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Anderson Discusses Anti-Blackness and Gun Legislation on CNN

The cover of Carol Anderson’s 2021 book, The Second.

Dr. Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler Professor of African American Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, was quoted in a CNN article on the racialized dimensions of contemporary legislation related to gun possession and gun control. Anderson’s most recent book, The Second: Race and Guns in an Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021), interrogates the links between anti-Blackness and the second amendment throughout U.S. history. Read an excerpt from the article below along with the full piece: “The fight to curb gun violence without inflaming racial biases.”

The issue when it comes to gun control isn’t necessarily the law, according to Carol Anderson, an African American studies professor at Emory University. Sometimes, the issue is the enforcement of the law.

“Let’s go back to the Bruen decision in New York, that horrible decision by the US Supreme Court,” Anderson said, referring to the high court’s ruling in June that struck down a century-old New York gun law and that observers suspect will unleash a wave of lawsuits seeking to loosen restrictions at the state and federal levels. “The amicus curiae brief from public defenders said, The NYPD has used this law to go after Black folks. Look at what this has done.”

Anderson, the author of “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” said that, at the core, the problem was policing.

“That’s the component I don’t think is understood well enough,” she said. “We’ve got to clean up policing.
Until we take anti-Blackness seriously, we’re going to keep dancing around the issue.”

Brandon Tensley and Eva McKend, “The fight to curb gun violence without inflaming racial biases,” CNN, July 31, 2022.
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Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation Supports Billups’ Research on Anti-Busing Violence

The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation has awarded doctoral candidate Robert Billups a travel research grant to support two weeks of research in their collections. Centered on anti-busing violence in the 1970s, the research will inform the final chapter of Billups’ dissertation, titled “‘Reign of Terror’: Anti–Civil Rights Terrorism in the United States, 1955–1976.” Drs. Joseph Crespino and Allen Tullos advise Billups’ dissertation.

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Arturo Luna Loranca Receives Sheila Carson Dissertation Completion Fellowship

Doctoral candidate Arturo Luna Loranca has been awarded the 2022-’23 Sheila Carson Dissertation Completion Fellowship. The fellowship provides financial support for an advanced graduate student in the History doctoral program to complete their dissertation. Loranca’s dissertation “Canines and the Making of Mexico City: Three hundred years of human-dog encounters, 1521-1821,” is advised by Drs. Javier Villa-Flores, Yanna Yannakakis, and Karen Stolley.

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LaChance Publishes ‘Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television’ with Stanford UP

Dr. Daniel LaChance, Associate Professor of History and Winship Distinguished Research Professor in History, recently published a new book with co-author Dr. Paul Kaplan, Professor of Criminal Justice in the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University. Titled Crimesploitation: Crime, Punishment, and Pleasure on Reality Television and published by Stanford University Press, the monograph investigates the enduring appeal of ‘true crime’ media in American popular culture. Dr. Michelle Brown, Professor at the University of Tennessee, offered the following appraisal of Crimesploitation: “Kaplan and LaChance move us toward a critical reckoning with the exploitative forms of (un)freedom that media’s spectacle of crime and punishment have conjured. A powerful dose of thoughtful accountability, this volume points the way to getting truly ‘real’ about—and intervening in—the suffering that a culture of punishment has produced.” Read more about the monograph below as well as on the Stanford UP website.

“‘Due to the graphic nature of this program, viewer discretion is advised.’ Most of us have encountered this warning while watching television at some point. It is typically attached to a brand of reality crime TV that Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance call “crimesploitation”: spectacles designed to entertain mass audiences by exhibiting “real” criminal behavior and its consequences. This book examines their enduring popularity in American culture. Analyzing the structure and content of several popular crimesploitation shows, including Cops, Dog: The Bounty Hunter, and To Catch a Predator, as well as newer examples like Making a Murderer and Don’t F**K with Cats, Kaplan and LaChance highlight the troubling nature of the genre: though it presents itself as ethical and righteous, its entertainment value hinges upon suffering. Viewers can imagine themselves as deviant and ungovernable like the criminals in the show, thereby escaping a law-abiding lifestyle. Alternatively, they can identify with law enforcement officials, exercising violence, control, and “justice” on criminal others. Crimesploitation offers a sobering look at the depictions of criminals, policing, and punishment in modern America.”


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Federal Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board Faces Time Crunch

In February of this year the U.S. Congress confirmed Professor Hank Klibanoff to the Federal Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board. The board has been charged with processing records of racially-motivated crimes from 1940-’79 that remain unsolved. A recent article from the Courthouse News Service provides an overview of the board’s work and discusses the time crunch the four-member team is under. As the 2019 law that sanctioned the establishment of the board was written, the work must be completed within four years. Klibanoff and other board members have yet to be sworn in, however, a delay that will pose serious challenges for the commission’s efforts. Klibanoff is James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism and Associated Faculty in the History Department. Read more via this article: “Newly formed board to review Civil Rights-era cold cases faces time crunch.“

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U.S. Senate Confirms Klibanoff and Dudley to Federal Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board

The U.S. senate has confirmed James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism Hank Klibanoff and Rose library instructional archivist Gabrielle M. Dudley to the federal Civil Rights Cold Case Review Board. Established in 2019 and convened in 2022, the panel has received authorization through 2027 to investigate unsolved cases from the Civil Rights era. Klibanoff is director of the Georgia Civil Rights Cold Cases Project at Emory and host of the award-winning podcast Buried Truths. Read more about the federal cold cases panel and Atlantans’ significant roles within it: “Civil rights cold case board to have unique Atlanta flavor.”

