Greetings and welcome! You've landed at the right place if you're looking for me -- Jessie Daniels, PhD, author and professor at Hunter College in New York City (if you're looking for the singer by the same name, go here). I'm passionate about documentary films and I frequently use them in my teaching; I keep a list of those films here. Since about 1995, my research has focused on how the Internet is (and is not) changing social inequality.
I did my graduate work at The University of Texas at Austin and hold an MA and PhD in Sociology. Following that, I was awarded a Charles Phelps Taft post doctoral fellowship at the University of Cincinnati, where I studied with Patricia Hill Collins (current president of the American Sociological Association).
I'm the author of two books White Lies (Routledge, 1997) and Cyber Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), both dealing with race and media. In addition, I've published a number of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters about race, gender and technology along with dozens of conference papers.
Recognized as a national expert on white racism, I was featured in Elizabeth Thompson’s Emmy-award winning documentary “Blink,” about a supposedly reformed white supremacist. I'm a frequent contributor to the blog Racism Review. Since I co-founding the blog in 2007 with Joe R. Feagin (former president of the American Sociological Association), Racism Review has become a leading national and international source of analysis on race and racism with a readership of over 90,000 unique visitors each month.
My current research is concerned with the question: How do new media and visual technologies affect social inequality (such as race/gender/class), particularly with regard to health, illness and the body?
My working hypothesis is that these new technologies both ameliorate and exacerbate inequality in complex ways. I'm examining this question in a number of different projects. For example, in one project, I'm exploring the use of mobile digital technologies by LGBTQ homeless youth to survive on the streets of the city. And, in another project, I'm conducting in-depth interviews with feminist bloggers for a book on feminism, gender, race and health in the blogosphere.
In my spare time, I'm writing a memoir about growing up white in 1970s Texas, becoming an anti-racist lesbian, and living in New York City.
Cloaked Websites 
Cloaked websites intentionally seek to deceive the casual or unsuspecting web-user. Cloaked white supremacist sites that mimic legitimate civil rights sites are, in my view, a particularly insidious form of racist propaganda. Cloaked sites dealing with health may mislead readers about medical conditions in the service of a political (or economic) agenda. An article I wrote about cloaked websites is scheduled for publication in the August issue of New Media & Society, and my new book, Cyber Racism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009) includes two chapters about this phenomenon.
