Waverly Duck Publishes New Book, ‘Tacit Racism’

Waverly Duck, an associate professor with Pitt’s Department of Sociology in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, is co-author of a new book, “Tacit Racism.” The University of Chicago Press recently named the book as one of 11 it has published as a primer on police violence, educational inequity and institutional racism that help readers understand the history and context of racism in the United States.

The text lays out the many ways in which racism is coded into the everyday social interactions of Americans. Duck, and Anne Warfield Rawls, professor of sociology at Bentley University, argue that these interactions can produce racial inequality, whether the people involved are aware of it or not, and that by overlooking tacit racism in favor of the fiction of a “color-blind” nation, Americans are harming not only our society’s most disadvantaged—but also endangering the society itself.