Guest Jackie Battalora

Jacqueline Battalora is an attorney and professor who works as an anti-racist writer and educator. At Saint Xavier University in Chicago, she teaches courses in law and society having completed graduate work at Northwestern University where her research was shaped by an interest in the social forces that make deep human connections across “race” lines so difficult to sustain. Her graduate training includes: theology, social ethics, sociology, and law. Battalora’s approach to white awareness training is enhanced by employment experience that includes educator, corporate attorney, and Chicago police officer. Her writings explore the enforcement of divisions between people specifically, the making of human difference in law. She is the author of Birth of a White Nation and numerous articles including: “Whiteness: an American ideology,” “Difference by law: the one man one woman marriage requirement and antimiscegenation law,” among others.  

Battalora speaks widely on the topic of the invention of white people in law and has been conducting white awareness training sessions since the mid 1990s. She has trained teachers as well as lawyers, judges, activists, corporate and law enforcement officials on the legal historical record of the creation and imposition of “white” people in U.S. history and its implications for work conducted today.