Legal historian Gautham Rao shares his new book, White Power, which examines the history of policing and slave patrols in the United States and the ways systems of surveillance and racial control shaped American governance and law.

White Power: Policing American Slavery introduces us to laws that empowered white people to forcibly exercise their desired racial superiority over Black people, shows how they spread from the South throughout the nation, and traces the rebellions, fugitivity, activism, and legal systems that challenged them. Gautham offers a new interpretation of the history of policing in the US, speaking to the origins of today's persistence of white vigilance, white supremacist militia groups, and white racist cops determined to maintain power over Black people by force.

Gautham Rao is a legal historian of early America and the United States and a professor of history at American University. He is the author of National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and a leading scholar in legal history. He serves as editorin-chief of Law & History Review and the Oxford Bibliography of Legal History, and has contributed to historians' amicus briefs before the US Supreme Court.