J. Russell Hawkins: Segregationist Theology

J. Russell Hawkins discusses his book, The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy. Why did southern white evangelical Christians resist the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s? Simply put, they believed the Bible told them so. These white Christians entered the battle against integration and civil rights certain that God was on their side. J. Russell Hawkins is Professor of Humanities and History in the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana…

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.…

Michael Hayden: When White Nationalists Move Into Town

Michael Edison Hayden discusses his book, "Strange People on the Hill: How Extremism Tore Apart a Small American Town." When an influential white nationalist group relocated its headquarters to Berkeley Springs, West Viginia, the town reacted in all sorts of ways. Hayden recounts the story of what happened to the white nationalists, the merchants reliant upon tourism, and his personal struggles covering this troubling beat. Michael Edison Hayden is an investigative reporter and a…

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”…

Michael E Brooks: History of Hate in Ohio

Michael E. Brooks discusses his co-authored book, A History of Hate in Ohio: Then and Now. Ohio’s great history of abolitionism is widely known, but there is also a long history of white supremacist activity. Brooks analyzes the historical origins of white supremacy in Ohio and the emergence of the earliest hate groups, covering the colonial period into the 1970s. Michael E. Brooks is professor of teaching at Bowling Green State University

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…

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…

Adam Shatz: Frantz Fanon and Anti-Colonialism

Adam Shatz discuss his book, The Rebel’s Clinic: the Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. Shatz brings to life Fanon as a man shaped by philosophy, psychiatry, and the anti-colonial struggles in Algeria and Africa. While also detailing how his two books, Black Skin, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth, combined Fanon's empathy and anger to produce consistently resonate works of struggle and liberation. Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to many…

Rina Bliss: Genetics and Race

Rina Bliss discusses her book, What's Real about Race?: Untangling Science, Genetics, and Society. Professor Bliss begins by posing the question, what is the true relationship between genetics and race? While genetics proves race does not exist, racism persists. By looking into the history of racial science and eugenics, Professor Bliss explains how these false distinctions continue to haunt the emerging genomic organizations and it's findings. Dr. Rina Bliss is Associate…

Amanda Moore: Alt-Right, Nazis, and Trump Staffing

Amanda Moore is a freelance journalist covering the far right. We discuss her year undercover in the Alt-Right and her continued work exposing Nazis. Moore's work has centered on far-right influencer Nick Fuentes's misogyny and neo-Nazi rhetoric. Most recently, she's monitoring the J6 insurrectionists and the continued appeal of those who's convictions were commuted and not pardoned. The fans of Fuentes and other far-right groups influence is beginning to be felt as they…

Katharina Motyl: From “Feminist Lies” to “White Replacement”

Katharina Motyl discusses her chapter, "From “Feminist Lies” to “White Replacement”: Digital Anti-Feminist Forums as Spaces of Collective Radicalization.”Which explores how the "manosphere" draws men and boys into a world of increasingly radical far-right ideologies, through grievance and misogyny . Prof. Motyl explores how digital platforms enable the spread of extremist ideologies, transforming individual grievances into collective radicalization and influencing offline…

Andra Watkins: Christo-Fascist Code in Project 2025

Andra Watkins discusses her substack, "For Such a Time as This: A Guide to Decode the Country America Has Chosen To Be." Ms. Watkins' life growing up in a Christian Nationalist Southern church indoctrinated her into a worldview and understanding of a coded language based on Christian Biblical Literalism. Since leaving the church, she has used her understanding of this Christian Nationalist code to explain Project 2025, the new Trump Administration's goals, as well as the…

Aidan Beatty: Sexual Antisemitism

This episode deals with sexual topics and abuse, all trigger warnings apply. Aidan Beatty discusses his article, “The Pornography of Fools: Tracing the History of Sexual Antisemitism.” Professor Beatty looks into historical sexual depictions, emotions and desires developed in the middle ages that continue to work in contemporary far-right antisemitic rhetoric. Aidan Beatty is a Lecturer and Senior Academic Advisor in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University.

Lasana Kazembe: Mohonk Conference and Black Education

Lasana Kazembe, discusses his article, “The Steep Edge of a Dark Abyss: Mohonk, White Social Engineers, and Black Education.” Professor Kazembe discusses the key objectives of the First Mohonk Conference on "the Negro Question" and how this built the education standards for Black Americans. Emerging from the Conference sessions and speakers were themes of racial fear, social engineering, and economic exploitation that supported white supremacy rather than black integration. Lasana…

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…