Algernon Austin

Algernon Austin, Director of the Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, is a sociologist of racial relations with a specialization on black Americans. Prior to joining the Economic Policy Institute, he was assistant director of research at the Foundation Center and a Senior Fellow at the Demos think tank. From 2001 to 2005, he served on the faculty of Wesleyan University. Austin is the author of Getting It Wrong: How Black Public Intellectuals Are Failing Black America and Achieving Blackness: Race, Black Nationalism, and Afrocentrism in the Twentieth Century. He has published scholarly articles in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Qualitative Sociology, the Journal of African American Studies, and Race, Gender and Class.