Omar Wasow

Omar Wasow
Wasow in 2007
Born
Omar Tomas Wasow

1970 (age 55–56)
Nairobi, Kenya
Education
Occupations
  • Tech expert 1995-2008
  • University professor and researcher, 2009 -
Employers
Known forPolitical science, race and ethnic politics
Spouse
​
(m. 2012)​
Websitewww.omarwasow.com

Omar Tomas Wasow (born December 22, 1970) is an assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Political Science. He is the founder of the social networking website BlackPlanet.

Life

Wasow grew up in a multi-ethnic family. His father, Bernard, is of German Jewish heritage, and his mother, Eileen, is African-American. Bernard was a civil rights activist who participated in the Freedom Summer Project, which entailed registering Black voters in Mississippi. Wasow's paternal grandfather was the mathematician Wolfgang R. Wasow. Both Wolfgang Wasow and Omar Wasow's paternal grandmother are of German Jewish heritage.[citation needed]

Education

Wasow is a graduate of Stuyvesant High School in New York City, where he was president of the student union. He then graduated in 1992 from Stanford University in California with a BA degree in race and ethnic relations.

Wasow earned a PhD in African-American studies, an MA in government and an MA in statistics, all from Harvard University in 2012.

Tech career

In 1995, Wasow was proclaimed by Newsweek as one of the "fifty most influential people to watch in cyberspace."

In 1999 he created BlackPlanet, one of the first major social networking sites. In 2008, the company was sold for $38 million.

Academic career

Wasow became an assistant professor of Politics at Princeton University in 2013.

Wasow’s work centers on race and ethnic politics and social movements and protests. His paper was published four days before the murder of George Floyd, in American Political Science Review paper on violent and nonviolent civil rights protests in the 1960s. The paper was widely discussed in international media coverage of the George Floyd protests.

Altmetric ranked the paper in the top 1% (1,000 of 18 million papers). Controversy erupted after David Shor was fired from his job at Civis Analytics, a progressive data analytics company, for tweeting a summary of Wasow’s paper.

Wasow has written commentary on the George Floyd protests and the 2021 United States Capitol attack.

In Summer 2021, Wasow became an assistant professor of Politics at Pomona College in Claremont, California. In 2022, he left Pomona College to become an assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Political Science.

Personal life

In 2012, Wasow married Jennifer Brea, a documentary filmmaker he met while they were both Ph.D. students at Harvard. He appears in her documentary film Unrest about her experience living with myalgic encephalomyelitis which premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

Wasow's sister is the filmmaker Althea Wasow, married to the writer Paul Beatty.

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ "The Identity of Young, Black Men". Chronicle of Higher Education. 1997. Retrieved July 11, 2020.
  2. ↑ Browning, Lynnley (May 13, 2001). "Private Sector; Silicon Alley's Philosopher-Prince". The New York Times. Retrieved January 12, 2018.
  3. ↑ "Jennifer Bréa, Omar Wasow". The New York Times. September 2, 2012. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 14, 2021.
  4. 1 2 Cornish, Audie (July 14, 2021). "Right To Vote: Civil Rights Activists Say We've Been Here Before". NPR.org. Retrieved July 14, 2021.
  5. ↑ Phelan, J. Greg (September 18, 1994). "Sound Bytes; Where Hipness is On-Line". New York Times. Retrieved November 14, 2007.
  6. ↑ "About – Omar Wasow". www.omarwasow.com. Retrieved April 27, 2018.
  7. ↑ "Omar Wasow Bio". Harvard University Scholar. Retrieved May 7, 2024.
  8. ↑ Watts, Jenisha (March 23, 2011). "Interview: BlackPlanet's Founder Talks Myspace, Why He was Skeptical of Twitter, And If Facebook May Have Peaked". Complex. Retrieved April 27, 2018.
  9. 1 2 Bartlett, Tom (July 7, 2020). "The Protesting of a Protest Paper". Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved July 11, 2020.
  10. ↑ University, Princeton. "Display Person – Department of Politics at Princeton University". www.princeton.edu. Retrieved April 27, 2018.
  11. ↑ Wasow, Omar (August 2020). "Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting". American Political Science Review. 114 (3): 638–659. doi:10.1017/S000305542000009X. ISSN 0003-0554. S2CID 219501252.
  12. ↑ "How Violent Protests Change Politics". The New Yorker. May 29, 2020. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  13. ↑ Douthat, Ross (May 30, 2020). "Opinion | The Case Against Riots". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  14. ↑ Edsall, Thomas B. (June 3, 2020). "Opinion | The George Floyd Election". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  15. ↑ "What the 1960s civil rights protests can teach us about fighting racism today". Science News. June 5, 2020. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  16. ↑ "Will protests help Donald Trump as they did Richard Nixon in 1968?". The Economist. June 8, 2020. ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  17. ↑ "美学者：抗议运动对特朗普选情是利还是弊？" [American scholars: Is the protest movement good or bad for Trump's election prospects?]. m.international.caixin.com (in Chinese). Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  18. ↑ Mahler, Thomas (June 3, 2020). "La preuve par l'Histoire : pourquoi les violences vont (sans doute) profiter à Trump" [Proof from History: why the violence will (undoubtedly) benefit Trump]. L’Express (in French). Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  19. ↑ "Riots helped elect Nixon in 1968. Can Trump benefit from fear and loathing too?". The Guardian. June 16, 2020. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  20. ↑ "ZEIT". www.zeit.de (in German). Archived from the original on August 11, 2022. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  21. ↑ Chait, Jonathan (September 17, 2020). "Trump Stoked Police Violence, and It May Have Cost Him the Election". Intelligencer. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  22. ↑ "Altmetric – Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion and Voting". cambridge.altmetric.com. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  23. ↑ Chait, Jonathan (June 11, 2020). "The Still-Vital Case for Liberalism in a Radical Age". Intelligencer. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  24. ↑ Yglesias, Matthew (July 29, 2020). "The real stakes in the David Shor saga". Vox. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  25. ↑ "Perspective | The protests started out looking like 1968. They turned into 1964". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  26. ↑ "Perspective | 'This is not who we are': Actually, the Capitol riot was quintessentially American". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved June 27, 2021.
  27. ↑ Li, Reia (February 11, 2022). "Pomona politics professor Omar Wasow leaving for UC Berkeley". The Student Life. Retrieved September 23, 2022.
  28. ↑ "Jennifer Bréa, Omar Wasow – Weddings". The New York Times. September 2, 2012. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved December 17, 2016.
  29. ↑ "Bio". eileenwasow. Archived from the original on October 29, 2023. Retrieved June 4, 2021.
  30. ↑ Millen, Robbie (October 25, 2016). "I'm not advocating segregation, I'm having fun pondering it". The Times.