The 2025 C. Wright Mills Award Committee selected Dr. Christina J. Cross’s book, Inherited Inequality: Why Opportunity Gaps Persist between Black and White Youth Raised in Two-Parent Families, Harvard University Press, as this year's winner.

Dr. Michael L. Walker, Chair of the 2025 C. Wright Mills Award Committee said of Dr. Cross's work:

The precision and reach of Inherited Inequality, the way it brings decades of longitudinal evidence on family structure into conversation with social welfare policy and the long history of American racism, not only overturns assumptions that have shaped public debate since the Moynihan Report but offers a fresh and rigorous account of why opportunity gaps persist even in the households we are told will close them. Written with unmatched clarity and methodologically exacting at every turn, Inherited Inequality has the power to allow us to rethink what we know about the family, racial inequality, and the policies built upon them, thus letting us reimagine what a path to justice may look like. This book is utterly deserving of the C. Wright Mills Award.

Congratulations, Dr. Cross! 

The award was presented at the 2026 Awards Ceremony on Saturday, August 8. Click here for a full listing of the 2025 finalists. Click here for a list of past winners.