Unpacking 1619 - A Heights Libraries Podcast

Rebecca Grant discusses her book, Access: Inside the Abortion Underground and the Sixty-Year Battle for Reproductive Rights. Grant traces the reproductive freedom movement from feminist organizing before Roe through the seismic impact of Dobbs. The stories in Access span four continents, tracing strategies across generations and borders. Working above ground, underground, and in legal gray […]

Kirstine Taylor discusses her book, Sunbelt Capitalism and the Making of the Carceral State. Prof. Taylor examines the evolution of southern criminal punishment from Jim Crow to the dawn of mass incarceration, charting this change from chain gangs to private prisons. Kirstine Taylor, Associate Professor of Political Science and Law, Justice & Culture at Ohio […]

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 […]

Leah Litman discusses her book, Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes. In it, she argues that the Supreme Court is no longer practicing law. Rather, it’s running on vibes. And by “vibes,” Litman means legal-ish claims that repackage the politics of conservative grievance and minority rule. Leah […]

After months of National Guard and ICE deployment around the U.S., questions remain about what these domestic deployments mean, under what legal authority are they happening and what have the lower Courts said about these issues, Scott R. Anderson details all the different aspects of these questions and more. Anderson outlines the complicated legal ways […]

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. […]

Kevin M. Schultz discusses his book Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals). In it Schultz lays out some of the objections to liberals—ineffective, spineless, judgmental, authoritarian—placing these objections in a historical frame. It turns out that how one defines a “white liberal” is less a reflection of reality and more a Rorschach test […]

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 […]