Troy Smith Duster (born July 11, 1936) is an American 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 University of California, Berkeley, and professor of sociology and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University.

In 1970, Duster 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.^[1] More recently he contributed to the book White-Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-blind Society (2005).

From 2004–2005, Duster served as president of the American Sociological Association.^[2] He was also a contributing member of the International HapMap Project, an organization that worked to develop the first haplotype map of the human genome.^[3]

He is the grandson of civil rights activist Ida B. Wells.^[2]

Education

Troy Duster is the son of Alfreda Duster (née Barnett) and Benjamin C. Duster Jr. and grandson of Ida B. Wells. He was able to attend university through the Pullman Foundation Scholarship, a scholarship for minority and impoverished students. With this scholarship Troy Duster attended Northwestern University as an undergraduate, where he earned his bachelor's degree in Sociology 1957.^[2][1]

Duster then went to the University of California, Los Angeles, for graduate school, earning a master's degree in Sociology in 1959.^[2] He then returned to Northwestern and received a PhD in Sociology in 1962.^[1]