Leslie Schwalm: Civil War and Racial Medicine

Leslie Schwalm discusses her book, "Medicine, Science, and Making Race in Civil War America." Drawing on archives of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, recollections of Civil War doctors and medical, and testimonies from Black Americans, Professor Schwalm exposes the racist ideas the lent authority and prestige to Northern doctor's and other elites.  Leslie Schwalm is a Professor Emeritus of history and gender, women’s, and sexuality studies at the University of Iowa.

Jessica Pishko: Constitutional Sheriffs

Jessica Pishko is a journalist and lawyer who graduated from Harvard Law School and Columbia University’s MFA program. Jessica Pishko, journalist and lawyer, discusses her book, "The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy," in which she walks through the long history of the American Sheriff. Since the 1960s, sheriffs have consistently moved to the right, claiming to be the final and only authority to enforce and defend the Constitution. Since…

Kellie Carter Jackson: Black Resistance to White Supremacy

Kellie Carter Jackson, Professor of Africana Studies and the Chair of the Africana Studies Department Wellesley College, discusses her book, We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance. Prof. Carter Jackson explains how she sees black resistance to white supremacy falling to several categories — revolution, protection, force, flight and joy. To illustrate how each one works in history, she recounts stories of ordinary people's everyday refusals and rebellions, focusing on the activism…

Jonneke Koomen: Teaching Black Internationalism

Jonneke Koomen discusses her two articles, “International Relations/Black Internationalism” and “Madness in the Classroom: Thomas Sankara’s Disobedient International Relations.” Professor Koomen shows how introducing W.E.B. du Bois’ essays and speeches by Thomas Sankara places teaching about international relations into conversation with its critics. Colonialism, white supremacy, and race based economic systems served as the foundations of International Relations theory and practice, but by…

Ekow Yankah: Deputization and White Violence

Ekow Yankah discusses his forthcoming Stanford Law Review article, "Deputization and Privileged White Violence." Prof. Yankah unpacks how the development of social and physical control of slaves necessitated laws and norms that allowed any white person the ability to police a person of color. This white privilege continues today in the self-deputization and citizen 's arrest interactions. Thinking themselves as enforcers of the law, white citizens elevate themselves to, sometimes,…

Fergus Bordewich: Grant and the Klan

Join Fergus Bordewich as he discusses his new book, "Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction." Klan War is a bold and bracing record of America’s past that reveals the bloody, Reconstruction-era roots of present-day battles to protect the ballot box and stamp out resurgent white supremacist ideologies. Fergus Bordewich is the author of eight previous nonfiction books, including Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln,…

Donald Yacovone: Teaching White Supremacy

Donald Yacovone, lifetime associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, discusses his book, “Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Identity.” He talks about the evidence of white supremacy’s deep-seeded roots in our nation’s educational system by looking at nearly 100 years of school textbooks. Yacovone finds that racism seeped in through Lost Cause narratives, exclusion of African Americans from the…

Christopher Span: Book Learning and Slave Education

Christopher Span, Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses his work, “Sam’s Cottonfield Blues” and “Quest for Book Learning: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom.” He discusses why literacy was so feared by white enslavers and crucial to slaves. Detailing how slaves subverted the rules to learn to read while enslavers punished those who did. Prof. Span’s own family provides a powerful example of the rhythm and style of…

Gerald Horne: Texas: Race, War, Colonialism

Professor Gerald Horne discusses his book, The Counter-revolution of 1836: Texas Slavery & Jim Crow and the Roots of American Fascism. Prof. Horne explains his thesis that Texas was a goldmine for Euro-Americans since it provided the dual economics of land speculation and the expansion of slavery, praxis for settler colonialism, and a built in challengers to white supremacy in Mexico and the Native Americans. Texas served as a lynchpin in the coming of the Civil War and a proving ground for…

