this to say about her: “More than any academic I know, Prudence’s scholarship and professional leadership are guided by her clear moral compass and attunement to the symbolic and experienced inequalities in society. I’ve learned an enormous amount from her as a colleague and a friend.”

Learning from Prudence makes you better. Working with her inspires you to do better. It is my privilege to introduce you to 2022-23 ASA President Prudence Carter.

Slaying the Myth of Oppositional Culture

One of my early insights into Prudence’s bold brilliance was in graduate school when we read Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu’s 1986 article, “Black students’ school success: Coping with the “burden of ‘acting white’”. Fordham and Ogbu argued that Black students underperformed in school because they adopted a reactive, oppositional culture in which excelling in school was tantamount to “acting white.” The fear of being accused of “acting white” by their peers, in turn, diminished Black students’ academic effort and performance. Oppositional culture became the go-to explanation for the pernicious Black-White achievement gap, and was adopted by leading scholars of race, education, culture, and immigration.

Prudence’s dissertation research—which laid the foundations for her first book, Keepin’ It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White (Oxford University Press 2005)—slayed the myth of oppositional culture and anti-achievement ideology among Black youth. Based on interviews and observation of 68 students over a 10-month period, Prudence found no evidence of oppositional culture. Listening to the students, she learned that they used the phrase “acting white” to describe styles, tastes, and codes that they associated with middle-class whites. Furthermore, Prudence found that poor Black and Latinx students do, in fact, subscribe to the achievement ideology of education as the vehicle to socioeconomic mobility, but the vast majority lacked the material resources and dominant cultural capital to achieve mobility through education alone.

Here, Prudence made another insightful theoretical intervention. Challenging the belief that there is a singular type of cultural capital, she identified “nondominant cultural capital,” characterized by a set of tastes, appreciations, and understandings employed by lower status group members to gain “authentic” cultural status positions in their communities. For many Black and Latinx students, nondominant cultural capital matters because it signifies in-group allegiance and preserves a sense of belonging. While not a single student devalued high academic achievement nor disparaged peers who were smart, they did care if their peers repudiated in-group cultural codes and knowledge.

By asking the right questions, Prudence masterfully challenged oft-held assumptions, and, in the process, dismantled the trope of “acting white” as an anti-achievement ideology. That she had the courage do this as a graduate student and an untenured assistant professor is a testament to Prudence’s bold brilliance. Keepin’ It Real was awarded ASA’s Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for the best book on race and the eradication of racism in 2006.

Organizational Habitus and Cultural Flexibility

Prudence’s next project was even more ambitious: a pioneering comparative study of eight schools in four cities and two countries, which eventuated in her second book, Stubborn Roots: Race, Culture, and Inequality in U.S. and South African Schools (Oxford University Press 2012). While the United States and South Africa differ in their racial compositions, they share a legacy of racial exclusion and a history of racial inequality, which they have sought to transform through school desegregation. Neither has been successful, however, because desegregation alone is not the answer. Prudence’s research reveals why.

Drawing on her keen ethnographic and interviewing skills, she draws our attention to the organizational habitus of schools, including what they teach (their curricula) and how they teach (their pedagogy), both within and beyond the classroom. She unveils the angst that minoritized students experience when they are perceived as representatives of their race while remaining invisible in their curricula in which the content fails to reflect their social, historical, and material realities. Moreover, she finds that desegregation and color-blind policies do not disrupt persistent patterns of racial segregation and inequality within schools.

In the United States, segregation is maintained through organizational practices such as the racialization of academic tracking, as well as participation in select athletic and extracurricular activities. Cheerleading is to white students as stepping is to Black students, for example. In South Africa, inequality persists though universal policies that demean minoritized students, including dress codes and styles that center on the practices of white youth. Universal color-blind policies, codes, and curricula can marginalize minoritized students in ways that amplify racial and cultural inequality.

Prudence urges researchers to attend to organizational habitus, and focus on “cultural flexibility.” This involves institutional policies and practices that promote cultural inclusion and belonging such that cultural differences are respected rather than debased or ignored, and ties across social boundaries encouraged. Prioritizing cultural flexibility would, in turn, create an inclusive educational experience for all students across racial and class boundaries.

Fellow Trustee at the William T. Grant Foundation Hiro Yoshikawa shared this: “Prudence is a visionary leader and scholar in the sociology of education, having conducted landmark studies on race, culture, systems and educational inequality in the U.S. and South Africa. She will bring her years of expertise in working not just to empirically describe, but to reduce racial, relational, and other forms of inequality to her new leadership position.”

