Karida Brown


Karida L. Brown 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.
WWW karida.io

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 Best Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association.

Career

Brown’s first job after college was as an underwriter at American International Group and then she went on to work at Zurich North America. After earning her Ph.D., Brown joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles as an assistant professor. She was promoted to full professor and received tenure in 2021. In 2022 she move to Emory University where she is a professor of sociology.
In 2020 Brown was named the director of racial equity and action for the Los Angeles Lakers. She held the position until the beginning of 2023.
Brown is the author of six books, Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia, The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Racialize Modernity and the Global Color Line, The Oxford Handbook of W. E. B. Du Bois, The New Brownies’ Book: A Love Letter to Black Families, which won the 2024 NAACP Image award for Outstanding Literary Work – Non-Fiction, Race in America 3rd edition, and The Battle for the Black Mind.
Brown 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

Selected publications

  • Brown, Karida L. The Battle for the Black Mind. Legacy Lit Books
  • Brown, Karida L. and Charly Palmer. The New Brownies Book: A Love Letter to Black Families. Chronicle Books
  • Brown, Karida L. Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia. University of North Carolina Press
  • Itzigsohn, José and Karida L. Brown. The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line. NYU Press.
  • Brown, Karida L. and Luna Vincent, “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