Dr. Ersula J. Ore is the Lincoln Professor of Ethics in the School of Social Transformation and Associate Professor of African & African American studies. Her research agenda focuses on the suasive strategies of Black Americans and investigates the relationship between physical and discursive violence, citizenship, and race. Dr. Ore’s book, Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, & American Identity (2019), which explores American lynching as an ongoing practice of racialized citizenship connected to anti-Black policing, received the 2020 RSA Book Award from the Rhetoric Society of America.
“Defund the police is really a call to radically reimagine an inactive future that doesn't currently exist now, that can't exist within the white racial framework, within a framework that’s predicated upon a history of policing situated within logics of slavery, capture, confinement.”
- Defund or Reform? BLM and Policing Expert Panel: Newswise Live Event
“Fight for black liberation is nothing new, nor is it particularly endemic to the United States, it just so happens that the confluence of various variables, one of those major variables being COVID created an opportunity for us to sit and watch and pay attention and to be present in ways we historically have not been able to, have not been permitted.”
- Defund or Reform? BLM and Policing Expert Panel: Newswise Live Event