Event

Heather Ann Thompson, University of Michigan professor and author of the Pulitzer Prize winning history, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, will share a section from her latest work-in- progress: Fear and Fury: Bernhard Goetz and the Rebirth of White Vigilantism in 1980s America. Her new project reexamines how we have come to understand the racial and political backlash that followed the movement-based possibilities of the 1960s and 1970s. It suggests that current “rise of conservatism” or “rise of the right” framings of this turn have not fully appreciated the role played by the re-legitimization of self-deputized “policing” of Blackness on the part of urban whites. This rebirth of white vigilantism was deeply rooted in a distinctly civic Reaganomics, was made “mainstream” by the rise of a new misinformation media in this same moment, and it would be foundational to the eventual triumph of Trump.

Coffee reception at 4:45pm