He hosted a comic radio show called "The Jackson Attraction" during his junior and senior years of high school in Brooklyn, New York.
He received a National Science Foundation predoctoral fellowship to pursue graduate work at Columbia University, earning an MA (1994), an MPhil (1998), and a PhD.
[12] Jackson is a founding member of CAMRA and PIVPE, two Penn-based groups dedicated to the creation of visual and performance research initiatives and the development of rigorous evaluation criteria.
The book is based on more than a decade of ethnographic studies around New York City, including stories from police officers, conspiracy theorists, and gospel choir singers.
[14] Jackson's invented alter ego, Anthroman, finds ethnographic significance in everyday buildings, showing how race is defined, debated, imposed, and confounded every day.
He argues that racism actually becomes more pronounced as explicit social discrimination subsides, using examples from current events and everyday interactions to show its serious impact on racially paranoid culture and the lives of all Americans.