To:To: Dr. Paul D. Allison, Chair and Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
      Marguerite F. Miller, Editor, Almanac
      Mary C. Capurso, Associate Editor, Almanac
      Natalie S. Woulard, Assistant Editor, Almanac


This letter is written primarily in response to the seventeen scholars who signed a letter entitled "Conceptual Plagiarism Absurd" (http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/volumes/v52/n07/spout.html#post2), which we feel is not only inaccurate but also disrespectful of the research, intellectual property, and distinguished career of Prof. Elijah Anderson.  While we recognize that these scholars have a right to an opinion, we categorically reject the unfortunate tactics and vocabulary employed in their letter as well as its suspect conclusions.   

Our purpose is not to engage in a debate about 'conceptual plagiarism.'  Our colleague Elijah Anderson never used this term, nor do we use it.  Because a detailed account of the appropriately acknowledged as well as the twenty-two inappropriately unacknowledged similarities between Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas' Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage and Elijah Anderson's previous work (most notably Code of the Streets) has been addressed elsewhere (see http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/volumes/v52/n07/spout-a.html), we will not revisit that topic here.

However, we wholeheartedly agree with Prof. Anderson' conclusion  "Should the field accept * claims to the originality of Edin and Kefalas' book, these scholars will have succeeded at seriously obscuring indebtedness to previous scholarship. [Their book] exhibits enough unacknowledged similarity to [Anderson's work] that it constitutes an unfair use of another's scholarship."

Karl Marx, famous for his use of dialectics, never forgot that it was an intellectual tool that he had borrowed from Hegel. We find it peculiar that in America the work of Blacks and others has been frequently misappropriated, borrowed, used, adopted, or adapted, with little or no attribution-from the patents, techniques, inventions, and procedures of Africa and the Africans; from the work of the slave to the work of the sharecropper; and from the labor of the servant to the labor of the industrial worker. In the academy, the same theft of our efforts has a long history - we remember the wholesale stealing of the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neal Hurston; we remember the appropriation of the graduate student works of St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton; and we know that the theft continues to this day.

It is essential therefore that we not remain silent in the face of the dismissive letter from the group of 17 scholars, which simply rejects out of hand the concerns raised about Edin's overlap without attribution of Anderson's work, and moreover disrespects a distinguished scholar (& his work) by implying that his concerns in this regard are "absurd" and may be rooted in a "fundamental misreading" of the texts.

We do not believe that such dismissive language would have been used if the author of the original work was a White male.  But it seems that the work of Black scholars merits little or no respect for its originality, insight, or contributions.  We can ill afford to allow this disrespect to continue.  To do less continues the pattern of abuse and misuse that plagues our history.  Unless we seek justice through such acknowledgements, our silence makes us all accomplices in the process.


