Deborah Gray White

Deborah Gray White is an Americanist who specializes in African American and American women’s history, with a focus on issues of identity and the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985 and 1999), the first gendered analysis of the institution of slavery; and the editor of Telling Histories: Black Women in the Ivory Tower (2008), a collection of personal narratives written by African American women historians that chronicle the entry of Black women into the historical profession and the development of the field of Black women's history. Among other scholarly works, she has also written several K–12 text books on United States history, and her coauthored college text, Freedom On My Mind: A History of African Americans, is in its third edition. White conducted research on her newest book, Lost in the USA: American Identity from the Promise Keepers to the Million Mom March, while a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and as a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow. She holds the Carter G. Woodson Medallion and the Frederick Douglass Medal for excellence in African American history.

White is also the codirector of the three-volume project entitled Scarlet and Black. The Scarlet and Black Project is a historical exploration of the experiences of two disenfranchised populations, African Americans and Native Americans, at Rutgers University. With Professor Marisa Fuentes she is editor of the 2016 volume, Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History and Scarlet and Black, Volume 2: Constructing Race and Gender at Rutgers, 1865–1945. As a distinguished faculty fellow, White will continue working on the Scarlet and Black Project, with a focus on building a deep and healthy relationship with Black alumni of Rutgers who are interested in different aspects of Scarlet and Black. White sees this as an opportunity to use her 30-year relationship with Rutgers to engage alumni who would be interested in our public facing programming as well as those who may be interested in partnering/sponsoring different components of Scarlet and Black.