W. D. Wright  Dr. W. D. Wright (born 1936) is a professor emeritus of history at Southern Connecticut State University and the author of seven books on race and racism. He earned a Ph.D. from State University of New York at Buffalo where he was influenced by W. E. B. Du Bois, referring to himself as a Du Boisian historical sociologist. He later published his dissertation "The Socialist Analysis of W. E. B. Du Bois." Wright, born 1936, was raised during the depression in Michigan City, Indiana, one of eight children. His father, Charles Noble Wright, worked as a riveter for the Pullman Train Company. His mother, Harriet Elizabeth Wright, was the first black female to graduate high school in Michigan City, Indiana. Wright's great grandmother, Elizabeth Downey, was a slave until the age of 12 in Virginia, when she was emancipated under the Emancipation Proclamation in approximately 1863. Wright was a childhood friend of Richard G. Hatcher, the first black mayor in Indiana. Hatcher often delivered speeches alongside Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and other historic proponents of the civil rights movement. Wright contends that historians and intellectuals have failed to understand the difference between race and racism, which has in turn impaired their ability to understand who Black people are in America. He argues that Black Americans are to be distinguished from other categories of black people in the country: black Africans, West Indians, or Hispanics. While Black people are members of the black race, as are other groups of people, they are a distinct ethnic group of that race. This conceptual failure has hampered the ability of historians to define Black experience in America and to study it in the most accurate, authentic, and realistic manner possible. Wright lectures often about how white people have been affected by their own racism and how it impacts upon relations between blacks and whites and the United States. He asserts that since the late 17th century, most Whites have been afflicted by their own racism, as evidenced by considerable delusional thinking, dehumanization, and alienation from America. White people have created and maintained a White racist America, which is the antithesis of liberty, equality, justice, and freedom; Black people continue to be the primary victims of this culture. Wright describes the Black experience in America as reflecting some of the richest dimensions of the human experience and human existence and also some of its most oppressive and wretched realities.