John Skrentny is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS) at UC-San Diego. He is also Co-Director of the San Diego regional node of the Scholars Strategy Network. His research focuses on public policy, law and inequality, especially as they relate to the science and engineering workforce, immigration, and civil rights.
Supported by a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, Skrentny has finished a book to assess the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at its 50th anniversary--to bring the civil rights story up to date and examine how its employment protections work for nonwhites in the current era of mass immigration and the post-industrial economy. Available from Princeton University Press, _After Civil Rights: Racial Realism in the New American Workplace_ focuses on "racial realism," or the perceptions of employers that race is real, and that strategically managing the perceived racial abilities of different groups, or the effects of racial symbolism on particular audiences, will help organizations achieve their goals. The book examines different contexts of employment and discrimination law, including business and the professions; government employment; media and entertainment; and low-skilled employment. Racial realism is a significant departure from both the Civil Rights Act and also affirmative action, and despite the widespread and elite advocacy of racial realism, it has found very little support in the courts.
Skrentny's books have included The Minority Rights Revolution (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), which won the Distinguished Book Award from the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and was a finalist for the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award of the Organization of American Historians. The book was featured in author-meets-critics panels at meetings of the American Sociological Association, the Midwest Political Science Association, and the Western Political Science Association. This work was also widely reviewed in academic journals, as well as The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, and The Nation. His first book, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture and Justice in America (University of Chicago Press, 1996), is a study of the development and politics of affirmative action in employment for African Americans. This book was featured in a author-meets-critics panel at the conference of the Social Science History Association, was reviewed in a wide variety of academic journals, as well as The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist.
He has received grants and fellowships from a variety of sources including the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Japan Foundation's Center for Global Partnership, the Social Science Research Council, and the Princeton University Center for Human Values. He has been active in professional societies for several disciplines including sociology, political science, history and law, reviews work and advises students in all of these fields and serves on the editorial board for the Oxford University Press book series on Contemporary American Political Development.
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