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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Shobana Shankar: Africa, India, and the Making of Race

Shobana Shankar discusses her book, An Uneasy Embrace: Africa, India and the Spectre of Race. Prof. Shankar explains how Africans and Indians make and unmake their differences. While decolonization brought Africans and Indians together to challenge Euro-American style white supremacy, discord over caste, religion, sex and skin color simmered beneath the rhetoric of Afro-Asian solidarity. Shobana Shankar is a professor of History at Stonybrook University, New York.

Heather Ann Thompson: the Bernie Goetz Shootings and the Rebirth of White Rage

Heather Ann Thompson talks her new book, Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage. In it she explores a pivotal moment in American history when new conservative media landscape is emerging, the Reagan Revolution is recoding racism, and the social fabric of the New deal is unraveling, all which helps contextualize a vigilante shooting on a NYC subway train on Dec 22 1984. Heather Ann Thompson is a historian at the University of Michigan and…

Ahilan Arulanantham: Immigration Law and Racist Precedent

Ahilan Arulanantham discusses his article, "Reversing Racist Precedent." In the article he examines how racist precedent remains a key feature of our legal system and how racism sits at the very center of US immigration law. Immigration law is originally tainted by two cases at the heart of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Courts could create a new exception in stare decisis doctrine: cases would be denied precedential force if they were motivated by racial animus. How these changes would…

Heather O’Connell: Confederate Monuments and Anti-Black Stereotypes

Heather O'Connell discusses her article, "Confederate Monuments and Anti-Black Stereotypes in the US South." Her research points to a strong link between Confederate monuments and heightened anti-Black stereotypes among white Southerners, particularly in areas with a high density of such monuments. She argues the observed relationship is driven by racialized cultural frames emphasizing the Black-White boundary that are linked to Confederate monuments with a “Lost Cause”…

David Silverman: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the U.S.

David Silverman talks about his book, The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States. When the colonial era began, Europeans did not consider themselves as “Whites,” and Native Americans did not think of themselves as “Indians.” Yet as a genocidal struggle for America unfolded over the course of generations, all that changed. Silverman restores the defining role Native people have played, and continue to play, in our national history. David J.…