Marquis Bey: Black Trans Feminism Liberation

Marquis Bey is Professor of Black Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and English, and core faculty in Critical Theory, at Northwestern University. Professor Marquis Bey discusses their book, BLACK TRANS FEMINISM in which they argue that how we define, label, and identify ourselves can be a way to embrace freedom and the liberated possible. First looking at how we are captured by systems and stereotypes when we see ourselves as defined by our race, gender, or sexuality, Dr. Bey sees the…

Michael Conklin: Public Opinion of Reparations

In this interview we discuss Prof. Conklin's paper An Unhill Battle for Reparationists: A Quantitative Analysis of the Effectiveness of Slavery Reparations Rhetoric. Prof. Conklin walks us through his research on normal citizen's attitudes toward granting or recieving reparations. The findings are often at odds with conventional assumptions.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant: Racial Formation Theory

Michael Omi and Howard Winant discuss their foundational work, Racial Formation in the United States. Unlike other traditional race theories, in Omi and Winant's view, racial meanings pervade US society, from defining individual racial identities to the structuring of collective political action. Race as a master category, the rise of colorblindness, and how the Right weaponizes civil rights advancements are all discussed. Michael Omi is a Professor Emeritus, Asian American and Asian…

Nakia D. Parker: Slavery in the Chickasaw Nation

Nakia D. Parker is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Michigan State University. Professor Nakia Parker discusses her article, "Regarded as an Appendage of His Family”: Slavery, Family, and the Law in Indian Territory." Chattel slavery spread into the Chickasaw Nation, in part, due to the "Civilization Program." How the Chickasaw legalized ownership and kinship is the focus of our discussion.

Nancy Heitzeg: School to Prison Pipeline

Dr. Nancy A. Heitzeg is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the interdisciplinary Critical Studies of Race/Ethnicity Program. Dr. Nancy Heitzeg discusses her research and book "The School to Prison Pipeline: Education, Discipline, and Racialized Double Standards." Dr. Heitzeg touches on police in schools, unfair suspensions, racialized biases, and the emergence of a system of medicalization that is different for white and black children.

Nell Irvin Painter: History of White People

Nell Irvin Painter is the award-winning author of many books, including Sojourner Truth, Southern History Across the Color Line, Creating Black Americans, The History of White People, and Standing at Armageddon. She is currently the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University. She has a second career as an artist after retirement from Princeton University and lives in Newark, New Jersey. Professor Painter discusses her book, THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE. Prof. Painter…

Pamela Newkirk: Racial Diversity

Pamela Newkirk, PhD, is a journalist, New York University professor, author and multi-disciplinary scholar whose work examines contemporary and historical depictions of African Americans in popular culture. Professor Pamela Newkirk discusses her book, Diversity Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business. She exposes the decades-old practices and attitudes that have made diversity a lucrative business while they fail to realize diversity. We discussed the history of exclusion, the…

Patricia Banks: How Corporate Philanthropy Leversage Black Culture

Patricia A. Banks is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Poetics and Chair and Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. Professor Banks discusses her book, Black Culture Inc.: How Ethnic Community Support Pays for Corporate America. By examining how corporate support and giving to Black museums, cultural events, and music festivals, Prof. Banks details the complicated and often fraught relationship created by these gifts. Afropunk, Kool Cigarettes, and Dennys are all…

Paul Finkelman: Slavery and the Supreme Court

Paul Finkelman, the Chancellor of Gratz College, is the author of more than 100 law review articles, 100 other scholarly articles and more than fifty books. He is a specialist on slavery, civil rights and race relations, African American history, American Constitutional and legal history, the American Civil War, religious liberty, the history of religion in the U.S., American Jewish history, and legal issues surrounding baseball. The United States Supreme Court has quoted and cited his work in…

Paula Ioanide: Racism's Emotional Economy

Dr. Paula Ioanide is a mother, teacher, scholar, and organizer who strives to counter the social and spiritual ills produced by systemic racism and build new worlds rooted in reparative justice. She is the author of The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings Trump Facts in an Era of Colorblindness and co-editor of the free, open access book, Antiracism Inc.: Why the Way We Talk About Racial Justice Matters. Professor Ioanide discusses her book The Emotional Politics of Racism: How Feelings…

