Johnny E. Williams is the author of African-American Religion and the Civil Rights Movement in Arkansas (University Press of Mississippi 2003) and Decoding Racial Ideology in Genomics (Lexington Books 2016). The former book examines the role of religious culture in motivating civil rights protest among African-Americans while the latter investigates the complex role racialized culture plays in delimiting how genome researchers think about human genetic variation. He is the author of numerous articles examining culture’s role in politics, social movement mobilization and scientific knowledge production.

He is also currently writing The Persistence of White Sociology (Palgrave Macmillan) which explores how conventional sociology as a theory, method and ideology functions to ensure the viability of systemic racism.

His commentary is featured in media outlets such as Black Agenda Report, Racism Review, CounterPunch, Ctnewsjunkie.com and The Mark News (Toronto, Canada).