An Invitation to Be Bolder, Transformative, and Radically Inclusive

An inimitable voice for bolder and transformative education policies, Prudence has most recently laid out the multidimensional forms of inequality that persist at the macro, meso, and micro levels. Addressing these requires multidimensional solutions. “Radical inclusion” in schools and communities is the path forward, with the goal of closing opportunity gaps so that access to and full participation in the economy, government, and schools is possible so that no group languishes at the margins.

Prudence’s intellectual trajectory serves as the foundation for her inspiring theme for the ASA 2023 Annual Meeting: The Educative Power of Sociology. At a time when the United States is experiencing a regressive turning point, voting rights are under assault, and federal constitutional protections of women’s reproductive rights undone, Prudence encourages us to reflect and act on the discipline’s educative power. How can we move toward bolder, transformative, and useful directions for social progress?

The call is morally urgent. As Prudence elaborates, “State legislatures have also outlawed explicit teaching of the nation’s history, about race and racism, anti-Semitism, and explicit references to certain books and ideas that highlight the racial hierarchy at the core of U.S. society and beyond… Competitiveness and fear of encroachment on individual choice motivate communities to reproduce thick social boundaries and segregation and to limit the sharing of resources and power significantly with historically underrepresented groups in access to departments, colleges, and universities.”

It is in this context that Prudence invites us to produce new scholarship, research, and policy frameworks that aim to focus on the use and utility of sociological thought and research in institutions, organizations, and society; disrupt the academic hierarchy of social science; expand and connect more intentionally with global sociologies; and engage in reflexivity and conduct a sociology of sociology.

That Philadelphia will host the ASA 2023 Annual Meeting is fitting. Home to the Liberty Bell and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia boasts a rich history of civil rights. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society met there in 1775, and the American Anti-Slavery Society, which grew to nearly 250,000 members by 1838, was established in Philadelphia. And outside of Independence Hall, Susan B. Anthony delivered the Declaration of the Rights of Women in 1876. The history of Philadelphia provides an iconic backdrop to Prudence’s bold theme for the Annual Meeting.

The Professional Is Personal

In her stunning address at the 16^th Annual American Educational Research Association Brown Lecture, Prudence shared that she is the granddaughter of sharecroppers and the daughter of Mississippi educators. Educated in a de facto segregated school system in which her teachers and all but two of her classmates were African American, she was taught that college was expected and upward mobility attainable.

“We were the embodiment of the dreams that our ancestors, our foreparents, and our parents held,” Prudence affirmed. “Those who had toiled in the Mississippi Delta under the hot sweltering sun. They toiled under economic exploitation, white supremacy, and deep oppression. But they kept that hope alive, and their children, and their children passed it along to their children.”

As Prudence grew older, she knew enough to question whether she was getting the most rigorous education. Upon the recommendation of one of her teachers, Prudence’s parents applied for her to attend a six-week summer program at an elite boarding school on the East Coast. Prudence was admitted, and for the first time was exposed to students from all 50 states and from around the globe. She engaged with a diverse array of perspectives, ideologies, and social, cultural and political realities.

That summer program was a “catalytic moment” in Prudence’s trajectory that would propel her on a path that diverged from her classmates in Mississippi. She would conquer firsts, open doors, and become a leader in our discipline who would inspire a legion of others.

Dean Linda Burton of Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare described Prudence as “a treasured North star,” adding that “every university needs a Prudence. She is a quintessential game-changer with laser sharp vision and outstanding leadership skills, an authentic collaborative spirit, and a cutting-edge scholar and researcher. Her penchant for mentoring her students is beyond inspiring as she guides them to become their best selves.”

And Dr. Reena Karani, a dear friend of Prudence’s for over three decades, shared that “Prudence believes in—and is utterly committed to—a more equitable and just future. She has dedicated her life to ending disparities in education and mobility faced by the most vulnerable among us, and will bring her rich lived experiences, proud intersecting identities, and brilliant mind and heart to the work of the organization and field.”

I hope this glimpse of who Prudence Carter is and what she brings to the American Sociological Association conveys how immensely fortunate we are to have her as our President.

Written by Jennifer Lee, Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences, Columbia University, and originally published in Footnotes, Volume 50, Issue 4.