In "Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America", legal historian Martha Jones traveled back to antebellum Baltimore to uncover the citizenship debates that anticipated the birthright citizenship clause as codified in the Fourteenth Amendment. What resulted was a meticulously researched, richly textured, and entirely original piece of scholarship that rewrites the genealogy of birthright citizenship in the United States.

Readers will be well aware of the ways in which black women’s representation in popular discourses is deeply caricatured – as angry, as devoutly Christian, as “in the life” of prostitution and drug addiction. Williamson argues that the knee jerk criticism and refusal of stereotypes that sometimes follow from the deployment of these representations can also reproduce structured absences of black women’s sociality.

Jared Sexton's new book "Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing" moves beyond a traditional critique of respectability politics to interrogate how Hollywood films make invisible global structures of anti-blackness through narratives of black incorporation and authority.

When we listen to the accounts of those most impacted by racism rather than defensively dismiss them, we can see the pervasiveness of violence. We can see that for Professor Marrus’ ‘joke’ to provoke humor rather than pain and rage, our Black colleagues would first need to feel liberty, equity and basic safety where they work.

Jared Sexton is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds an affiliation with the Center for Law, Culture, and Society. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).