Contact Information
Biography Information
Omar Wasow is a sixth-year doctoral candidate at Harvard pursuing a Ph.D. in African and African American studies, a Master's in Government and a Master's in Statistics. His research focuses on race and American political development. His dissertation focuses on the rise of punitive criminal justice policy in the United States since the 1960s. He is also interested in the political economy of education and the intersection of social media and politics. Prior to enrolling in graduate school he helped co-found the site BlackPlanet.com, an African American-oriented social network that currently reaches about three million users a month. In 2003, he helped found a K-8 charter school in Brooklyn. In addition, he works to demystify technology issues through regular TV and radio segments on shows like NBC's Today and Oprah. In support of his research, he has received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, a Humane Studies Fellowship and the Aspen Institute's Henry Crown Fellowship. He received his BA from Stanford University in Race and Ethnic Relations.
Project Description
From roughly 1940 to 1970, many measures of black economic, political and social progress showed rapid improvement and steady convergence with those of whites. From about 1970 onwards, however, despite the passage of historic civil rights legislation, key indicators of progress for the poorest African Americans flatlined and even reversed. In particular, two measures of the worsening condition of black life, incarceration and homicide victimization, began to increase dramatically. Why homicide increased, why "law and order" politics became salient and why such trends had racially disparate effects remain the subject of ongoing research and debate. For my Du Bois Institute research project, I propose to investigate these questions and, using both qualitative and quantitative methods, contribute to a better understanding of the dramatic growth in disparities in black incarceration and homicide victimization.