McClain also edited the 1993 book Minority Group Influence: Agenda Setting, Formulation, and Public Policy.
": Racial and Ethnic Minorities in American Politics, co-authored with Joseph Stewart, Jr., won the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America Award for Outstanding Scholarship on the Subject of Intolerance.
"[9] Apropos of "racially insensitive" remarks in 2010 by Glenn Beck describing President Obama as a racist, the arrest of black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and the Obama administration's dismissal of a black Agriculture Department official for making supposedly racist remarks, McClain told the Singapore Straits Times: "It's dispiriting and disheartening that we are still dealing with these kinds of issues.
In Until Proven Innocence, their book about the Duke lacrosse-team rape controversy, KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr., wrote that "McClain's extraordinary sensitivity to imagined racial slights from the desperately politically correct [Duke president Richard] Brodhead administration contrasted with her indifference to— if not approval of— the many very real racially inflammatory statements by her Group of 88 colleagues".
Apropos of a visit to her "Race and American Politics" class by Hollywood film director Paul Haggis to talk about racism, she told the Chronicle that Haggis had "hit so many things that we've been talking about here....Then the lacrosse allegations intervened, and so it became much more relevant -- that this wasn't just what we were reading in class."
An article that appeared in the Duke Chronicle on June 9, 2006, reported that in the wake of the rape allegations, "increased demands from students and administrators contributed to a challenging semester for many black faculty at Duke" and "have led to calls for renewed efforts in the hiring and retention of black professors."
The article quoted McClain as saying that "Black faculty in particular [have been affected] because of the very racial dimensions of some aspects of the incident....The substantial number of faculty people that I have talked to have all felt the same way – that the University failed to recognize the racial dimensions of this and failed to address it quickly."
McClain called this allegedly slow response to the case's "racial dimensions" "depressing and demoralizing for faculty" and complained, in the Chronicle's paraphrase, that "[n]o administrator" had "met with members of the black faculty to explicitly address the issues broached by the lacrosse incident."
"[12] Women in Higher Education reported on July 1, 2006, that in the wake of the lacrosse-team rape scandal, the team, under the "guidance" of Duke president Richard Brodhead, had written "a mission statement" in which "players pledge to 'demonstrate the virtues of compassion, sensitivity and respect.'"
But the article said that in the view of McClain, the conduct of some of the lacrosse players was "so far out of bounds" that "agreeing to a set of principles and admitting that they were wrong" was not sufficient to bring about change.