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…

Spencer Sunshine: Neo-Nazi Counterculturalism

Spencer Sunshine, PhD discuss his book, Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege. Sunshine describes how Ohio native and lifelong Neo-Nazi James Mason's newsletter Siege, which praises terrorism, serial killers, and Charles Manson, influenced today's generation of hate groups and alt-right influencers. Spencer Sunshine, PhD, has written extensively about the U.S. Far Right, from militias to neo-Nazis. He has been documenting…

Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy: Colonial Slavery and Disability

Professor Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy discusses her book, “Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean,” which examines the relationship between disability, antiblack racism, and slavery in the sugar-producing colonies of the British Caribbean. Prof. Hunt-Kennedy explains how disability was a defining feature of slavery’s violence and it’s antiblack racism. Professor Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Associate Professor, Department of History at the University of New Brunswick. She…

Stephanie R. Logan: School Vouchers and Charters

Stephanie R. Logan is an associate professor of elementary and multicultural education. Prof. Logan discusses the history of public school vouchers and the rise of charter schools in the United States. The discussion begins in 1954 and continues through the 21st Century by looking at her 2018 article, "A Historical and Political Look at the Modern School Choice Movement."

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…

Steve Luxenberg: Plessy V. Ferguson

Steve Luxenberg is an associate editor at The Washington Post and an award-winning author. Steve Luxenberg discusses his nonfiction book, "Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation," which was published in 2019 to critical acclaim. He discussed the people most influential in arguing and deciding the Supreme Court case - civil rights author Albion W. Tourgée, the Great Dissenter John Marshall Harlan, and Henry Billings Brown who wrote…

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.

Taifa Alexander: Mapping CRT Attacks

Taifha Natalee Alexander, J.D., LL.M., Project Director CRT Forward Critical Race Studies Program UCLA School of Law, discusses the how Critical Race Theory has become a rallying cry for anti-anti-racism and led to the organization of local, state, and national interventions against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. The CRT Forward project tracks actions by school boards and other local governments to introduce model legislation centered around removing or restricting classes and…

Thomas Craemer: Estimating the Cost of Reparations

Thomas Craemer obtained a political science doctorate in 2001 from the University of Tuebingen in his native Germany, and a PhD from Stony Brook University, New York, in 2005. He teaches at the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy. His experience of growing up in post-World-War II Germany motivated his research on implicit racial attitudes and race-related policies including slavery reparations. In 2015, he published an article titled Estimating Slavery Reparations that has…

Todd Michney: Redlining and Home Owners Loan Company

In this inaugural session of the Heights Library Unpacking Our History interviews, we talk to Todd M. Michney, who shares insights from his book "Surrogate Suburbs: Black Upward Mobility and Neighborhood Change in Cleveland, 1900–1980," about redlining and the HOLC's role in housing discrimination.

Tonja Jacobi: Interrupting the Supreme Court

Tonja Jacobi discusses her article "Supreme Court Interruptions and Interventions: The Changing Role of the Chief Justice." Recent scholarship has focused on how often the Supreme Court Justices get interrupted, especially when female Justices are speaking. To fix this, the Court changed how hearings are run. This article looks at whether these interruptions—and the gender gap in who gets interrupted—have gotten better, and if the new rules helped. Tonja Jacobi is a Professor of Law…

Tracey L. Meares: Effective Policing

Tracey L. Meares discusses her article, “The Good Cop: Knowing the Difference Between Lawful or Effective Policing and Rightful Policing — And Why it Matters.” Prof. Meares describes the two traditional roles of policing as they function under the law and in fighting crime. These two roles place the responsibility of policing on the behavior of citizens. But Prof. Meares suggests a third role, rightful policing, that places the emphasis on procedure, fairness, and transparency of conduct of the…

Trevor Burnard: Demis of the Royal African Company

Trevor Burnard is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and Director of the Wilberforce Institute. He is a specialist in the Atlantic World and slavery in plantation societies. He is the author of Only Connect: A Field Report on Early American History

Vida Johnson: Judges and White Supremacy

Vida Johnson, professor at law at Georgetown law, discusses her article “White Supremacy and the Bench.” In which she describes how judges maintain and enforce structural racism. Judges benefit from a cultural cache of authority, prestige and as unbiased arbiters of fairness, but they often sustain and amplify racism through jokes, decisions, and rulings that unfairly targets people of color.

Vida Johnson: Police Bias and Testimony

Vida B. Johnson is an Associate Professor of law at Georgetown Law where she teaches in the criminal defense clinics. She writes about policing and criminal procedure. She received her law degree from NYU and her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Johnson discusses her two articles on police bias. First, we talk about her article, "Bias in Blue: Instructing Jurors to Consider the Testimony of Police Officer Witnesses with Caution" where…

Vida Johnson: White Supremicist Police at Jan. 6th

Professor Vida Johnson discusses her 2022 Brooklyn Law Review article, White Supremacy’s Police Siege on the United States Capitol. Professor Johnson details the failures of the Capitol Police, the unsettling involvement of active law enforcement officers in the January 6th Insurrection, and how White Supremacists continue to infiltrate and plague police departments. The difference in police preparation, presence, and intervention between the Jan. 6 and Black Lives Matter protests is instructive…