Arko Dasgupta is a PhD candidate in History at Carnegie Mellon University and a doctoral fellow in the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. He studies Modern India, the British Empire, early Indian immigration in the United States, and the American Civil Rights Movement. Recently, he presented a component of his…
The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity and Director William “Sandy” Darity Jr. were recently featured in an Inside Philanthropy article discussing the potential impacts of anti-DEI executive orders on funding for reparations research and advocacy. The article highlights the William T. Grant Foundation’s $300,000 grant to the Cook Center in 2021, which supported…
Cook Center Postdoctoral Associate Will Damron was recently published in the Explorations in Economic History Journal. His research explores a newly-collected dataset covering manufacturers in North Carolina in the early 1900s to examine the effects of electrification at the establishment level. In this paper, Damron studies the gains from electrification and the effects on workers…
DURHAM, N.C. – The Black-white health gap is one of the most striking examples of the depths of racial inequality in the United States. Why does it persist? A new paper from researchers at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University investigates—and refutes—a popular argument for the causes of this disparity….
Founding Director, William “Sandy” Darity, discussed the potential racial and social harms of a nearly all white presidential cabinet on the Tavis Smiley Podcast. He acknowledges that while representation matters, it does not inherently guarantee policies that advance equity. I don’t think that visual representation is a sufficient basis for making a judgement about any…
The Cook Center is proud to celebrate Faculty Affiliate Lauren Brinkley-Rubenstein in receiving the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers! Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein is an Associate Professor of Population Health Sciences and core faculty in the Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity. On January 14th, President Biden awarded nearly 400 scientists and engineers…
The Hank & Billye Suber Aaron Young Scholars Summer Research Institute is a program that provides high school students enrolled in Durham Public Schools (DPS) with training to enhance their writing, research, and presentation skills. The program is sponsored by the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University in partnership with Durham…
In 2015 the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reported that only 6 percent of full-time faculty are Black and 5 percent are Latino, and these numbers are lower in economics. Similarly, a 1994 study found that there were eleven Black economists teaching at the nation’s twenty-five highest-ranked universities; a 2006 study identified thirteen such…
Last year Founding director, William A. “Sandy” Darity, Jr., was named a 2024 Distinguished Fellow by the American Economic Association (AEA). On January 5th, 2025 he received the award at the ASSA Annual Meeting. Darity, the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University, is one of…
Associate professor in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University and Cook Center Faculty Affiliate Dr. Sarah Gaither contributed to a paper recently published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. The study employed a collaborative multi-site approach, and measured 4- to 6-year-old children’s minimal group attitudes and preference for real-world racial/ethnic ingroups…