SEEN & UNSEEN

How the fight for racial justice has evolved in the era of “the rapid democratization of technology.”

Hill, the host of BET News and Black News Tonight, joins forces with historian Brewster, the founding director of the West Point Center for Oral History, in this intellectual examination of how racial injustices are viewed and enhanced through the use of social media. The authors look at our current culture of citizen surveillance and the “ubiquity of video evidence of racism,” scrutinizing a series of timely examples of racial confrontation captured on camera. In assessing the history of George Floyd, for example, Hill and Brewster weigh the downward trajectory of his life against a discussion on the nation’s history of slavery and the advent of Black separatism and social reform movements. They also ask why it took a live video portraying deadly violence to elicit the kind of sympathy and outrage that would shift our national conversation on race. The authors discuss abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth and films like The Birth of a Nation (1915) to further elucidate the plight of Black people throughout American history, including far too many examples of violence in our current era. They deliver a sharp assessment of the social media photojournalistic “influencer” culture, in which the history of anti-Black violence can become rewritten as “ideas get massaged and pulled like taffy” into “new applications or modifications that befit the times.” The result is a fascinating juxtaposition of history and contemporary affairs that offers a “more realistic, unfiltered picture of Black life.” Thanks to video technology, “long-held claims of racially motivated police and vigilante violence now have the evi­dence that they formerly lacked.” Throughout, the authors intelligently contrast momentous historical events with current atrocities, showing that while progress continues, there is much more work to be done to combat racial injustice.

An important addition to debates at the intersection of race and technology.