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Anderson in ‘The Guardian’: “The US supreme court is letting racist discrimination run wild in the election system”

Charles Howard Candler Professor Dr. Carol Anderson recently published an opinion piece in The Guardian. Titled “The US supreme court is letting racist discrimination run wild in the election system,” the article draws important parallels between contemporary voting restrictions that target minority populations and historical disenfranchisement practices, especially those in the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow United States. Read an excerpt below along with Anderson’s full piece here.

“This assault on African Americans’ right to vote was an assault on American democracy aided and abetted by the highest court in the land. The results were devastating. By 1960, there were counties in Alabama that had no Black voters registered, while simultaneously having more than 100% of white age-eligible voters on the rolls. In Mississippi a mere 6.7% of eligible Black adults were registered to vote.“

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SlaveVoyages Featured, Eltis Quoted in ‘NYT’ Article

The digital memorial and database project SlaveVoyages, spearheaded by Emeritus Professor David Eltis and maintained by numerous Emory faculty and alumni, was recently featured in an article in The New York Times. The piece, “We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was,” provides an overview of the trans-Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans as well as the history of SlaveVoyages itself. Originating in the 1960s, the database was recently expanded with a new section titled “Oceans of Kinfolk” that includes information on trafficking within North America in the first half of the nineteenth century. The New York Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie, situates this expansion in the context of a broader reflection about how data on slave trafficking can provide access to or, alternatively, obscure the lived experiences of the enslaved. The Steering Committee of SlaveVoyages includes the following Emory History faculty and alumni: Allen E. Tullos (Professor, Emory History Department), Alex Borucki (PhD 11, Associate Professor, UC-Irvine), and Daniel B. Domingues da Silva (PhD 11, Associate Professor, Rice University). Read Bouie’s article here: “We Still Can’t See American Slavery for What It Was.”

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‘NYT’ Article on Anniversary of Wannsee Conference Quotes Lipstadt

A recent article in The New York Times, titled “80 Years Ago the Nazis Planned the ‘Final Solution.’ It Took 90 Minutes,” quotes Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty member Deborah E. Lipstadt. The piece centers on the 80th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference in Germany in 1942, when Nazi bureaucrats planned the systematization of the Holocaust of European Jews. Read an excerpt from the article quoting Lipstadt below, along with the full piece here.

“Eighty years after the Wannsee Conference and 77 years after the end of World War II, the witnesses of Nazi atrocities are dying.

“When Dr. Lipstadt, 74, the Dorot professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, first started teaching about the Holocaust more than three decades ago, it was easy to find survivors to talk to her students.

“‘When I wanted a survivor to come to my class, I would say, ‘Do I want a survivor of a camp or in hiding? Do I want someone from Eastern Europe? Do I want a German who lived under the laws for eight years before deportation? Do I want someone from the underground’? she recalled. ‘Now I hope I can find someone who is healthy enough to come at all.'”

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Lipstadt in ‘NYT’: “For Jews, Going to Services Is an Act of Courage”

Dr. Deborah E. Lipstadt, Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently published a piece in The New York Times. In the guest essay Lipstadt addresses increasing anti-Semitic violence in the United States, including at synagogues such as the Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, where a gunman took three hostages last month. Read an excerpt from Lipstadt’s piece below along with the full article: “For Jews, Going to Services Is an Act of Courage.”

“I have not walked through the main entrance to my synagogue since October 2018, after the shootings at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue. For over three years now, that door has remained locked. When I asked why, I was told, “It’s too wide open; it can’t be made secure.” I understood. You won’t find wide-open doors at any synagogue in Europe or North America. It is only after you get past the guards that you find welcome, though welcome is still there for those who seek it.

“It is not just the large synagogues that fear for security. I hear from students that they think twice about going to Hillel services, the campus Jewish chaplaincy. Some out of fear for physical safety. Some out of worry about the slings and barbs that might come from other students in the dorm. I met parents whose child had been accepted to a very selective college. He wears a kipa and was struggling with whether to replace it for the next four years with a baseball cap. Increasingly I hear: Jews are contemplating going underground.

“We are shaken. We are not OK. But we will bounce back. We are resilient because we cannot afford not to be. That resiliency is part of the Jewish DNA. Without it, we would have disappeared centuries ago. We refuse to go away. But we are exhausted.“