DAVID WEINER, PHD
David Weiner was born in 1936 to socialist parents who studied to be journalists but went into the paper business to support their family during the depression. Training new employees was what he excelled at. At age twenty-four he moved to California and became a secondary school teacher. His first job was as a math teacher at a middle school in Compton, a solidly African American community. One day, a girl in one of his classes asked if perhaps she and her peers were inferior, since they always seemed to get the proverbial short end of the stick. Weiner placed math on hold and taught what he knew about the sociology of race relations for a week. She and her classmates decided that they were not inferior but that American society was seriously flawed. They wanted to continue talking about such issues, so a deal was struck: they got their math done by Thursday and every Friday the class discussed. This experience shaped Weiner’s life. He earned a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Texas in 1968, bent on community organization, education and social activism. He has pursued this course ever since. He has also served as a consultant to corporations and other organizations, including police departments. Acknowledgements he is especially proud of are a University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award in 1973, and publication in 2008 of his piece “What Racism Does to White People” in The Black Agenda Report. More information can be found about him in his autobiographical narrative, The Education of a Sociologist, on Amazon.

He can be reached at dweiner@austincc.edu