Stewart Home discusses his book, Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremist, and the New Order in Wellness. Home sweeps away the half-truths of Western yoga to expose a world full of grifters, cult leaders, TV celebrities and fake gurus, the story of yoga has involved some of the strangest currents of humanity. Stewart Home is […]

Michael Omi and Howard Winant discuss their foundational work, Racial Formation in the United States. Unlike other traditional race theories, in Omi and Winant’s view, racial meanings pervade US society, from defining individual racial identities to the structuring of collective political action. Race as a master category, the rise of colorblindness, and how the Right […]

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 […]

Seth Rockman discusses his book, Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery which tells one of the biggest stories of early American history through everyday consumer goods: shoes manufactured in Massachusetts for the use of enslaved people in Mississippi, for example, or woolen dresses stitched in Rhode Island for enslaved women in South Carolina […]

Jane Borden discusses her book, Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America. She explains why the doomsday beliefs of our Puritan founders still drive American culture. Tracing threads of our latent Puritan indoctrination through eugenic cults, prosperity gospel, and the current rise in far-right extremism, she proposes that the United States might just be […]

Herman Bennett talks about his book, African Kings and Black Slaves Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic. It is an examination of how early modern African-European encounters offer a rethinking of these exchanges as being solely about the slave trade and racial difference. By asking how Europeans and Africans thought about sovereignty, polities, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Andrea Ford discusses her book, Near Birth: Contested Values and the work of Doulas, in which she discusses how pregnancy, birthing, and infant care offer a microcosm of cultural debates. Ford examines how people’s birthing decisions and experiences relate to and construct the American ideal of the individual and family in various ways and forms. […]

Cedric Powell is the Wyatt, discusses his article, “The Post-Racial Deception of the Roberts Court” in which he argues that the supposed colorblind rhetoric masks an agenda to strip precedent, history and reality away from Supreme Court decisions. By looking at the Civil Rights and Civil War Amendment cases, Powell shows how the Roberts Court […]