In the framework of the Max Weber Programme Special Lecture, this event features a conversation with Ariela Gross (UCLA School of Law).
From the moment the last shot was fired in the Civil War, some white politicians and judges in the U.S. sought to erase slavery from the history of the Constitution, and to erase the perspectives of the Black people who fought to end slavery and claim freedom and citizenship for themselves. In this lecture, Ariela Gross will discuss how strong the impulse has been from the moment slavery ended until now to erase slavery from American memory, to emphasise freedom over slavery, and thus to deny slavery’s legacies. By telling a story in which slavery was buried in the deep past, and freedom was a gift from white people to Black people, opponents of Black rights in the aftermath of Reconstruction promoted a nationwide retreat from the promise of citizenship and equality embodied by the Reconstruction Amendments. The same dynamic has been at work over the last several decades. Today’s courts have adopted a version of history promulgated by radical movement conservatives in which slavery ended with finality in 1865 and the debt for slavery was paid with the Civil War. The Supreme Court hearkens back to 1787 for the Constitution’s meaning, but they erase slavery from that history, imagining a Constitution that already contained timeless principles of colorblindness and freedom. Just as the Trump Administration seeks to shape our national narrative by keeping the history of slavery and racism out of museums, university and school curricula, conservative judges have used stories about timeless colorblind freedom to undergird their campaign to decimate voting rights, reproductive freedom, and the right to an equal education.
For almost two decades, the authors has written academic essays about how the memory (and erasure) of slavery shapes constitutional law and politics in the U.S. as well as in Europe, particularly France. This book, however, is intended for a general audience, to intervene in debates about the current crisis, and how the current threat to democracy in the United States is tied to our own history of white supremacy, rather than an imported European fascism. This lecture aims to raise some of the difficult methodological and conceptual questions about writing a history of the present that bridges history and memory, culture, politics, and law.
Speaker:
Ariela Gross is a Distinguished Professor of Law and History at UCLA. She was previously the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History and Co-Director of the Center for Law, History, and Culture at the University of Southern California. Her most recent book with Alejandro de La Fuente, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge UP, 2020), was the winner of the 2021 Order of the Coif Award for the best book on law, and the John Philip Reid Award for the best book in Anglo-American legal history from the American Society for Legal History. Her book What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Harvard UP 2008), was winner of the James Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association, the Lillian Smith Award for the best book on the U.S. South and the struggle for racial justice, the American Political Science Association’s Best Book on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Gross is also the author of Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton UP 2000), numerous essays and articles, and op-eds in the Washington Post, LA Times, and Wall Street Journal. She received her JD and PhD in History from Stanford University, and has been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, Kyoto University, EHESS, Sciences Po, the University of Paris, and Tel Aviv University, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow, a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow, a Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellow, an ACLS Burkhardt Fellow, an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellow, and an NEH Huntington Libraries Fellow.