Gary T. Marx (born 1938) is professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and retired from the University of Colorado in 1996. He has worked in the areas of race and ethnicity, collective behavior and social movements, law and society and surveillance studies.
Marx was born on a farm in central California, raised in Los Angeles from the age of two, and attended John Marshall High School.[1] He has degrees from UCLA (1960) and University of California at Berkeley (PhD in sociology, 1966: Protest and Prejudice: The Climate of Opinion in the Negro American Community).[2] He taught at Harvard University in the Department of Social Relations, moving to MIT in Urban Studies and Planning (1973-1994). From 1992, he spent four years as head of the Sociology Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder.[3][4]
Marx was married with children, to Phyllis Anne Rakita Marx for over 50 years, until her death in 2013. They moved to a farm on Bainbridge Island near Seattle in 1996.[5]
Marx's early work was on race relations in the United States, during the Civil Rights Movement. He has also contributed to studies of collective behavior and social movements, and studies of policing and policing methods. In 1967, he was a consultant sociologist for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) and participated in the writing of the controversial internal staff paper, "The Harvest of American Racism," which concluded that some of 1967's rioting was political in nature and inferred that it was justified. Although this paper was largely rejected by senior staff, its major theme--that the rioting was caused by racism--was consistent with that of the Commission's final report, and Marx, while recognizing some of the final report's weaknesses, has generally been a strong and consistent supporter of the report.[6][7][8]
He worked extensively on surveillance issues, illustrating how and why surveillance is neither good nor bad, but context and comportment make it so. He has sought to create a conceptual map of new ways of collecting, analyzing, communicating and using personal information. Explanation and evaluation require a common language for the identification and measurement of surveillance's fundamental properties and contexts (e.g., the new surveillance, surveillance society, maximum security society, surveillance creep; surveillance slack, the softening of surveillance, the myth of surveillance, neutralization and counter-neutralization, and four basic surveillance contexts: coercion, contracts, care, and cross cutting, unprotected "publicly" available data).[9]
^Steven M. Gillon (2018). Separate and Unequal. New York: Basic Books. pp. 151-175 and 274-275.
^Rick Loessberg and John Koskinen. "Measuring the Distance: The Legacy of the Kerner Report". Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. 4 (6): 105-106 and 116.
^Gary T. Marx (1970). J.F. Szwed (ed.). Two Cheers for the National Riot (Kerner) Commission Report. In Black Americans: A Second Look. New York: Basic Books.
