Allison Skinner-Dorkenoo: Microaggressions

Dr. Skinner-Dorkenoo is an assistant professor at the University of Georgia. Dr. Allison Skinner-Dorkenoo discusses her article, "How Microaggressions Reinforce and Perpetuate Systemic Racism in the United States." She defines what microaggressions are and how they support White superiority. Through subtle and slight processes microaggressions protect and reinforce the "othering" of people of color with environmental exclusions, treating people of color as second class, and…

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…

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,…

Christopher Willougby: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools

Christopher Willoughby is a historian of Atlantic slavery, U.S. medicine, and racism and a Visiting Assistant Professor of History of Medicine and Health at Pitzer College. Christopher Willoughby, a Visiting Assistant Professor of History of Medicine and Health at Pitzer College,talks about his book, Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools. Professor Willoughby discusses the origins of racialized medicine as was taught in Antebellum Medical Schools. Exploring how…

Katharine Gerbner: Christian Slavery

Katharine Gerbner is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. Professor Katharine Gerbner discusses her book Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World shows how debates between slave-owners, black Christians, and missionaries transformed the practice of Protestantism and the language of race. The early role of Protestant Supremacy is challenged as debates about who can be and what it means to be baptized in the Christian Faith work…

Alison Skinner-Dorkenoo: The Water We Swim In: An Examination of Systemic Influences on Our Attitudes

This talk will make the case that systemic forms of oppression are maintained and reinforced through subtle patterns of thought and behavior, and present some paths through which those systems can be challenged. Dr. Skinner-Dorkenoo has been an assistant professor at the University of Georgia since the fall of 2019.

Carole Emberton: Violence, Reconstruction, and Redemption

Carole Emberton, Associate Professor of History at University at Buffalo, discusses her book Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South After the Civil War. Contrasting Freedmen and Ex-Enslavers, Reconstruction and Redemption, and white and black violence, Professor Emberton explores how the Post-Civil War South struggled to reform itself. The role of black and white veterans, election violence, and the rise of paramilitary groups all converged to create a turbulent and dangerous…

Kelsey Klotz: Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whitenes

Dr. Kelsey Klotz’s book, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness, is scheduled to come out in January 2023 with Oxford University Press. Drawing on archival records, recordings, and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid-century whiteness and white supremacy, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck, his critics, and his audiences. This talk will introduce some of the ways in which…

Dexter Voisin: Violence as Neighborhood Trauma

Dexter R. Voisin is the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Dean in Applied Social Sciences at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University. Dean Dexter Voisin discusses his book "America the Beautiful and Violent: Black Youth and Neighborhood Trauma in Chicago." History and context play a huge role in how violence is processed by the residents of America's poorest, minority communities. Generations struggle to understand and…

Jessica Katzenstein: Scenario Training and Police Reform

Jessica Katzenstein completed her PhD in Anthropology at Brown University in 2022. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Inequality in America Initiative though 2024. Dr. Jessica Katzenstein discusses her research on how U.S. police officers absorb and resist reforms during a mounting legitimacy crisis. She explores why reforms fail to realize their promises to curb racialized violence. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with officers and reformers in Maryland, she…

Bradley Onishi: White Christian Nationalism

Professor Bradley Onishi discusses his book. "Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism- and What Comes Next." Prof. Onishi talks about the changing nature of evangelicalism, the rise of the religious right, and how these are reactions to a changing American culture. As the religious right focuses on political and cultural power, the movement's leaders embrace conspiracy theories and reactionary tactics which help us reframe and understand both Donald…

Joanna Schwartz: Unaccountable Policing

Joanna Schwartz is a professor of law at UCLA. Professor Joanna Schwartz discusses her new book, Shielded: How The Police Became Untouchable. Prof. Schwartz draws on her experience as a civil rights attorney and law professor to explain how Section 1 of the Klu Klux Klan Act of 1871, known as Section 1983, set the groundwork for protections for state employees, most notably police officers, when they violate a citizen's civil rights. As civil cases against police violence reached the…

Erin Thompson: Smashing Monuments

Erin L. Thompson is a professor of art crime at the City University of New York. Professor Erin Thompson discusses her book, "Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments." Prof. Thompson explains the role of Confederate monuments, what they symbolize, and to whom their message is aimed. The design of the "parade stance" figure's rise to monument dominance provides insight into the submissive posture of white defender was intentional. Thompson…

Ayesha Bell Hardaway: Rise of Police Unions

Ayesha Bell Hardaway is an Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law and the Director of the Criminal Clinic in the Milton A. Kramer Law Clinic. Professor Ayesha Bell Hardaway talks about her 2022 article, "The Rise of Police Unions on the Back of the Black Freedom Movement." Professor Bell Hardaway discusses how police unions developed slowly over time to their rapid growth in the 1960s. How police unions transitioned from advocating for labor and wages to…

