I'm Kidada Williams, a historian who specializes in how African Americans experienced and responded to racist violence and racial terror in the U.S. I am the author of They Left Great Marks on Me ,"Regarding the Aftermaths of Lynching," and a forthcoming book called I Saw Death Coming. I was one of the co-creators of #CharlestonSyllabus, the crowd-sourced resource developed to help Americans understand the context behind the 2015 massacre at Emanuel AME. We produced Charleston Syllabus, a book of readings on race, racism, and racial violence.

You may have seen me on Henry Louis Gates's PBS documentary, Reconstruction: America after the Civil War or heard me on Slate Academy: Reconstruction, BackStory, specifically Respectfully Yours, Gainer Atkins and The Difference Ten Miles Makes.

Most U.S. historians researching racist violence and racial terror have focused on perpetrators, bystanders, the state, and media responses to it. Having learned about lynching as an undergrad through the killing of Mary Turner, a heavily pregnant Black woman who was lynched as part of a 1918 lynching spree in Lowndes County, Georgia, I wondered, "how did her people live with and through her killing, that of her fetus, and her husband?" At the time, lynching historians rarely attempted to answer that kind of question. Literary and popular culture scholars who explored African Americans' responses often prioritized public thinkers and writers, most of whom knew about this violence, which is reflected in their literature, but weren't often at the epicenter of it.

The inability of existing research to answer my questions drove my own research in graduate school and became the basis for Great Marks. I used African Americans' testimonies about a wide range of racist violence (night riding, lynching, Klan raids, massacres, and rape) from emancipation to the World War I to shift our gaze to targeted people. Doing that enabled me to unearth both a wider range of harm and different modes of resistance. I am especially interested in the immediate and long-term physical, psychic, and psychological injuries from this violence.

Although I focus primarily on African American victims, I do recognize the need to acknowledge and histories of racist violence directed at Native Americans as well as Americans of Mexican and Chinese descent and origin in the late nineteenth and early 20th century.

Ask me anything!

Edit: I really enjoyed this AMA and want to thank everyone who asked fantastic and really thoughtful questions.

In light of the recent move by Erdogan, my parents who are staunch Muslims, claim that Mehmet the conqueror legally bought the Church and thus he was within his rights to turn it into a mosque. I looked it up but I couldn't find any mention of that, however when one looks it up in Arabic(my native language), Arabic websites claim there's a historical document proving it. Example: https://www.adwhit.com/%D8%AA%D8%B1%D9%83%D9%8A%D8%A7/%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%B1%D9%81-%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%89-%D8%B9%D9%82%D8%AF-%D8%B4%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%A1-%D8%A3%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%B5%D9%88%D9%81%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D9%85%D9%86-%D9%82%D8%A8%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D9%84%D8%B7%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%85%D8%AD%D9%85%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%AA%D8%AD-%D9%88%D8%AB%D9%8A%D9%82%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%AE%D9%8A%D8%A9/0234320

It's in Ottoman Turkish and I unfortunately don't speak that. Can someone help shed light on the argument and show me how exactly Hagia Sophia was turned into a mosque?

The Ask Historians moderation team has made the commitment to be as transparent as possible with the community about our actions. That commitment is why we offer Rules Roundtables on a regular basis, why we post explanations when removing answers when we can, and why we send dozens of modmails a week in response to questions from users looking for feedback or clarity. Behind the scenes, there is an incredible amount of conversation among the team about modding decisions and practices and we work hard to foster an environment that both adheres to the standards we have achieved in this community and is safe and welcoming to our users.

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At times, genocide denial is explicit; a user posts a question challenging widely accepted facts about the Holocaust or a comment that they don’t think what happened to Indigenous Americans following contact with Europeans was a genocide. In those cases, the question or comment is removed and the user is permanently banned. If someone posts a question that appears to reflect a genuine desire to learn more about genocide, we provide them a carefully written and researched answer by an expert in the topic. But at other times, it’s much less obvious than someone saying that a death toll was fabricated or that deaths had other causes. Some other aspects of what we consider genocide denial include:

• Putting equal weight on people revolting and the state suppressing the population, as though the former justifies the latter as simple warfare
• Suggesting that an event academically or generally considered genocide was “just” a series of massacres, etc.
• Downplaying acts of cultural erasure considered part of a genocide when and if they failed to fully destroy the culture

Issues like these can often be difficult for individuals to process as denial because they are often parts of a dominant cultural narrative in the state that committed the genocide. North American textbooks for children, for instance, may downplay forced resettlement as simply “moving away”. Narratives like these can be hard to unlearn, especially when living in that country or consuming its media.

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We once again want to reaffirm our stance of zero tolerance for the denial of historical atrocities and our commitment to be open about the decisions we, as a team of moderators, take. For more information on our policies, please see our previous Rules Roundtable discussions here on the civility rule, here on soapboxing and moralizing and here on asking uncomfortable questions.

I was watching a documentary series on Youtube about medieval castle building and the above statement was made at 20:50. It sounds nearly impossible that France would have more forests today than nearly 7 centuries ago.

Also any bit of insight to the accuracy of the project in the documentary would be greatly appreciated.

I am currently travelling around China, I have been to Yunnan, Sichuan, Hunan and now Jiangsu. One question that keeps coming to mind that I cannot find an answer to is; why have some of these cultural relics such as the Beisi Pagodain Suzhou not been completely destroyed? Did the red guards use these locations strategically or just did not get around to destroying them?

“The aspiration for a nation-state was not central in the Zionist movement before the 1940s,” writes the Hebrew University historian Dmitry Shumsky in his book, “Beyond the Nation-State.” A Jewish state has become the dominant form of Zionism. But it is not the essence of Zionism. The essence of Zionism is a Jewish home in the land of Israel, a thriving Jewish society that can provide refuge and rejuvenation for Jews across the world.

Is this a tenable statement?