Dr. Charity Clay is a Critical Race Sociologist of the African Diaspora. She is an Associate Professor in the sociology department at Xavier University of Louisiana, an HBCU in New Orleans. She is the head of the major concentration in crime and social Justice. Her work centers around Pan-African liberation and resistance movements dating back to 16th century Marronage throughout the Americas and attends to Decolonization and Nationalist movements and includes current Anti Police-Terror, Reparations and other Emancipation movements in the Social Media Era of the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States and abroad. As an affiliated faculty member of the African American and Diaspora studies, she has worked to develop study abroad opportunities for students throughout the African diaspora with centering around Afro-Indigeneity in the “Americas” and transatlantic Blackness outside of the United States.

As a fellow, Dr. Clay’s project seeks seeks to develop a conceptual framework to understand the non-fatal and collective impact of Systemic Police Terrorism on Targeted Black Communities. This framework shifts the current understanding of the relationship between policing and Black communities in the United States away from the hyperfocus on singular incidents of fatal use-of-force and toward an expansive view of the ways that both the most extreme and subtle aspects of policing (proactive, reactive and reporting) terrorize members of targeted Black communities.