ABOUT ME

I’m a cultural sociologist interested in how race and class reshape the way power and values are made and passed down inside American institutions.

I grew up in Brooklyn Heights — a mostly white pocket of an otherwise diverse borough — where my analytical lens took shape early. As a kid, I was always noticing who belonged in a given room, whose knowledge counted, and who was working to translate themselves to fit a certain place. I was studying my own world in order to make sense of how to exist inside it.

My work examines elite institutions — families, schools, the rooms where powerful people convene — and what happens within them: how people learn an institution’s codes, absorb its tools, and carry them elsewhere. I’m less interested in studying culture from a distance than in thinking about it honestly, from inside. My research agenda grew out of a realization that I didn’t yet have language for the patterns I kept observing — things neither everyday conversation nor the academic literature could quite name. Much of my work has been an attempt to build that language: to name how advantage is learned, held, and moved. That search became my doctoral work at Brown, where I spent years inside the world of the American Black elite — a way of seeing that still shapes my work today.

I’m now based in Atlanta, where I lead a peer community of senior executives. Alongside that, I write — about power, belonging, and the worlds I’ve spent my life trying to understand.