He is the author of The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton University Press, 2008), which received the American Historical Association’s 2008 Albert J. Beveridge Award “for the best book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada from 1492 to the present.” He is also co-author of Grace Lee Boggs’ The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2011) He has over twenty years of experience as a grassroots activist and is a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership based in Detroit, Michigan.