Karida L. Brown (born August 9th, 1982) is an American sociologist, author, professor, and public intellectual who serves as Professor of Sociology at Emory University. She served as the inaugural Director of Racial Equity & Action at the Los Angeles Lakers from 2020 to 2022. She is recognized for her scholarship on Black history and culture. Her research also examines the history and function of racial colonial capitalism. She has published widely on a broad array of topics, migration, education, collective memory, and social theory.
Early life and education
Brown was born and raised in Uniondale, New York, to Richard Brown and Arnita Davis-Brown. Her father worked as a sanitation worker for the Town of Hempstead, while her mother labored as a physical therapist at Hempstead General hospital. Her parents migrated to Long Island, New York in the 1960s from Lynch, Kentucky, a company-owned coal mining town in Appalachia. She has one sibling, Richard Charu Brown, Jr. Brown graduated from Uniondale High School in 2000 and attended Temple University, from which she graduated in 2004 with a Bachelor of Business Administration in Risk Management and Insurance. After a six-year stint in Corporate America, Brown returned to school, subsequently earning a Master Public Administration from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University in 2016. Her dissertation, The Ties that Bind: the Intergenerational Migration of Kentucky’s Coal Camp Blacks, won the 2017[citation needed]
Career
Brown’s first job out of college was as a junior underwriter at AIG. Between 2004 and 2008 she enjoyed a career as an excess casualty and professional liability underwriter at some of the largest multi-national insurance firms, including AIG, ACE North America, and Zurich North America. Brown earned her Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter (CPCU) designation 2006 from the American Institute of Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters. Dismayed by the central role the insurance industry, specifically her former employer AIG, played in the 2008 financial crisis, Brown decided to leave insurance underwriting to pursue a career in academia.
Upon completing her Ph.D. in 2016, Brown joined the faculty at UCLA as an Assistant Professor of Sociology, and later, a joint appointment as Assistant Professor in the department of African American Studies. She was tenured and promoted from Assistant to Full Professor at UCLA in 2021. During an academic leave at UCLA in 2021-2022, Brown served as the inaugural Director of the John Lewis Center for Social Justice and Visiting Diane Nash Descendants of Emancipation Chair at Fisk University. She is currently a Professor of Sociology at Emory University, where she teaches courses on race and ethnicity and historical and archival research methods.
In addition to her academic appointment, Brown also has served as the Director of Racial Equity & Action at the Los Angeles Lakers where she works with the company in its journey in transitioning from a non-racist to an anti-racist organization.
Dr. Brown is the author of three books, Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia (UNC Press, 2018), The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Racialize Modernity and the Global Color Line (co-authored with José Itzigsohn, NYU Press, 2020), and The New Brownies’ Book: A Love Letter to Black Families (Chronicle Books, 2023). In addition, her research is published in various peer-reviewed academic journals such as the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Southern Cultures, and The Du Bois Review. Brown is a Fulbright Scholar, and national foundations such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Hellman Fellows Fund have supported her work.
Brown also served on the board of The Obama Presidency Oral History Project.
Personal life
Brown lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband, fine artist and illustrator, Charly Palmer and their two pugs.
Awards and honors
Brown has received the following awards and recognition:
- 2024 NAACP Image Award—Outstanding Non Fiction
- 2023 Temple University, RMI Fox School of Business Distinguished Alumni Award
- 2021 Uniondale High School Hall of Fame inductee
- Runner Up, 2019 Weatherford Award for best book of Non-Fiction, sponsored by the Appalachian Studies Association
- Co-Winner, 2019 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the American Sociological
- Association’s Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities
- Winner, 2019 Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book from the American Sociological
- Association’s Sociology of Culture Section
- Winner, 2019 Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the American
- Sociological Association’s Section on Race, Gender, and Class
- Honorable Mention, 2019 Otis Dudley Duncan Book Award from the American
- Sociological Association’s Sociology of Population Section
- Finalist, 2018 Prose Award, sponsored by the Professional and Scholarly Publishing
- Division, Association of American Publishers. Prose Award for Excellence in Social Sciences
- American Sociological Association 2017 Best Dissertation Award
Selected Publications[edit]
Brown's work in the following permanent collections:
- Brown, Karida L. and Luna Vincent, (2022) “American Pragmatism and the Dilemma of the Negro”, in Isaac Reed, Neil Gross, and Christopher Winship eds. Agency, Inquiry, and Democracy: The New Pragmatist Social Science. Columbia University Press
- Itzigsohn, José and Karida L. Brown. (2020) The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line. NYU Press.
- Brown, Karida L. (2018) Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia. University of North Carolina Press
- Brown, Karida L. (2019) “A Traveler’s Tale” Southern Cultures, 25(4): 6-15, 25th Anniversary Special Issue: Here/Away
- Brown, Karida L. (2019) “Gardens of Eden: Affrilachian Foodways in Harlan County.” The Food We Eat, The Stories We Tell: Contemporary Appalachian Tables, The Ohio State University Press
- Brown, Karida L. (2018) “A Love Letter to Black Graduate Students.” The New Black Sociologist. Routledge Press
- Brown, Karida L. (2016) “The Hidden Injuries of School Desegregation” American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 4(2): 196-220
- Brown, Karida L. (2016) “On the Participatory Archive: An ethnography of the Eastern Kentucky African American Migration Project” Southern Cultures 22(1): 113-127, Special issue: Documentary Arts
- Brown, Karida L., Murphy, Michael, and Apollonya Porcelli. (2016) “Ruin's Progeny: Race, Environment and Appalachia's Coal Camp Blacks" Du Bois Review special issue: Race and Environmental Equity.
- Itzigsohn, José and Brown, Karida L. (2015) “Sociology and the Theory of Double Consciousness