Browse All Records(178 total)
Chiamaka Echebiri on White Supremacy, Christy Lopez on Carceral Logic, Anna Preston on Prisons and Mental Health, a debate between Micheal Javen and Marie Gottschalk, and finally an article by Jack Norton from the "New York Review of Books."
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…
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: 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.
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
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…
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…
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.
Thomas Craemer: Holocaust and Slavery Reparations
Professor Thomas Craemer grew up in post-World War II Germany. One day, he met a Holocaust survivor who had retired from Israel to Germany of all places. For four decades, Mieciu Langer had received a reparations pension from the (West) German government. If reparations have the power to bring about reconciliation in this case, then reparations from the US Government to the Black descendants of the formerly enslaved might bring about racial reconciliation in the United States as well. Thomas…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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."
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…
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…
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…
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.
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."
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…
Sang Hea Kil: Covering the Border War
How the news media create crime, race, nation, and the USA-Mexico divide examines border newspaper coverage of the USA-Mexico divide and how the nation and immigration are racially imagined in crime news discourse, where whiteness is associated with order and brownness is associated with disorder in a variety of imaginative, nativist ways. By applying critical discourse analysis methodology to the Los Angeles Times, Arizona Republic, Albuquerque Journal, and Houston Chronicle during a peak epoch…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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.
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…
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,…
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…