The Baton Foundation

Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality
2025-02-09 15:00 - 16:30 (America/New_York) | GA
About the Book
Racial Innocence will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it is possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. As Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the US, this revelation is critical to dismantling systemic racism. Basing her work on interviews, discrimination case files, and civil rights law, Hernández reveals Latino anti-Black bias in the workplace, the housing market, schools, places of recreation, the criminal justice system, and Latino families. By focusing on racism perpetrated by communities outside those of White non-Latino people, Racial Innocence brings to light the many Afro-Latino and African American victims of anti-Blackness at the hands of other people of color. Through exploring the interwoven fabric of discrimination and examining the cause of these issues, we can begin to move toward a more egalitarian society.
About the Speaker
Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, where she teaches Anti-Discrimination Law, Comparative Employment Discrimination, Critical Race Theory, Writing/Righting Race in the Public Sphere, The Science of Implicit Bias and the Law: New Pathways to Social Justice, and Trusts & Wills. She received her A.B. from Brown University, and her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she served as Note Topics Editor of The Yale Law Journal.
Professor Hernández is an internationally recognized comparative race law expert and Fulbright Scholar who has visited at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, in Paris and the University of the West Indies Law School, in Trinidad. She has previously served as a Law and Public Policy Affairs Fellow at Princeton University, a Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University; a Faculty Fellow at the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, and as a Scholar in Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Professor Hernández is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation, the American Law Institute, and the Academia Puertorriqueña de Jurisprudencia y Legislación. Hispanic Business Magazine selected her as one of its annual 100 Most Influential Hispanics and NYC Comptroller Brad Lander awarded her a Commendation for “extraordinary contributions to anti-racism.” Professor Hernández serves on the editorial boards of the Revista Brasileira de Direito e Justiça/Brazilian Journal of Law and Justice, and the Latino Studies Journal published by Palgrave-Macmillian Press.
Professor Hernández’s scholarly interest is in the study of comparative race relations and anti-discrimination law, and her work in that area has been published in numerous university law reviews like Cornell, Harvard, N.Y.U., U.C. Berkeley, Yale and in news outlets like The New York Times, among other publications–including her books Racial Subordination in Latin America: The Role of the State, Customary Law and the New Civil Rights Response (including Spanish and Portuguese translation editions), Brill Research Perspectives in Comparative Law: Racial Discrimination, and Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination. Her most recent book from Beacon Press is Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and The Struggle for Equality, and its Spanish translation edition, Inocencia Racial: Desenmascarando la antinegritud de los latinos y la lucha por la igualdad. Currently under contract with Beacon Press, is her next book (Under) Counting Blackness Across the Globe: The Civil Rights Crisis of Census Racial Erasure.
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Riding Jane Crow: African American Women on the American Railroad
2025-03-09 15:00 - 16:30
About the Book
Riding Jane Crow tells the overlooked story of Black women on American trains, from before the Civil War to more contemporary times. How did Black intellectual women such as Ida B. Wells fight racial segregation through lawsuits, before the (in)famous Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision of 1896? Who were the Black women who worked as Pullman maids, along with the more well-known Pullman porters? How does the experience of Black women on the American railroad provide a more accurate measure of American ingenuity and progress? These questions and others will be answered during this virtual talk.
About the Author
Miriam Thaggert is a professor of English at the University at Buffalo. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on African American literature, history, and culture. Her previous book was on the Harlem Renaissance, Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance. She has also written on films such as Imitation of Life, Twelve Years a Slave, and Mahogany. She is currently working on the Buffalo-area African American poet Lucille Clifton and Percival Everett’s novel, The Trees. She grew up in southwest Louisiana and obtained her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.
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An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South
2025-04-13 15:00 - 16:30
About the Book
Between Fort Sumter and Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands of Black men, women, and children through a persisting trade in enslaved people. They did so for numerous reasons, including to adapt to the conflict, to invest in their desired slaveholding future, and to fend off the onset of emancipation. These transactions had profound impacts on the enslaved–their lives and families, and the ways in which they pursued freedom during the war. The surviving traffic in humanity thus shaped the experience of the Civil War and its aftermath for all inhabitants of the wartime South.
About the Speaker
Robert Colby is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. His first book, An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South, was published in 2024 by Oxford University Press. His research has won awards from the Society of American Historians and the Society of Civil War Historians and has been published in the Journal of the Civil War Era, Journal of the Early Republic, and Slavery & Abolition.
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