Lu-in Wang
Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh
2023
Lu-in Wang serves as Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh. Her scholarship examines ordinary and extraordinary forms of discrimination and the connections between them. Her recent work explores the legal implications of economic and social stereotypes in the service industry, particularly with respect to discrimination in employment and against customers. An earlier book, Discrimination By Default: How Racism Becomes Routine (New York University Press 2006), draws on social psychology to detail three commonplace but generally unrecognized ways in which unconscious assumptions lead to discrimination in a wide range of everyday settings and how these dynamics interact to produce an invisible, self-fulfilling, and self-perpetuating prophecy of racial disparity. Wang also has written on more extreme forms of discrimination, including hate crime. In addition to being the author of Hate Crimes Law (West 1994), the first legal treatise on that subject, she has published several articles that apply insights from historical, sociological, and social psychological literature to illuminate the legal issues related to bias-motivated crime and violence.
The effort to eradicate hate requires the active participation of every component of our society, to include governments, the private sector, communities of faith and indeed every aspect of civil society. There is no more urgent task in front of us. The organizers of the Eradicate Hate Global Summit are doing the United States and the world an enormous service by tackling hatred and extremism with a focus on honest dialogue and conversation, genuine learning and practical solutions. This will not happen overnight, but the Pittsburgh community’s leadership in this effort is genuinely inspiring and motivating.
