Rogers Smith: Toward a Post-White America?

University of Pennsylvania Professor Rogers Smith’s research has shown the great extent to which American citizenship has historically been structured in favor of those who called themselves “white,” though never without intense contestation.  His current work explores whether and how America’s political system, now severely racially polarized, can cope with the challenges posed by the legacies of the nation’s racial past and its demographically more diverse present and future.

Rogers M. Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Associate Dean for the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and Chair of the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism. He is the author or co-author of many articles and seven books, including Political Peoplehood (2015), Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America with Desmond S. King (2011), Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (2003), and Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (1997). Civic Ideals received six best book prizes from four professional associations and was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. Smith was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004, the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 2011, and the American Philosophical Society in 2016.