Dr. LaToya Council, Assistant Professor of Sociology, has been awarded a Paul J. Franz, Jr. Fellowship research award. This award will support her current sabbatical as she completes the research and publication of her book, Empathetic Care: Marriage, Family and Gender in the Black Middle Class.
This scholarly work focuses on the role marriage plays in the Black middle class and asks why marriage matters and has mattered for generations in Black America. In Empathetic Care, LaToya Council argues that marriage is important because it can operate as a “safety net” even as it reinforces racialized gendered forms of inequality. Black middle class couples have passionately invested in marriage and childrearing because the two serve as important forms of care and support for them as individuals within broader racist systems that shape their family’s occupational, residential, and educational lives.