The Samuel DuBois Cook Center is a scholarly collaborative that studies the causes and consequences of inequality and develops remedies for these disparities and their adverse effects.
Faculty Affiliate Keisha Bentley-Edwards, Associate Professor of Medicine at Duke University, will deliver the Richard Payne Lecture in Faith, Justice, and Health Care this Friday. The event is hosted by the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School. Her lecture, titled Black Women’s Religion and Their Health: When Individual and Institutional Factors Intersect, represents…
Faculty Affiliate Nancy MacLean’s research has been featured in a blog post by Richard Murphy on the Finding the Future Blog. He writes, “Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains is one of the most powerful books of our time. It is not a conspiracy theory but a history of how the American right turned James Buchanan’s…
On November 10th, Faculty Affiliate Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy Emerita at Duke University, visited the Yale Center on Public Theology & Public Policy to speak on a panel, “Theology and Resistance: What History Teaches Us”. She joined Bishop William Barber II and legal scholar John Witt to discuss…
Founding Director William Darity Jr. co-authored a new literature review in The BMJ that directly addresses one of the most persistent critiques of reparations: the claim that no feasible plan exists. The proposal outlines direct monetary payments as the clearest economic measure of the cumulative and intergenerational effects of white supremacy. The article argues that…
Cook Center Director William A. Darity Jr. will be among the featured speakers at an upcoming public hearing hosted by the New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies (NYSCCRR) on Saturday, March 21st, 2026, in Staten Island, New York. The hearing, titled “Economic Development: Quantifying Harms,” is part of the Commission’s statewide effort to…
New research co-authored by Faculty Affiliate Sarah Gaither, Associate Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University, explores how something as routine as demographic forms can influence feelings of inclusion and identity among marginalized communities. Published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the study—“Enumeration or Exclusion? Demographic Forms and Latine Identity”—investigates how demographic questions may…