1.	Rodney D. Coates, Professor, Miami University of Ohio
2.	BarBara M. Scott, President and Signing on Behalf of The Association of Black Sociologists, Professor, Northeastern Illinois University
3.	Judith Rollins, Professor, Wellesley College
4.	Essie Manuel Rutledge, Professor, Western Illinois University
5.	Vasilikie Demos, Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota, Morris
6.	Andrew Billingsley, Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina
7.	David Covin, Professor Emeritus, California State University, Sacramento
8.	Stanley Aronowitz, distinguished professor of sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
9.	Patricia A. Bell, Professor, Oklahoma State University
10.	Judith Blau, Professor, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
11.	Edna Bonacich, Professor, University of California, Riverside.
12.	Charles Jarmon, Professor, Howard University
13.	Marc Silver, Professor, Hofstra University
14.	Rhonda F. Levine, Professor of Sociology, Colgate University
15.	Augustine J. Kposowa, Professor, University of California-Riverside
16.	Walda Katz-Fishman, Professor, Howard University & Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide
17.	Hernan Vera, Professor, University of Florida
18.	John Sibley Butler, Professor, University of Texas
19.	Mary Romero, Professor, Arizona State University
20.	Sam Marullo, Professor and Chair of Sociology, Georgetown University
21.	Anthony Lemelle, Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
22.	Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor, Duke University
23.	Charles M. Payne, Professor, Duke University 
24.	Wornie Reed, Professor of Sociology, University of Tennessee
25.	Kenneth A. Gould, Professor of Sociology, St. Lawrence University
26.	Allan Schnaiberg, Professor, Northwestern University
27.	Robert Newby, Professor, Central Michigan University
28.	Ronald L. Taylor, Professor, University of Connecticut
29.	Maynard Seider, Professor, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts
30.	Juan Battle, Professor, CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College
31.	Robert Davis, Professor, North Carolina A&T State University
32.	Levon Chorabajian, Professor, U Mass/Lowell
33.	Lauren Langman, Professor, Loyola University of Chicago
34.	Thomas A. LaVeist, Professor, Johns Hopkins
35.	Maxine Thompson, Associate Professor, North Carolina State University
36.	Marlese Durr, Associate Professor, Wright State University
37.	Rose M. Brewer, Associate Professor, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
38.	Anne Warfield Rawls, Associate Professor, Bentley College
39.	Shirley A. Jackson, Chair and Associate Professor, Southern Connecticut State University
40.	David Fasenfest, Editor, Critical Sociology, Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow, Wayne State University
41.	Arthur Paris, Associate Professor, Syracuse University
42.	Nikitah Imani, Associate Professor, James Madison University
43.	Najja N. Modibo, Associate Professor, Indiana University Purdue University
44.	Noel A. Cazenave, Associate Professor, University ofConnecticut
45.	Frank Harold Wilson, Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
46.	B. Ricardo Brown, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute
47.	Bruce D. Haynes, Associate Professor, UC Davis
48.	Paul-Jahi Price, Associate Professor, Pasadena City College
49.	Johnny Williams, Associate Professor, Trinity College
50.	Peter Seybold, Associate Professor of Sociology, IUPUI
51.	Donald Cunnigen, Associate Professor, University of Rhode Island
52.	Lynda Dickson, Associate Professor, University of Colorado-Colorado Springs
53.	Annemarie Harrod, Associate Professor, Belmont University, Nashville, TN
54.	Shawn R. Donaldson, Associate Professor, Stockton College of NJ
55.	Michael Hodge, Associate Professor, Morehouse
56.	Michael Joseph Francisconi, Associate Professor, University of Montana Western
57.	Glenn S. Johnson, Associate Professor, Clark Atlanta University (Atlanta, GA)
58.	Carl Jorgensen, Associate Professor, UC Davis  
59.	Eric Margolis, Associate Professor, Arizona State University
60.	George Snedeker, Associate Professor, SUNY/College at Old Westbury
61.	Paul Paolucci, Associate Professor, Eastern Kentucky University
62.	Patricia Case, Assistant Professor, University of Toledo
63.	Sherrill L. Sellers, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison
64.	Carrol B. Cox, Assistant Professor of English (Emeritus) Illinois State, University Normal, Illinois
65.	Tanya Golash-Boza, Assistant Professor, University of Kansas
66.	Jennifer F. Hamer, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
67.	Amon Emeka, Assistant Professor, University of Southern California
68.	Johnnie M. Griffin, Assistant Professor, IU South Bend
69.	Carla Day Goar, Assistant Professor, Northern Illinois University
70.	April Linton, Assistant Professor, UC San Diego
71.	Keri Iyall Smith, Assistant Professor, Stonehill College
72.	Sandra Barnes, Assistant Professor, Purdue University
73.	David L. Brunsma, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Missouri 
74.	Beth Schaefer Caniglia, Assistant Professor, Oklahoma State University
75.	Ronnie A. Dunn, Assistant Professor, Cleveland State University
76.	Warren S. Goldstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Central Florida
77.	Georgina Murray, Senior Lecturer, Griffith University, Australia. 
78.	John M. Talbot, Lecturer, University of the West Indies, Jamaica
79.	Kristine Wright, Lecturer, California State University, Long Beach 
80.	Michael Briguglio, Assistant Lecturer, University of Malta
81.	Daryl Meeks, Lecturer, California State University, Long Beach
82.	Don Wallace, Adjunct Professor. Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA
83.	Yvonne J. Combs, Adjunct instructor/Independent Scholar, Brevard Community College, Florida
84.	Kathryn Brown-Tracy, Adjunct Prof. Three Rivers Community College Norwich, CT
85.	Marino A. Bruce, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, NIH NRSA Research Fellow
86.	Vashron Chapple, MPH-CHES -- Public Health Educator
87.	T. Rasul Murray, independent scholar, New York City
88.	La Francis Rodgers-Rose, Ph.D., CEO, International Black Women's Congress, Norfolk, Virginia  
89.	Pamela Guthrie, Research Analyst, Vera Institute of Justice / Graduate, student, City College, City University of New York   
90.	Albert Sargis, Lecturer, Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library For Social Research (Oakland, CA)
91.	James E.  Johnson, Ph.D., Independent researcher (graduate of UPenn), Galloway, N.J.
92.	Renee E. Spraggins, PhD., Demographer/Statistician, Special Populations Branch/ Population Division, U.S. Census Bureau
93.	Karen S. Glover, Doctoral Student, Texas A&M University
94.	Tamara L. Smith, Graduate Student, Loyola University Chicago
95.	Vanessa D. Brooks, Student, New York City College of Technology
96.	Darryn C. Roberts, Doctoral Candidate (ABD), Miami University of Ohio
97.	Tamar Diana Wilson, Research Affiliate, UMSL
98.	 Felice Jones-Lee, Student, Stony Brook University
99.	Michelle Christian, Graduate Student, Duke University
100.	Dave Overfelt, Graduate Student, University of Missouri- Columbia  
101.	David G. Embrick, Graduate Student, Texas A&M University
102.	Toroitich Cherono, Graduate Student, Howard University  
103.	Willie Oliver, Doctoral Candidate (ABD), American University
104.	 Spencer Hope Davis.  Doctoral Student, North Carolina State University 
105.	John Barnshaw, Doctoral Student, University of Delaware
106.	Thomas Volscho, Doctoral Candidate, University of Connecticut 
107.	Vernese Edghill, PHD Student, Howard University  
108.	Andrew Van Alstyne, Graduate Student, Sociology, University of Michigan 
109.	 Khaya Clark, Graduate Student, University of Oregon.
110.	Nathanael Matthiesen, Graduate Student, University of California, Irvine
111.