Charity Clay, PhD

Dr. Charity Clay is a Critical Race Sociologist of the African Diaspora. She received her PhD in Sociology from Texas A&M University in 2014. She is currently an assistant professor at Xavier University of Louisiana, an HBCU in New Orleans where she heads the concentration in crime and Social Justice.

As an educator, she uses sociological perspectives to help her students understand systems of oppression and resistance at micro and macro levels. She is passionate about developing students' skills to conduct, analyze and apply qualitative and quantitative research as tools of resistance.

As a researcher her interests center around pressing issues throughout the African diaspora including but not limited to, impacts of constructing Black Womanhood through the white gaze, the importance of African Descended students having global education experiences, Gentrification as Structural Racial Oppression, The significance of the Caribbean in strengthening cultural connections from Africa to the United States, and the impacts of Social Media on Black Resistance.

Her current work is a mixed methodologies project that introduces a Conceptual Framework she created called “Systemic Police Terrorism” (SPT). It seeks to expand understandings of Police Violence in Black communities beyond fatal incidents of use of force. She uses police statistics, interviews with those impacted by SPT, analysis of media representations of Policing in Black communities, and photography and videography to fully capture the Systemic nature of Police Terrorism. She intends for this work to be used by those invested in eradicating SPT and healing Black communities.