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…

Adam Shatz: Frantz Fanon and Anti-Colonialism

Adam Shatz discuss his book, The Rebel’s Clinic: the Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. Shatz brings to life Fanon as a man shaped by philosophy, psychiatry, and the anti-colonial struggles in Algeria and Africa. While also detailing how his two books, Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth, combined Fanon's empathy and anger to produce consistently resonate works of struggle and liberation. Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to many…

Cedric Merlin Powell: Post-Racial Deception of the Roberts Court

Cedric Powell is the Wyatt, discusses his article, “The Post-Racial Deception of the Roberts Court” in which he argues that the supposed colorblind rhetoric masks an agenda to strip precedent, history and reality away from Supreme Court decisions. By looking at the Civil Rights and Civil War Amendment cases, Powell shows how the Roberts Court applies a standard of neutrality to vacate diversity and equality while removing race from its Constitutional consideration. This deception seeks to…

Daniel Harawa: Race and The Roberts Courts' Criminal Cases

Daniel Harawa discusses his article, “Lemonade: A Racial Justice Reframing of The Roberts Court’s Criminal Jurisprudence. Professor Harawa points out how the Court has recently issued a series of decisions addressing racism in the criminal legal system: Peña-Rodriguez v. Colorado and Flowers v. Mississippi. Both teach that race history matters, those who discriminate must be held to account, and institutional practices can no longer perpetuate racism. While not perfect, these cases offer…

Andrea Ford: Pregnancy, Birth, and Doulas

Andrea Ford discusses her book, Near Birth: Contested Values and the work of Doulas, in which she discusses how pregnancy, birthing, and infant care offer a microcosm of cultural debates. Ford examines how people's birthing decisions and experiences relate to and construct the American ideal of the individual and family in various ways and forms. Andrea Ford is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.

Luke Baumgartner: The Violence of the Great Replacement

Luke Baumgartner discusses his paper “Where did the white people go? A thematic analysis of terrorist manifestos inspired by replacement theory.” By delving into the long history of immigration resentments and fears, Baumgartner defines two stages of the imagined "great replacement" grievance. Further, he examined four mass shooter manifestos to demonstrate how this toxic ideology leads to terrorist violence against racial and religious minorities. Luke Baumgartner is a Research…

Herman Bennett: African Kings, Iberian Traders, and Black Slaves

Herman Bennett talks about his book, African Kings and Black Slaves Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic. It is an examination of how early modern African-European encounters offer a rethinking of these exchanges as being solely about the slave trade and racial difference. By asking how Europeans and Africans thought about sovereignty, polities, and subject status, Bennett offers a new take on the slaves' experiences in the Americas. Herman Bennett is the Executive…

Jane Borden: Doomsday Cults and America

Jane Borden discusses her book, Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America. She explains why the doomsday beliefs of our Puritan founders still drive American culture. Tracing threads of our latent Puritan indoctrination through eugenic cults, prosperity gospel, and the current rise in far-right extremism, she proposes that the United States might just be largest cult of all. Jane Borden is an author, culture journalist, and editor. She contributes regularly to Vanity Fair, and has…

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…

Kirstine Taylor: James Baldwin and Racial Innocence

Kirstine Taylor on her article “Racial Capitalism and the Production of Innocence.” James Baldwin's concept of "racial innocence" has been understood as a matter of practiced unconsciousness about the reality of racism in the United States. Taylor revisits his essays highlighting racial capitalism to show how segregated urban space, racialized labor relationships, and policing contribute to Baldwin's racial innocence. . Kirstine Taylor, Associate Professor of Political…

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…

Stewart Home: Modern Yoga and the Far Right

Stewart Home discusses his book, Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremist, and the New Order in Wellness. Home sweeps away the half-truths of Western yoga to expose a world full of grifters, cult leaders, TV celebrities and fake gurus, the story of yoga has involved some of the strangest currents of humanity. Stewart Home is an artist, filmmaker, pamphleteer, art historian and activist. He is based in London.

Sophie Lewis: Enemy Feminisms

Sophie Lewis discusses their book, Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation. Offering a 200 year tour feminist history to uncover 19th century imperial feminists, Klan feminists, and today’s anti-abortion and TERF feminists. This tour paints a complicated picture of women's rights advocates that is sometimes messy, racist, and, yes, even sexist. Sophie Lewis is a writer, speaker, and teacher. She has written several books and articles on feminism and…

Kevin M. Schultz: Why Everyone Hates White Liberals

Kevin M. Schultz discusses his book Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals). In it Schultz lays out some of the objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian—placing these objections in a historical frame. It turns out that how one defines a “white liberal” is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test revealing one's own political anxieties. Kevin M. Schultz is professor and chair of history at the University of Illinois…

Stephen Kenny: Slave Hospitals

Professor Stephen Kenny discusses his article, “A Dictate of Both Interest and Mercy”: Slave Hospitals in the Antebellum South.” Beginning on the shores of West Africa, White doctors began to systematize racialized medicine in the service of slavery. Establishing institutions of idealized models of slave care, the story of slave hospitals became a self-serving lie of enslaver benevolence and racial difference. Plantation hospitals were rooms or shacks, while urban spaces resembled prisons. The…

Gabriel Schwartz: Evictions and Health Risks

Gabriel L. Schwartz discusses his work on “Eviction as a Community Health Exposure.” and “Moving due to unaffordable housing and disrupted social safety net access among children.” He talks about how moving and evictions lead to sometimes catastrophic health outcomes based on losing access to social safety net programs. Evictions upend people’s lives and the effect on children is great. Gabriel L. Schwartz, Assistant Professor Health Management & Policy, Drexel FIRST Program at Drexel…