Jocelyn Simonson: Radical Acts of Justice

Professor Jocelyn Simonson talks about her book, Radical Acts of Justice: How Ordinary People Are Dismantling Mass Incarceration. Beginning with a close look at the ideological meaning behind calling the prosecution, “The People,” Prof. Simonson points out how the criminal justice systems defines “community.” By looking at several ways activists and volunteers engage in organized efforts centered around bail, court watching, and participatory defense, Prof. Simonson shows how justice is changing…

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…

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…

Antonia Hylton: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum

Antonia Hylton discusses her book, Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Ms. Hylton’s extensive research into Crownsville Hospital in Maryland, a segregated asylum that was both hospital and prison, serves as physical example of racist systems and black resistance. Tracing the history of Crownsville was difficult since so many of the official records were destroyed and those that remained were in rough shape. She turned to oral history of those nurses and staff that worked there to…

Kidada E. Williams: Surviving Reconstruction

Kidada E. Williams discusses her book, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction. Professor Williams begins by describing how she elevated and amplified the voices of the survivors of Klu Klux Klan terrorism. Mining Congressional Investigation reports and the Works Progress Administration interviews, the survivors recount the continued terrorism of ex-Confederates and other Southern whites intent upon destroying Freed People's success. Professor…

Laura Meckler: Shaker Heights History of Integration

Journalist Laura Meckler of the Washington Post discusses her book, Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity. Beginning with a historical overview of the Cleveland suburb and its uncanny ability to propel itself into the national spotlight, Ms. Meckler discusses how the suburb fought segregation and racial covenants to become one of the first integrated communities in Northeast Ohio. The desegregation of Shaker schools has been one of success and challenge, but through the…

Alys Weinbaum: Slavery and Surrogacy

Alys Weinbaum, professor of English at the University of Washington, discusses her book, The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery. Professr Weinbaum examines how the legal and cultural impact of Atlantic slavery defined slave reproduction and enslaved women as “biocapital.” This form of racialized capitalism changed human reproduction from kinship to “breeding.” How this ideology remains four centuries later in the emerging markets for female egg harvesting to the multimillion dollar international…

Christy Lopez: Police Reform and Carceral Logic

Christy Lopez draws on her work as a Deputy Chief in the Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice to talk about Pattern or Practice Investigations with in police departments. How these investigations begin, how they work, and what their outcomes may be, are all unpacked by Professor Lopez. Additionally, Prof. Lopez describes her formulation of “carceral logic” and how it informs police reform efforts.

Erica Meiners: Childhood and Carceral Society

Erica R. Meiners is a Professor of Education and Women’s and Gender Studies at Northeastern Illinois University. Professor Erica Meiners discusses her book, For the Children? Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State, in which the definition of childhood become an ideological state used to push back against resistance and reform. Childhood, Meiners states, depends on social constructions and differ based on the group it refers to - freed slaves were talked about as children, while white wealthy…

Jenifer Barclay: Slavery and Disability

Jenifer Barclay is an associate professor and the Associate Director at the Center for Disability Studies at the University of Buffalo. Professor Jenifer Barclay discusses how disability and ablism helped shape American ideas of slavery, black bodies, and the medical practice. She explains how the antebellum South justified slavery by linking blackness to disability, defectiveness, and dependency. Both proslavery and abolitionists used disability as a frame to further their arguments about the…

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…

Joanna Wuest: LGBTQ+ Rights

Joanna Wuest is an assistant professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Joanna Wuest discusses her book, Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement. How did LGBTQ+ civil rights leaders address moral, medical, and legal obstacles to change the way American society views them and their communities? While society has come a long way in accepting and understanding Queer people, there is a renewed backlash that threatens these hard-won…

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…

Amanda Frost: Citizenship Stripping

Amanda Frost is the Ann Loeb Bronfman Distinguished Professor of Law and Government at American University in Washington, D.C. Amanda Frost discusses her book, "You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers." Beginning with Reconstruction, American citizenship began a contested and trouble road toward full protection of "birthright citizenship." What it meant to be a citizen varied for immigrant groups depending on racism, economics, and…

Caitlin O'Loughlin: Banned Books and Gay Erasure

For Banned Books week, join Caitlin O’Loughlin as she discusses her article, “It’s Just Filth: Banned Books and the Project of Gay Erasure.” She explains how proposed bans seek to erase queer peoples, how these bans impact teachers, and what teacher preparation programs can do to counter these acts of censorship.

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,…

Frank Cooper: Cop Fragility and Blue Lives Matter

Frank Rudy Cooper is the William S. Boyd Professor of Law and Director, Program on Race, Gender & Policing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Professor Frank Rudy Cooper discusses his article, "Cop Fragility and Blue Lives Matter." Professor Cooper discusses how after the rise of Black Lives Matter protests and reform efforts, police responded with a varied and detailed list of their own grievances. Blue Lives Matter emerged as a way to reframe police reform efforts by…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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.…

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.…

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…

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…

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…