Giuliana Perrone: Abolition’s Legal Failures

Giuliana Perrone, Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara, discusses her book, Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law. Professor Perrone explains how emancipation and abolition stalled and were ultimately defeated in the Courts. After the Civil War, State courts became the location that set the terms of racial identity, civil rights, and national belonging. These decisions posed a purposeful resistance to the post-War reimagining of the American…

Jim Wallis: White Christian Nationalism and the Church

Jim Wallis, the founding Director of the Georgetown University Center on Faith and Justice, discusses his book, The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy. He argues that the civic promotion of fear, hate, and violence as the trajectory of our politics under a banner of Christian Nationalism, should be faced to contend with a greater response of a civic faith of love, healing, and hope to defeat it. Jim Wallis is the Chair in Faith…

Justin Brooks: Why You Might End Up In Prison

Professor Justin Brooks, director of the LLM Program in U.S. Law in Spanish at the University of San Diego, discusses his book, You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent. Prof. Brooks explains how bad lawyering, bad science, and inadequate investigations, lead to wrongful conviction. We look into how police interrogations and juries all contribute to a broken justice system, where innocence is no protection from incarceration. Professor Brooks directs the LLM Program in U.S. Law…

Fergus Bordewich: War on the Klan

Fergus Bordewich discusses his newest book, Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction. Mr. Bordewich explains how the Klu Klux Klan was America's first terrorist organization intent on counterrevolution after the Civil War. How President Grant mobilized the Federal government to challenge and ultimately dismantle the Klan is the subject of the interview. Fergus Bordewich is an American writer, popular historian, and editor living in San Francisco. He is the author of…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Diane Negra: Irish Identity in America

Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture at University College Dublin. Professor Diane Negra discusses her most recent scholarship which investigates Irish identity in the United States. She begins with the election of John F. Kennedy with a sense of hopefulness which progressed through the 1980s and 1990s with an explosion of interest in all things Irish. But beginning in the 2000s, Professor Negra locates a growing sense of dread as images of skulls and death begin to…

Nell Irvin Painter: History of White People

Nell Irvin Painter is the award-winning author of many books, including Sojourner Truth, Southern History Across the Color Line, Creating Black Americans, The History of White People, and Standing at Armageddon. She is currently the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University. She has a second career as an artist after retirement from Princeton University and lives in Newark, New Jersey. Professor Painter discusses her book, THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE. Prof. Painter…

Leslie Picca: Two Face Racism

Professor Leslie Picca discusses her work, Two-Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage, which examines the racial attitudes and behaviors exhibited by whites in private versus public settings. Prof. Picca explains how simple racial jokes work to maintain dominant racism while offering up an easy out for racists. The creation of these white safe spaces where intolerance and prejudice are elaborated are rarely challenged by other whites, instead the behaviors are excused or dismissed.…

Fran Shor: White Identity Politics

Francis Shor is an Emeritus Professor of History at Wayne State University. Professor Fran Shor talks about his book, Weaponized Whiteness [https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/...] which interrogates the meanings and implications of white supremacy and, more specifically, white identity politics from historical and sociological perspectives. Prof. Shor looks at the history of immigration, slavery, and moments of resistance against White Supremacy. Examining how white people participated in the…

Kathryn Gin Lum: Heathen and Race-Making in the Chirstian World

Kathryn Gin Lum is Associate Professor of Religious Studies in collaboration with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and History (by courtesy) at Stanford University. Professor Kathryn Gin Lum discusses her book, "Heathen: Religion and Race in American History ." Prof. Lum begins by explaining the Doctrine of Discovery and how the colonizers of the Americas imported the idea of the pagan or heathen. How Christian missionaries came to understand native…

Fran Shor: Weaponized Whiteness and Gun Violence

Why does the United States have so much gun violence and why is it so difficult to overcome? Obviously, there are numerous contributing factors to the persistence of gun violence from the legacy of a frontier past to the proliferation of guns to toxic masculinity. However, one significant aspect, often overlooked, is the role of systemic racism. This power point presentation will explore the long history of racist currents in American gun violence. Francis Shor is a Professor Emeritus of History…