David Wellman passed away at home after a long illness in Berkeley, California on March 28, 2022. He is survived by his partner, Ms. Diana Penney.
David was a member of UC Santa Cruz's community studies faculty for 27 years. He was hired in 1983 as chair of the Community Studies Department. David received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and taught at the University of Oregon before arriving in Santa Cruz. David made major contributions to the sociology of race and racism in America.
His first book, Portraits of White Racism (1977) was among the first major challenges to the conception of racism as attitudinal prejudice. He argued that white racism could not be adequately explained as either a manifestation of prejudiced attitudes or ideology. Instead, white racism should be understood and analyzed as a matter of white people protecting their economic, political, psychological, and social advantages in the face of Black demands for change and inclusion. David demonstrated the strength of this conception through in-depth interviews with a diverse
group of white people. Today, Portraits of White Racism is regarded as a classic statement of an alternative theoretical framework for analyzing white racism.
David pursued study of white racism in subsequent articles and as a co-author of Whitewashing Race:The Myth of a Colorblind Society. Over the last year he worked with his co-authors on an afterword to a new edition of this award-winning book to bring its empirical analysis up to the present. David was an associate research sociologist at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at UC Berkeley for many years where he contributed to a significant report on affirmative action.
David also wrote and published a major study of union organizing and bargaining, The Union Makes Us Strong: Radical Unionism on the San Francisco Waterfront. His book challenged extant views of the labor movement; “his insights into worker behavior and workplace culture,” one reviewer wrote, “should cause us to rethink many of our assumptions about both union practices and labor-management relations.”
David’s research and analytical perspectives reflected his history as an activist fully engaged in some of the most significant social movements of the 20th century. He was active in the Bay area in anti-racist movements and campaigns, and he served as an expert witness in California courts on cases of racial discrimination.
He brought the same passion and commitment to his work at UCSC. He was instrumental in establishing the Social Documentation program now part of the Film and Digital Media department. In the late 1990s, he took a moribund idea for such a program and got it funded and established initially in the Community Studies Department. This was a major contribution to the campus at large. David also advised and served on the oral and dissertation committees of
numerous Sociology Ph.D. students.
David will be sorely missed by his friends and colleagues. But the memory of his scholarship and commitment to a more just society will not be forgotten. An African American home health care worker who cared for David in his last weeks, said she felt blessed to come into a house with people like David who respected her and treated her as a valuable member of the community. "Just look around this room," she said, as she pointed to the books and pictures in the living room, "it makes me feel that somebody is fighting for me."
That’s the David Wellman we will all remember.