Philip Reichel: Slave Patrols: Origins of the Police

During his more than 45 years in academia, Professor Reichel has received awards for teaching, advising, service, and scholarship. He is the author of several textbooks and has authored or co-authored more than forty articles and book chapters. His areas of expertise include comparative justice systems, transnational crime generally, and human trafficking more specifically. Professor Reichel discusses his articles "Southern slave patrols as a transitional police type" and "The…

Rana Hogarth: Slavery and Medicine

Professor Hogarth discusses her research into how the professionalization of medicine and the production of scientific knowledge in the Americas was bound up with the making of race. We talk about her first book, "Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840" and how white physicians defined blackness as a medically significant marker of difference in slave societies of the American Atlantic. And the legacy slave bodies had on the foundations of…

Randall Balmer: Race and the Religious Right

Randall Balmer, the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College, is the author of more than a dozen books. Professor Balmer discusses his book BAD FAITH: RACE AND THE RISE OF THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT. Professor Balmer debunks the myth that the Religious Right formed around opposition to Abortion. Instead, he finds that the movement coalesced around de-segregation of white's only Religious Universities. As the religious right fought to keep their white only segregation academies,…

Randolph McLaughlin: Slavery in the Virginia Colony

Prior to joining the Pace Law School faculty in 1988, Professor McLaughlin was an attorney associated with Meyer, Suozzi, English & Klein, with whom he did litigation and labor law work. In 1978, he began his legal career at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a civil rights/civil liberties legal organization in New York City. For eight years he worked side by side with the renowned civil rights attorney William Kunstler fighting for the rights of activists and the communities across the…

Rebecca Grant: Pregnancy in America

Journalist Rebecca Grant author of "Birth: Three Mothers, Nine Months, and Pregnancy in America" discusses her book. She describes the current state of maternal care in America, how midwifery factored into early American birth care, and how the rise of doulas can minimize harm during pregnancy and birth. Racial, social, and economic roadblocks create a system in maternal health defined in part by discrimination, judgment, and disparate treatment. But while things can seem desperate,…

Reece Jones: Immigration as Racial Exclusion

Reece Jones is Professor and Chair, Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa. Professor Reece Jones discusses his book, White Borders. Tracing the connections between the Chinese Exclusion laws of the 1880s, the “Keep America American” nativism of the 1920s, and the “Build the Wall” chants of the 2016, Prof. Jones makes the case that American Immigration policy has always been and remains racially motivated. Looking at the scholars and politicians who used…

Reginald Bell: Black Slave Owners

Reginald L. Bell is a Professor of Management in the College of Business at Prairie View A&M University. Bell received his PhD in Business Education from the University of Missouri at Columbia. Bell writes mostly in the management communication area, which is his research focus. Bell has more than 80 articles published in peer reviewed journals and trade publications. He is the author, with Jeanette S. Martin, of three books on Managerial Communication. Dr. Bell discusses his article…

Richard Rothstein: Color Of Law

Richard Rothstein is a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Policy Institute and a Senior Fellow (emeritus) at the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, which recovers a forgotten history of how federal, state, and local policy explicitly segregated metropolitan areas nationwide, creating racially homogenous neighborhoods in patterns that violate the Constitution and require…

Rina Bliss: Genetics and Race

Rina Bliss discusses her book, What's Real about Race?: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society. Professor Bliss begins by posing the question, what is the true relationship between genetics and race? While genetics proves race does not exist, racism persists. By looking into the history of racial science and eugenics, Professor Bliss explains how these false distinctions continue to haunt the emerging genomic organizations and it's findings. Dr. Rina Bliss is Associate…

Robert Craig: Private Prisons After Dobbs

Robert Craig discusses his article, “Fundamental Rights and Private Prisons after Dobbs: Shifting Sands and Opportunities.” He details the history of private prisons next to the history of state-run prisons. Additionally, the competing interest of for-profit prison incentivizes extended incarceration and cost cutting practices that set the stage for a legal argument based on Plyler and Dobbs which challenges private prisons on basis of ordered liberty and constitutional violation. Robert…

