In August, Professor Daría Roithmayr will join the Colorado Law faculty as Professor of Law. Professor Roithmayr teaches and writes about persistent structural racism and racial exploitation. Her 2014 book, Reproducing Racism: How Everyday Choices Lock In White Advantage (NYU), explores how racial inequality structurally reproduces itself over time, even in the absence of intentional discrimination. Professor Roithmayr is currently at work on a number of projects that highlight the central role racial exploitation plays in capitalism.
Roithmayr previously taught at the University of Southern California and has been a visiting researcher at Harvard University and a visiting law professor at the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Georgetown University Law Center, and Yale Law School.
In this interview, Professor Roithmayr sits down with Colorado Law’s Emily Battaglia to answer a few questions about her work and what she is looking forward to in her new position here at Colorado Law.
Hi Daría – thank you so much for taking the time to answer a few questions about your work and the expertise you will be bringing to the law school as a new faculty member. We can’t wait for you to join us!
DR: I am looking forward to it!
What excites you most about this new role here at Colorado Law?
DR: I am most excited about a new collaboration with colleagues at CU Anschutz. My collaborators and I are investigating the uneven impact of legal change on the public health and well-being of Colorado's marginalized communities. Our first project is to map for Colorado policymakers the impact of a recent change reducing the amount of fentanyl involved in drug use or distribution to be classified as a felony. Drawing on a range of data, including amazing data from the Rocky Mountain Data Research Center, we plan to map both direct and indirect effects of this legal change, not just on overdose behavior but on housing, food and financial security for those affected by the change in the law.
Sounds exciting! I heard you are working on a new project, Racism Pays – could you share some more about this and how it builds upon your previous publications?
DR: I am publishing Racism Pays with the Michigan Journal of Race and Law—it will be out very soon! This article is part of a larger body of research on racial exploitation. Racism Pays argues that some of our most celebrated innovations in the digital economy have gotten off the ground by racially exploiting workers of color, paying them less than the marginal revenue product of their labor for their essential contributions. Innovators like Apple and Uber have been able to racially exploit workers of color because workers of color have far fewer outside options than white workers, owing to intentional and structural discrimination against workers on the basis of their race. I build here on my earlier work on structural discrimination in labor markets, showing among other things that people of color have less network access to job referrals and job information for high-wage "good" jobs than white people.
I conclude the paper by arguing that exploited workers of color should be paid the marginal revenue product of their labor and should share in the profits of the innovation that they make possible. In the last section, I explore different ways to increase worker power to fight back against racial exploitation.
Outside of your new paper, are there any other current projects you'd like to provide more detail on?
DR: I am about to submit a new paper that investigates the contagiousness of police violence. Explanations for police violence focus on “bad-apple” officers or problematic department culture. Recent research suggests that violence may also spread contagiously, transmitting influence through the connections between officers on their professional network. My collaborators and I investigate whether police shootings spread via peer influence. We use data on police shootings and officer connections from the Chicago Police Department to map officers’ professional network, and then layer shootings onto that network. We then investigate whether exposure to earlier shootings by officers’ network neighbors affects the relative risk of later officer-involved shootings. We find statistical evidence suggesting that shooting behavior spreads from officer to officer via peer influence, even after controlling for potential observed confounding and accounting for unobserved confounding.
We are very excited about this project and its potential implications for policymaking in police departments. Proposed policy reforms might include changing the way officers interact with each other—with whom they are assigned, their organizational architecture–or inducing particularly influential officers to spread anti-shooting norms. Focusing on the social interactions among officers could prove essential to developing strategies designed to reduce police shootings. But first, we have more work to do to identify the mechanism that enables shootings to spread from officer to officer.
Your work is very interdisciplinary, with crossover into economics, sociology, political theory, history and complex systems theory. Can you expand on what drew you to this kind of thinking, and why it is important when exploring racial inequity and structural disparities?
DR: I study how racism emerges from local interactions among individual people, and between people and the social structures they create. Racism emerges not just from individuals interacting with each other, but also from the patterned interactions of people in a social network, a neighborhood, and ultimately across entire political economies, like the launch of the cotton economy in the U.S. South. To understand how this happens, I work across a diverse array of disciplines that investigate the patterns, systems, and histories of human social interaction. Increasingly, I am drawn to data-focused projects --like the police contagion project, and the data-focused analysis of fentanyl felonization.
I started thinking about racism as something that emerges from social interaction after reading a groundbreaking book by economist Brian Arthur, who described the economy in this dynamic way, as something that emerges at multiple scales from human interactions with each other and with markets.
Thank you so much, Daría, for your thoughtful answers. To conclude our conversation, I would love to know: what is your proudest career accomplishment so far?
DR: Developing this novel way of thinking about racism!