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Anchored by contemporary crises surrounding queer and trans people in the United States, I employ movements from queerness within an affective queer phenomenological framework to understand how arrangements of “white religion” (Schaefer, 2015, p. 63), a process whereby U.S. American Christian forms escape ideology into religious affective economies in the United States, relegate queer people “to the background… to sustain a certain direction” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 31). I assemble a queer rhetorical context analyzing white religious space in documentary film, secular sexual regulation through contemporary U.S. legal contexts around marriage, and settler colonial Christian nationalist political imaginations to critique how these affective economies materially orient bodies from queerness towards “a commitment to a national sexuality” (Jakobsen, 2020, p. 27). I argue that movements from queerness and white religion continue to exert significant power over queer bodies and U.S. sexual cultures through intersecting systems of whiteness, cisheterosexism, neoliberalism, and settler colonialism.

On both a national and global stage we are witnessing a reckoning on issues of racial justice. This historical moment that continues to unfold in the United States and elsewhere also creates an opening to spark and revitalize debate and policy changes on a range of crucial topics, including national security. By surfacing the depths to which White hegemonic power influences our institutions and cultural assumptions, we gain more accurate understanding of how race manifests in national security domestically, transnationally, and globally. In Race and National Security, leading experts challenge conventional interpretations of national security by illuminating the underpinning of White supremacy in our social consciousness. The volume centers the experience of those who have long been on the receiving end of racialized state violence. It finds that re-envisioning national security requires more than just reducing the size and scope of the security state. Contributors offer visions for reforming and transforming national security, including adopting an abolitionist framework. Race and National Security invites us to radically reimagine a world where the security state does not keep Black, Brown, and other marginalized peoples subordinated through threats of and actual incarceration, violence, torture, and death. Race and National Security is a groundbreaking volume which serves as a catalyst for remembering, exposing, and reconceiving the role of race in national security. The Just Security book series from OUP tackles contemporary problems in international law and security that are of interest to a global community of scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and students. With each volume taking a particular thematic focus and gathering leading experts, the series as a whole aims to rigorously and critically reflect on developments in these areas of law, policy, and practice. Each volume will be accompanied by a series of shorter digital pieces in Just Security's online, https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/books/1138/thumbnail.jpg

In contemporary constitutional politics, Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment—which includes the citizenship, privileges and immunities, due process, and equal protection clauses—is the star of the show. But this was not the focus for the Republican members of the Thirty-Ninth Congress. Their interest was instead in Sections 2, 3, and 4. Today we tend to think the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to protect persons of color. But the Republicans engaged in Reconstruction saw its purpose as preventing “rebel rule” by punishing treason and rewarding loyalty, particularly the loyalty of white men who remained faithful to the Union during the Civil War. In this first of three planned volumes for the University Press of Kansas’s Constitutional Thinking series, Mark A. Graber aims to restore to contemporary memory the Fourteenth Amendment drafted by those Republican and Unionist members of Congress who supported congressional reconstruction. In Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty, Graber breaks new ground researching Reconstruction, the Fourteenth Amendment, and constitutionalism by highlighting the importance of Sections 2, 3, and 4 to the representatives in the Thirty-Ninth Congress and their relative indifference to Section 1. His work underscores the importance and impact that legislative primacy and partisan supremacy had to Republican constitutional thinking about constitutional authority immediately after the Civil War. Centered on Reconstruction and constitutional reform, Graber shows anew the Republican effort to prevent rebel rule by empowering and protecting loyalty., https://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/books/1139/thumbnail.jpg

Law reform advocates should be strategic in deploying tax tropes. Through an examination of five common tax phrases—the “nanny tax,” “death tax,” “soda tax,” “Black tax,” and “pink tax”—this Article demonstrates that tax rhetoric is more likely to influence law when used to describe specific economic injustices resulting from actual government duties, as opposed to figurative inequalities. In comparison, slogans describing figurative taxes are less likely to influence law and human behavior, even if they have descriptive force in both popular and academic literature as a short-hand for group-based disparities. This Article catalogues and evaluates what makes for effective tax talk, in terms of impact on both the law and day-to-day actions on the ground. With this roadmap, lawyers, policy makers and others will be able make more forceful and precise tax-based arguments aimed at reforming the law and changing human behavior. This Article makes three principal claims—one descriptive, one empirical, and one normative. The Article first develops a taxonomy of tax phrases, based on the object of critique. The classification distinguishes between criticisms of compulsory formal levies, on the one hand, and burdens or oppressions that are akin to taxes, on the other. The taxonomy also notes some differences among tax tropes based on their linguistic form. Some phrases deploy a single word modifier for “tax” (like “nanny,” “death,” or “soda”) to signify a larger relationship, event, or transaction that is subject to taxation. Other phrases use a single-word modifier for “tax” (like “Black” or “pink”) that is strongly associated with the persons subject to taxation. The Article next engages in a content analysis of multiple data sets of printed popular and scholarly literature to compare the relative “success” of the phrases “nanny tax,” “death tax,” “soda tax,” “Black tax,” and “pink tax” in terms of frequency of use, links to legal reform, and impacts on taxpayer behavior.

This study's objective investigates the viewpoints held by Black women in two urban areas of Minnesota about the social upheaval that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020 for using a counterfeit $20 bill. In the last decade, police killings of innocent Black people in the United States have received more attention, and Floyd's death is only one example of this phenomenon. In the U.S., the likelihood of a police officer taking the life of a Black man is higher than that of a White man. Between 2013-2019 there have been 1,641 fatal shootings of defenseless Black men by police officers. Video of Floyd's murder and the demonstrations that followed was extensively disseminated by many news organizations and other media sites (Ladyzhinskaya, 2021). It has been demonstrated that widespread coverage of killings on social media is also easy to access and harms the psychological well-being of the Black community. This is especially true when viewed in the context of the historical framework of institutional and cultural racism and discrimination in the U.S. This research ascertains the extent to which several Black women residing in the metroplex of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, were prompted to respond and act as a direct result of Floyd's death due to police misconduct. All the participants were selected based on their well known presence in the Black community. Each spoke intimately about their personal and communal experiences, which have shaped their activism and commitment to social justice. Based on these participants' narratives, recommendations are provided for professional practices which will provide invaluable information to regulatory systems, such as policing and the judicial system.