Robert Pierce Forbes: Race and Jefferson's Notes

Robert Pierce Forbes taught U.S. history at the University of Connecticut and was the founding associate director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Robert Pierce Forbes discusses his introduction, scholarship, and editorship of Thomas Jefferson's seminal work, "Notes on the State of Virgina." Prof. Forbes locates the origin of United States' racial dynamic in Jefferson's notes on race. Specifically, how Jefferson,…

Robin Bernstein: Auburn Prison and the Murder that Shocked America

Professor Robin Bernstein discusses her book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison For Profit. Auburn Prison in Upstate New York was designed to be a factory prison, incorporating the area’s major industry into its walls. Through harsh conditions, solitary and silent confinement, and constant violence, the inmates’ lives were desolate ones of hard labor. Enter William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit. He suffered greatly in…

Ronnie Dunn: Racial Profiling and Traffic Stops

Dr. Ronnie A. Dunn recently assumed the role as the inaugural executive director of The Diversity Institute at Cleveland State University, where he has been an associate professor of Urban Studies since 2004. Dr. Dunn discusses his work on traffic patterns, driving populations, and police ticketing in Cleveland. His work was pivotal in exposing Cleveland Police's racial bias' in traffic ticketing and in the use of traffic cameras.

Ruth Colker: White Supremacist Constitution

Professor Ruth Colker, Distinguished University Professor and Heck Faust Memorial Chair in Constitutional Law, is one of the leading scholars in the country in the areas of Constitutional Law and Disability Discrimination. Professor Ruth Colker discusses her 2022 Utah Law Review article, "The White Supremacist Constitution." The United States Constitution is a document that, during every era, has helped further white supremacy. White supremacy constitutes a “political, economic and…

Sally Hadden: Slave Patrols

Dr. Sally Hadden is a professor and the director of graduate studies in the Department of History at Western Michigan University. Professor Sally Hadden discusses her book, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virgina and the Carolinas. Prof. Hadden explains the origin and purpose of the slave patrol, how the patrols differed from the militia, who made them up and what the patrols were charged with accomplishing. We discuss how slave patrols operated before and were stressed during the Civil War.…

Samantha Pinto: Hemmings, Baartman, and Complicated Fame

Samantha Pinto is a Professor, Department of English and Director, Humanities Institute at University of Texas at Austin. Professor Samantha Pinto discusses her book, Infamous Bodies Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights. Using the idea of "vulnerability" as a touchstone to explain the celebrity of Sally Hemings and Sarah "the Hottentot Venus" Baartman, Prof. Pinto describes how each woman's agency is complicated by dominant systems of coercion and…

Sang Hea Kil: All Lives Matter Racism

Sang Hea Kil is the Chair, Anti-Racism, Social Justice Transformation Committee and Faculty member in Justice Studies at San Jose State University. Professor Sang Kil talks about how “all lives matter” (ALM) has advanced Whiteness in the news. Using critical race theory’s critique of neoliberalism’s use of race-neutral racism, Professor Kil, discusses how "All Lives Matter" works to undermine the civil rights meaning of Black Lives Matter by denying its central critique. Blue Lives…

Seth Rockman: Plantation Goods: A Material History of Slavery

Seth Rockman discusses his book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery which tells one of the biggest stories of early American history through everyday consumer goods: shoes manufactured in Massachusetts for the use of enslaved people in Mississippi, for example, or woolen dresses stitched in Rhode Island for enslaved women in South Carolina to wear. In following these goods from the North where they were made to the Southern Plantations where they were used, the geography of…

Sherri Burr: Free Blacks of Virginia

In 2015, she was awarded a Monticello Fellowship to conduct research on the Free Blacks of Virginia, the hundreds of thousands of African-Americans who were free before the Civil War. Burr’s ancestors were among this group. Professor Burr discusses her research which became her 27th book, "Complicated Lives: Free Blacks in Virginia, 1619-1865."

Sheryll Cashin: Housing Segregation

Cheryll Cashin is an author and the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University. Currently she teaches Constitutional Law, Race and American Law, and a writing seminar about American segregation, education and opportunity. Her new book — White Space, Black ‘Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality — is about the role of residential segregation in producing racial inequality.