Troy Duster is a sociologist with research interests in the sociology of science, public policy, race and ethnicity and deviance. He is a Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and professor of sociology and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University. He contributed to White-Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-blind Society.

He is the grandson of civil rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. In 1970, he published The Legislation of Morality, in which he showed how the moral indignation regarding addiction at the time of the Harrison Narcotic Law (1914) pointed fingers not at the middle- and upper-class users of drugs but at the lower classes of Americans.

Although Troy Duster was raised in poverty, he was able to attend a university on an academic scholarship, the Pullman Foundation Scholarship, a scholarship for minority and students in poverty. This scholarship not only paid his tuition, but it gave him spending money as well. With this scholarship Troy Duster attended Northwestern University as an undergraduate student. Duster earned his bachelor's degree in Sociology from Northwestern in 1957.

After receiving his bachelor's degree at Northwestern, Duster went to UCLA for graduate school, earning his master's degree in Sociology in 1959. Duster then returned to Northwestern and received a PhD in Sociology in 1962.

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