Sociologists Talking Real Sh*t

Dr. Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson joins me to discuss the Matrix of Gendered Islamophobia, why we shouldn't call those who stormed the capitol on January 6th terrorists, and the relationship of gender, war, and imperialism to the shootings of the Asian women in Georgia. 

Dr. Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson is an Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, Long Beach. She has published her research in various journals including Gender and Society, Critical Sociology, Race and Class, and Women, Gender, and Families of Color on the topics of gendered Islamophobia and state violence, racialized surveillance and counterterrorism, capitalism and the privatization of the domestic War on Terror.

She is Affiliate Faculty at the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers Law School. She previously served as an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London’s Centre for the Study of Education in Muslim Contexts and as a Research Fellow in the Civil Rights Division at the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA). She has received funding from the American Association for the University Women, Association for the Sociology of Religion, American Sociological Association, Society for the Study of Social Problems, and Sociologists for the Study of Women. She is currently serving on the National Minority Fellowship Program Advisory Board for the American Sociological Association and is the campus Chair for the California Faculty Association’s Racial and Social Justice Council.

I discuss the rise in hate crimes towards Asians and the Georgia killings with community/labor organizer Seo Yun Son and Professor of Sociology Julio Tsuha.  We examine racist stereotyping of Asians, the model minority myth, racial triangulation, and the umbrella of White supremacy that binds all people of color.

Seo Yun Son (she/they) is an artist and community/labor organizer living in Los Angeles, California. She received her BFA in Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles and is an organizer at amwa, Ktown For Black Lives, and AFT 1521.

 Julio Tsuha is Professor of Sociology at Los Angeles Pierce College of the LA Community College District.  Prior to this, he served as Executive Director of the Dolores Huerta Labor Institute.  He decided to get his Ph.D. at UC Riverside after doing an internship with the AFL-CIO where his love for labor organizing and social justice activism were forged.  He has been a union member and activist for the past 20 years. 

Join Professor Sheryl Nomelli and I as we give the sisters their due.  We talk about a few of her favorite female historical figures, sociologist/activist the historical Jane Addams, Anita Hill, Hill's connection to Joe Bidden,  and the #metoo movement.  

Professor Sheryl Nomelli returned to college as a re-entry student at the age of 30, earning her undergrad degree in History, with a minor in Women’s Studies, from California Lutheran University.  She completed her MA in History with a focus on Southern and Women’s history at California State University, Northridge.  Her graduate research focused on the unique community of Adams County, Natchez, Mississippi which held a large number of white planter elites, their enslaved labor, and the free black “Blue Vein” society during the Antebellum and post-Antebellum period of the 19th Century. 

Professor Nomelli has been teaching history since 2003 specializing in U.S., Women's, and Southern history.  Her teaching experience includes both undergrad and graduate courses at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), California Lutheran University, College of the Canyons, Moorpark College, and currently as tenured faculty at Los Angeles Pierce College.  Returning to school while both working and raising a family has given her a unique perspective as an instructor at a community college.  Many of her students struggle with the same challenges and her goal is to encourage them to hang in there and achieve their academic dreams.

Dr. Yousef Baker joins me to discuss the effects of the Iraq War on the Iraqi people, the Iraqi Narratives Project and anti-Muslim racism and its connection to larger national and global issues, including racial projects right here in the United States. 

Dr. Yousef K. Baker is an assistant professor in the International Studies Program currently at California State University, Long Beach. He is also the co-director of the Global Middle East Studies Program. Dr. Baker’s career both as a student and an educator have been in California’s public education system, graduating from LAUSD, finishing his BA in Political Science from UCLA, his Master’s and Doctorate in Sociology from UCSB, and working at CSULB since 2014. 

 Dr. Baker looks at global political economy with an interest in how race, nationalism, post-colonial development, and social movements shape our contemporary world. His work focuses on the Middle East and North Africa, where he has been looking at the political economy of the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. Dr. Baker has been recently working on issues of anti-Muslim racism and their connection to larger national and global issues, where he shows how this racializing process shape politics in the US and broader global geo-politics as well. In addition to this research, Dr. Baker is one of the co-founders of the Iraqi Narratives Project, where alongside other collaborators he has collected oral histories of people who migrated from Iraq to the US and Canada.  

 As an educator, and as a resident of Long Beach since 2010, and greater Los Angeles since 1993, Dr. Baker is always asking how does our life locally shape and is shaped by the lives of others living around the globe? 

Tomorrow (February 22) on https://www.sociologiststalkingrealshit.com/podcast: Join Tanya Golash-Boza and I as we talk about the role of the drug war in the gentrification of Washington DC, being a public intellectual, "Get a Life PhD Blog" (yes, it is possible for an academic to have a life), and the intersection of scholarship and activism.  

Tanya Golash-Boza is the founder of the Racism, Capitalism, and the Law Lab and a Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Merced. She is a prolific scholar, with several published books and dozens of academic articles and book chapters. She has received several awards, including the Distinguished Contribution to Research Book Award from the Latino/a Studies Section of the American Sociological Association for her book, Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor and Global Capitalism – published by New York University Press in 2015. Her textbook, Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach, published by Oxford University Press, is now in its third edition and is the leading textbook in this field. Dr. Golash-Boza is currently working on a project funded by the National Science Foundation that explores how gentrification affects formerly incarcerated Black men in Washington, DC. That work is featured on her website: MappingGentrification.com. Professor Golash-Boza is also the creator of the blog, Get a Life, PhD, which focuses on faculty success and wellbeing and has over 4 million pageviews. For this and other mentoring work, she received the UC Merced Senate Award for Excellence in Faculty Mentorship in 2019.

I sit down with activist intellectual Dr. Jose Zapata Calderon. We discuss the roots of migration and Biden’s proposed Immigration policies, community engaged scholarship, multiracial coalitions, and in the end some sound solutions for inequality.  

Join Historian, Professor Christopher Strickland and I as we discuss the Wilmington insurrection of 1898, Du Bois feud with Marcus Garvey, Black Power, Black Sisters leading the way, and so much more.   

Dr. Jane Ward and I talk about her interesting and provocative book The Tragedy of Heterosexuality.  Dr. Ward discusses heterosexuality's central role in misogyny, patriarchy, and and why heterosexuals are the ones you should feel sorry for.  In the end Dr. Ward does not want to end the practice of heterosexuality but rather suggests what she refers to as "deep heterosexuality" in its place.  Her book is a letter of love to her heterosexual sisters and plea for heterosexual men to "be better" and love women truly and deeply.  

What do you get when a tenured Community College professor sits down with one of sociology’s most influential and unapologetic academics…honest talk about real sh*t.  Join Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (author of Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America) and I for a very candid and important conversation. We talk about the real danger to racial equality in the United States (hint: they don't wear hoods), if we can get leftist politics out of the Biden Administration, racist academia and much more. 

I sit down with Dr. Christina Jackson, coauthor (with Enobong Hannah Branch) of "Black in America." Among the topics we discuss are Black Women's leadership in social movements, gentrification, the Black middle class, and revitalizing the ghetto.