Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration

Baldwin III, Robert. “Trayvon Martin’s Killing 10 Years Ago Changed the Tenor of Democracy.” NPR, Feb. 26, 2022. npr

This article, written by lawyer and journalist Robert Baldwin III, looks back on the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman and the incident’s longstanding effects on US political and social culture. Baldwin traces the origins of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and the current rise of racial justice organizing in the US to Martin’s death. He also provides current political context, including the backlash against BLM that grew during Donald Trump’s presidency and continues today. Both Martin’s death and the current wave of social justice activism in the US occurred after Marked was published, so this article links themes in Pager’s work to the present day.

Bertrand, Marianne and Sendhil Mullainathan. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” American Economic Review 94 (2004): 991-1013.

Pager cites this paper by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan in her own work. Bertrand and Mullainathan conducted a similar field experiment to Pager, responding to job ads in Chicago and Boston with fictitious resumes that used either “Black-sounding” or “white-sounding” names. Unlike Pager’s study, their work focused only on race, not the additional factor of criminality.