William E. Cross, Jr., PhD, was awarded a Presidential Citation for more than four decades of stellar contributions to the understanding of social identities in African-Americans and other cultural groups.
Currently clinical professor of higher education and counseling psychology at the University of Denver, 2014 president of Div. 45 of APA (Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race) and distinguished elder of the National Multicultural Summit, Cross has made substantive contributions to the study of cultural identities around the globe. His original nigrescence model, published in 1971 when he was still a doctoral student, represented a seminal moment, not only for Black identity and African-American psychology, but also for the study of social identities and the field of cultural psychology. His work has influenced research on Asian-American identity, ethnic identity, feminist identity, Latina/o identity, gay and lesbian identity, and White identity. The revisions of the nigrescence model in 1991 and 2001 resulted in the development of the Cross Racial Identity Scale, described as an exemplar of cultural scale development, and are ideal examples of the interplay of theory and empirical research.