<p>A renowned cultural critic who coined the term “Know-Your-Place Aggression,” Koritha Mitchell created the C19 Podcast episode, <em>The N-Word in the Classroom: Just Say No!</em> </p><p>In 2013, Koritha published <em>Love in Action: Noting Similarities Between Lynching Then and Anti-LGBT Violence Now</em>. She found that what lynching and anti-LGBT violence most have in common is the targeted group’s success. To emphasize that members of marginalized groups are attacked for their success, not because they have done something wrong, Koritha coined the term “know-your-place-aggression,” and it has shaped public conversations and academic discourse. Public examples include NPR’s <em>Morning Edition</em>, <em>Good Morning America</em>, <em>The Guardian</em>, and <em>FiveThirtyEight</em>, and academic examples span the social sciences, the physical and computer sciences as well as the humanities. </p><p>Koritha’s own public commentary has addressed a range of issues, and it is always oriented toward justice and informed by Black feminism. Her writing has appeared in outlets such as <em>TIME</em>, <em>The Washington Post</em>, CNN, <em>Openly</em>, <em>Electric Literature</em>, and <em>The Huffington Post</em>. </p><p>Having devoted decades to studying violence in U.S. history and contemporary culture, Koritha understands the many forms violence can take. Meanwhile, studying violence as a Black woman has inspired Koritha’s commitment to understanding how targeted communities survive and thrive, despite the hostility they face. When society is designed to deny your humanity, simply living requires deliberate effort and purpose-driven strategies. </p><p>Because she lives and thinks while having to navigate American racism, sexism, and heterosexism, Koritha helps audiences understand that violent words may not draw blood, but they are no less damaging than physical blows. She equips audiences to see how, when institutions and cultures have been designed for injustice and inequity, violence is built into what is most commonly said and done. As important, she guides audiences to notice how they can make every space they enter less hostile for more people. </p><p>On stage, Koritha draws from her research and her life to inspire intellectual engagement, self-reflection, and clear effort based on the belief that thriving should be the American way for more than a select few.</p>
Award-Winning Author, Feminist Scholar, Cultural Critic
<ul><li><strong>Lynching and Anti-LGBT Violence: Making the Connection</strong></li><li>The violence plaguing LGBT communities has much in common with the brutal practice of lynching, which was at its height from the 1890s to the 1930s. Ultimately, both forms of aggression are designed to deny targeted groups recognition as citizens. Having studied racial violence for decades, award-winning scholar Koritha Mitchell brought this expertise to her examination of the data on anti-LGBT attacks collected by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP). Her research revealed striking similarities between lynching at the last turn of the century and anti-LGBT violence today. By drawing out those parallels, Mitchell equips audiences with historically grounded knowledge that can encourage coalitions and make environments less hostile for more people.</li><li><strong>What if Americans Had Listened to Black Women of the 1800s?</strong></li><li> Award-winning scholar Koritha Mitchell shares insights from editing the work of Harriet Jacobs while witnessing the Supreme Court’s commitment to ending abortion access and limiting the right to vote. Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the first book-length autobiography by a formerly enslaved African American woman. Despite facing obstacles typically avoided by white women and Black men, Jacobs published her life story in 1861. This work sheds light on the experience of a particular demographic—nineteenth-century Black women. In the process, it exposes American culture’s fundamental beliefs as the nation built its foundation on treating Black women not as people but as chattels, moveable pieces of property. Using Harriet Jacobs as a case study, Mitchell shows how Black women were model citizens who could not vote. Even while enslaved, Jacobs exemplified the critical thinking of engaged citizenship. Her writing exposes the brutally inventive creativity of the nation’s most vaunted nonfiction texts. Jacobs proves to be unequivocal: legal statutes exert very real pressure on her life, but they rely on the relentlessly reiterated fiction that she is not fully human and deserves no rights</li><li><strong>Homemade Citizenship: All But Inviting Injury</strong></li><li>Award-winning scholar Koritha Mitchell discusses how, even when they embody everything the nation claims to respect, African Americans cannot count on being treated like citizens. Consider, for example, the Black soldiers and nurses who served in the Civil War, WWI, and WWII only to be disfranchised and denigrated. Or, consider the Ivy League-educated constitutional lawyer who rose to the office of president only to face demands that he “show his papers,” his birth certificate and academic transcripts. Though their success will not likely bring them the safety and respectability it should, African Americans seem to cling to all that purportedly makes one an ideal citizen, including the heteronormative nuclear family and its traditional household. What does this pattern of investing against the odds reveal about African American culture? The short answer: homemade citizenship.</li></ul>