Her work focuses on the evolution of racism and how this process affects institutional practices, identities, and interracial organizing. Like many scholars of critical race and racism theory, she operates under the assumption that different types of racism dominate in different historical periods and the type that dominates affects the way people think, talk, and act towards the issue of racism. In her past work, she developed the concept of emotional segregation, which she defined as an institutionalized empathetic barrier between European Americans and people of color. She showed how this barrier was reproduced in U.S. films that continued to “other” people of color. Currently, she is developing a book manuscript building on her ethnography of an interracial social movement organization.