Jack Turner is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington and Director of the Washington Institute for the Study of Inequality and Race (WISIR). He specializes in American political thought, race in American politics, critical race theory, and democratic theory. He is the author of Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America (University of Chicago Press, 2012). With Melvin L. Rogers, he is editing African American Political Thought: A Collected History (Under contract, University of Chicago Press). He is currently working on new essays on Frederick Douglass and Audre Lorde. He is also researching a book entitled Death and Democracy: The Radical Vision of Walt Whitman.