Social Sciences Division
Professor Emeritus of Politics
Faculty
Merrill/Crown Faculty Services
The question of economic justice for Black Americans remains unresolved and continues to be the subject of contentious political debate. In Unjust Restitution: A Century of Black Struggle for Equality, Michael K. Brown examines the meaning of racial equality during three transformative periods in American history, when significant changes to economic status and opportunity appeared to be a real possibility in the US: Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Great Society. Political leaders believed slavery and Jim Crow degraded Black people and enacted policies to rehabilitate formerly subjugated individuals. Black Americans challenged this conception and repudiated the idea that they were damaged people in need of repair. Repeatedly, Black people’s vision of economic justice was based on anti-privilege egalitarianism, the idea that a just restitution for their oppression required abolishing the political and legal privileges whites had acquired. Black opposition reveals what was at stake at each historical moment and what might constitute economic justice in the 21st century. Equality of opportunity can be a just restitution for continuing durable racial inequality only if it changes the structure of people’s economic opportunities.
Books:
2025 Unjust Restitution: A Century of Black Struggle for Equality (University of California Press)
2023 (Co-Author) Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-blind Society, 2nd Edition (University of California Press) Winner of the 1st Annual Benjamin L. Hooks Outstanding Book Award; Gustavus Myers Outstanding Books Award.
1999 Race, Money and the American Welfare State (Cornell University Press).
1988 Working the Street: Police Discretion and the Dilemmas of Reform, with a new epilogue, "Race, Reform and the American Police in the 1980s (Russell Sage Foundation).
1988 (Editor), Remaking the Welfare State: Retrenchment and Social Policy in America and Europe (Temple University Press)
Selected Articles and Essays:
2013 Divergent Fates: The Foundations of Durable Racial Inequality, 1940-2013, (DEMOS & Rockefeller Foundation; Background study for conference on New Economic Paradigms).
2013 Race and Equality of Opportunity in American Political Development, Politics, Groups, and Identities, 1:2, pp. 232-236.
2009 The Death Penalty and the Politics of Racial Resentment in the Post Civil Rights Era, De Paul Law Review, 58, pp. 645-670.
2008 Saving Souls Won't Save Children: Religion and the Pre-History of the American Welfare State, Journal of Urban History, 34:2 pp. 362-369.
2005 (Co-Author) Embedding the Color Line: The Accumulation of Racial Advantage and the Disaccumulation of Opportunity in Post Civil Rights America, Du Bois Review,2:2 pp 187-208.
2003 Ghettos, Fiscal Federalism, and Welfare Reform in Race, Welfare and the Politics of Reform, eds. Richard Fording, Joe Soss, and Sanford Schram (University of Michigan Press), pp. 93-122.
2000 Is Race Experienced as Class? Labor History, 41:4 pp;. 513-516.