Beginning in the colonial era and growing through the American Revolution and the Southern plantation system, slaveholders’ violent police regime continued after Emancipation, through Reconstruction, to today. Moving across time, space, and place, White Power uncovers how slaveholders created their own white supremacist police and government to deny Black people rights, power, and humanity.
Legal historian Gautham Rao introduces us to laws that empowered white people to forcibly exercise their desired racial superiority over Black people, shows how they spread from the South throughout the nation, and traces the rebellions, fugitivity, activism, and legal systems that challenged them. Rao’s narrative includes slaveholders, lawmakers, and the Ku Klux Klan, dramatic escapes by runaway enslaved people, abolitionist activism in courtroom showdowns, and pitched battles between white paramilitaries and enslaved rebels. He offers a new interpretation of the history of policing in the US, centering the institution and legacy of slavery and speaking to the origins of today’s persistence of white vigilance, white supremacist militia groups, and white racist cops determined to maintain power over Black people by force. Equally determined, however, was Black Americans’ refusal to accept it.
Gautham Rao is associate professor of history at American University in Washington, DC, and Editor-in-Chief of Law and History Review.
Rao will be in conversation with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, one of the world’s foremost historians and leading antiracist scholars. His books have been translated into multiple languages and republished throughout the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia. Dr. Kendi is Professor of History and the founding director of the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study, an interdisciplinary research enterprise examining global racism. He is author of many highly acclaimed bestsellers including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He is the author of the international bestseller How to Be an Antiracist. Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant.