Thomas Craemer

Associate Professor

School of Public Policy

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Education

Ph.D., Political Science, Stony Brook University, 2005
M.A., Political Science, Stony Brook University, 2002
Doctorate, University of Tübingen, Germany, Political Science, 2001
M.A., University of Tübingen, Germany, Political Science, Computer Science, 1997

Teaching Interests

Race and Public Policy
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
Applied Quantitative Methods
Applied Research Design
Public Opinion and Survey Research

Research Interests

Implicit and Explicit Racial Attitudes
Racial Stereotyping in the U.S. Media Coverage of Haiti
Reparations for Slavery and De Jure Discrimination in the U.S.
International Reparations for Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

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Dr. Thomas Craemer

Background

Born and raised in (West) Germany, Professor Thomas Craemer’s interest in racial attitudes was shaped by learning about the Holocaust in every school subject and feeling deeply ashamed. One day he met Mieciu Langer, a survivor of five concentration camps and a death march. How could Mieciu retire from Israel to Germany of all places? How could he trust his old age to German hands? From the 1970s to his passing in 2015, Mieciu had received a small Holocaust reparations pension from the German government, perhaps giving German words of apology more credibility.

Research

Thomas studied how implicit racial attitudes influence American public opinion on race-related policies, including slavery reparations. His paper on “Implicit Closeness to Blacks, Support for Affirmative Action, Slavery Reparations, and Vote Intentions for Barack Obama in the 2008 Elections” received the International Society of Political Psychology’s Roberta Sigel Award in 2010 and was published in 2014 in Basic and Applied Social Psychology (vol. 36, pp. 413-424). His work also appeared in Political Psychology (2008, Vol. 29, Nr. 3, pp. 407-436; 2010, Vol. 31, Nr. 6, pp. 797-829) and other journals. In 2024, Thomas investigated “Implicit Black Identification among White non-Hispanic Respondents and Support for Black Reparations” (Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Vol. 40, pp. 657–671.

Between 2007 and 2012, Thomas accompanied Department (now School) of Public Policy graduate students to New Orleans to do research and volunteer for Hurricane Katrina relief. The resulting research on racial disparities in Hurricane Katrina relief was published in the Public Administration Review in 2010 (Vol. 70, Nr. 3, pp. 367-377).

With travel grants from the Ford Foundation (2012 and 2013), Thomas took student teams to Haiti volunteering for earthquake reconstruction while conducting research on racial stereotypes in the US media coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake (this research was updated in 2025 with a generous grant from the Haitian American Foundation for Democracy, HAFFD).

In his 2015 paper on Estimating Slavery Reparations (Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 96, Nr. 2, pp. 639-655), Thomas quantified losses to Black Americans from unpaid hourly wages between 1776 and 1865. At that time, free laborers earned between 2 and 8 cents per hour. At a very modest 3% interest rate the lost wages amounted to $14.2 trillion in 2009 dollars (roughly $22.8 trillion in 2025 dollars). The paper was widely cited in the media, including appearances in Full Frontal with Samantha Bee (2019), CNN’s United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell (2020), and invitations to conferences in the Gambia (2016), at Tulane Law School (2018), and at Stellenbosch University in South Africa (2018).

Advocacy

Among other pro-bono consulting work, Thomas served as part of a 5-person expert team advising the California Reparations Task Force (2021 to 2023), and he is currently engaged in similar work for New York Senator James Sanders’ “40 Acres and an EV Coalition” in support of New York State’s Community Commission on Reparations Remedies (2023-present).