William A. (“Sandy”) Darity, Jr.

William A. (“Sandy”) Darity, Jr. is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University. He is the founding director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity, and he has served as chair of Duke’s Department of African and African American Studies. Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment.

He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (2015-2016), a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (2011-2012) at Stanford University, a fellow at the National Humanities Center (1989-90) and a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors (1984). He received the Samuel Z. Westerfield Award in 2012 from the National Economic Association, the organization's highest honor. In 2017, he was named to the Politico 50 list of the most influential policy thinkers over the course of the past year, and he also was honored by the Center for Global Policy Solutions with an award recognizing his work in the development of the effort to study and reverse racial wealth disparities in the United States.

He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has published or edited 13 books and more than 250 articles in professional journals. His most recent book is the 2017 publication, For-Profit Universities: The Shifting Landscape of Marketized Education, co-edited with Tressie McMillan Cottom.