Troy Duster

Troy Smith Duster (born July 11, 1936) is an American sociologist with research interests in the sociology of science, public policy, race and ethnicity and deviance. He is a Chancellor's Professor of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley, and professor of sociology and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University. Duster is on the faculty advisor boards of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies.

In 1970, Duster published The Legislation of Morality in which he showed how hundreds of thousands of previously law-abiding drug addicts became associated with the deviant and criminal segment of society after the United States Supreme Court in Webb v. United States interpreted the Harrison Narcotic Law (1914) to prohibit physician prescriptions for the maintenance of existing physical opiate dependence. It was easier, Duster concluded, for middle America to direct its moral hostility "toward a young, lower-class Negro male than toward a middle-aged white female". More recently he contributed to the book White-Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-blind Society (2005).

From 2004 to 2005, Duster served as president of the American Sociological Association.

He is the grandson of civil rights activist Ida B. Wells.