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…

Jefferson Cowie: White Resistance to Federal Power

Jefferson Cowie discusses his 2022 book, "Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power." By examining the local history of Barbour County in Alabama, Professor Cowie develops a thesis of white freedom which dependent upon the oppression of others. Tracing the origins in white intrusion into Creek lands and the Federal response to these intruders, the idea of racialized anti-statism begins to form around sovereignty and "outsider" interference in local…

Jacob Glick: Violent Extremists of Jan. 6th

Jacob Glick was counsel to Representative Jamie Raskin on the House Oversight Committee, Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, managing its years-long investigation into violent white supremacy. He also served on the legal team for the House Managers during the second impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump. Jacob Glick, Policy Counsel at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center, served as Investigative Counsel, Select…

James Oakes: Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution

James Oakes is one of our foremost Civil War historians and a two-time winner of the Lincoln Prize for his works on the politics of abolition. He teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He discusses his book, The Crooked Path to Abolition Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution. Beginning with the inclusion of the 3/5th clause and the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution there existed a tension between a proslavery and antislavery interpretation. How did…

Gerald Horne: Colonialism: Religion, Class, Race

Gerald Horne is an American historian who holds the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. Professor Gerald Horne discusses his book, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century. Prof. Horne explains his thesis that religion, which supported so much colonial expansion, gave way to race, specifically whiteness, as a way of organizing conquest.…

Kathryn Olivarius: Yellow Fever and New Orleans

Professor Kathryn Olivarius, Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, discusses her book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom. Professor Olivarius uses yellow fever to frame how wealth, class, and race developed in the economic powerhouse antebellum city of New Orleans. Developing from three vector points of disease, acclimation, and immunocapital the social and political elite held their grip over the economics of the city by weaponizing yellow fever.…

Jessica Katzenstein: Problems in Police Training

Police reform advocates often push police departments to move from fear-laden “warrior” survival trainings and toward reality-based or scenario trainings, which involve immersive role-playing scenarios such as making an arrest. Scenario trainings promise to teach officers to suppress fear, counter racial bias, and calibrate “reasonable” uses of force. But these trainings often fall short of their promise and end up reinforcing the threats and survival mindset. Drawing on 16 months of…

Jason Morgan Ward: White Democaracy: Democrats become Republicans

Jason Morgan Ward is professor of history at Emory University. Professor Jason Morgan Ward discusses his book Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965. Starting in the 1930s at the advent of the New Deal, Southern Democrats came to face a growing threat to Jim Crow and White Supremacy. New Deal agencies seemed to threaten Federal intrusion into labor and social norms that held white people in power. After World War II,…

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…

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…

Aaron Bekemeyer: Thin Blue Line of Police Unions

Aaron Thomas Bekemeyer, Lecturer on History, Harvard University. Professor Aaron Bekemeyer discusses the complicated history of police unionization. How police balanced their role as union busters and political enforcers with their desire for higher wages and retirement/pensions led to contradictions in messaging. After both World Wars, American society changed in various ways and policing took on new meanings, in response to reformist challenges to political machine corruption and later the…

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…

Christopher Willoughby: What Modern Medicine Gained from Slavery

Medical science in antebellum America was a paradox: it presumed African Americans to be less than human yet still human enough to be useful as experimental subjects, as cadavers, and for use in the training of medical students. Professor Willoughby will discuss how false beliefs defined American medicine and how the impact is still being felt today. Christopher D.E. Willoughby is an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He…

Cristina Beltran: Migrant Suffering and White Democracy

Cristina Beltrán is an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. Cristina Beltrán discusses her book, "Cruelty as Citizenship How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy." Prof. Beltran explains the how Herrenvolk Democracy is useful in understanding White Supremacy and how it transformed into White Democracy. By exploring whiteness as a political and legal project as well as political, White Standing extends beyond racialized…

Carissa Byrne Hessick: Plea Bargaining Bad Deals

Carissa Byrne Hessick, Anne Shea Ransdell and William Garland "Buck" Ransdell, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Law, University of North Carolina School of Law. Professor Carissa Byrne Hessick discusses her book, "Punishment Without Trial," and how plea bargaining has overtaken the criminal justice system. While our rights to a jury trial, evidence, and confronting our accusers are all written into the Constitution by the Framers, American criminal prosecution relies upon the…

Christina Aushana: Role-Playing in Police Trainings

Christina Aushana discusses her article “Inescapable Scripts: Role-Playing Feminist (re)visions and Rehearsing Racialize State Violence in Police Training Scenarios.” Professor Aushana talks about participating in Police Academy Scenario Training as an actor. By participating in the police role-play training, she was able to witness and document a genre of performance wherein training officers, patrol officers, and recruits' stage, rehearse, and revise racial (re)visions together, infusing…