Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

by Marc Lamont Hill, Todd Brewster

Overview

A riveting exploration of how the power of visual media over the last few years has shifted the narrative on race and reignited the push towards justice by the author of the “worthy and necessary” (The New York Times) Nobody Marc Lamont Hill and the bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Todd Brewster.

With his signature “clear and courageous” (Cornel West) voice Marc Lamont Hill and New York Times bestselling author Todd Brewster weave four recent pivotal moments in America’s racial divide into their disturbing historical context—starting with the killing of George Floyd—Seen and Unseen reveals the connections between our current news headlines and social media feeds and the country’s long struggle against racism.

For most of American history, our media has reinforced and promoted racism. But with the immediacy of modern technology—the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, and the internet—that long history is now in flux. From the teenager who caught George Floyd’s killing on camera to the citizens who held prosecutors accountable for properly investigating the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, ordinary people are now able to reveal injustice in a more immediate way. As broad movements to overhaul policing, housing, and schooling gain new vitality, Seen and Unseen demonstrates that change starts with the raw evidence of those recording history on the front lines.

In the vein of The New Jim Crow and Caste, Seen and Unseen incisively explores what connects our moment to the history of race in America but also what makes today different from the civil rights movements of the past and what it will ultimately take to push social justice forward.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781982180393
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	05/03/2022
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	202,908
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Marc Lamont Hill is currently the host of BET News and Black News Tonight and is the Steve Charles Chair in Media, Cities, and Solutions at Temple University. He is the founder and director of the People’s Education Center and the owner of Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books in Philadelphia. He has authored or coauthored several books, including Nobody and We Still Here.

Todd Brewster is a veteran journalist and historian who has worked as an editor for Time and Life and as a senior producer for ABC News. He is the coauthor, with Peter Jennings, of the #1 New York Times bestselling book, The Century, which spent nearly a year on the bestseller list, the author of the acclaimed Lincoln’s Gamble, and coauthor, with Marc Lamont Hill, of Seen and Unseen; Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice. Brewster was the founding director of Center for Oral History at West Point and the executive producer of Into Harm’s Way, an award-winning documentary about the West Point Class of 1967. He has taught journalism at Cooper Union, Temple University, and Mount Holyoke College. A native of Indianapolis, Brewster now lives in Connecticut.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The Spectacle of Death 11

2 "You About to Lose Yo' Job" 59

3 The "Campaign" 97

4 The "Influences" 143

5 Another Chance 197

Acknowledgments 255

Endnotes and Sources 257

Index 297

Editorial Reviews

04/04/2022

Journalists Hill (Problem) and Brewster (Lincoln’s Gamble) take an insightful and immersive look at the role technology has played in the ongoing struggle for racial equality in America. They begin by documenting how video footage of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police sparked worldwide protests against police brutality, then turn to historical examples of the links between racial violence and emerging media technologies. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ida B. Wells and other members of the Black press brought attention to the widespread lynching of Black men by “culling data and making careful use of illustrations and photographs” that contradicted “inconsistencies and outright falsehoods” published in mainstream newspapers. Hill and Brewster also recount how Boston newspaperman William Monroe Trotter sought to “mobiliz popular dissent” against filmmaker D.W. Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation, and explain how the “democratization of technology” has ensured that communication tools are no longer predominantly available to the white and the powerful, but also created a “digital environment where... the racist and the antiracist occupy the same amount of space.” Packed with relevant history lessons and sharp analysis, this offers a fresh angle on an issue of vital importance. (May)

Publishers Weekly

12/01/2021

In Wastelands, award-winning novelist Addison turns to nonfiction to profile a rural community so angered by the damage done by pollution-spewing Big Agriculture that it sued the worst offender—and won. New York Times best-selling author Bremmer sets us on a Collision Course, predicting that more pandemics, increased climate-change complications, and life-altering new technologies will inevitably be a part of our future (100,000-copy first printing). Distinguished Stanford political scientist Fukuyama, perhaps best known forThe End of History and the Last Man, now examines Liberalism and Its Discontents at a time of political upheaval (75,000-copy first printing). "Corner Office" columnist at theNew York Times, Gelles calls General Electric CEO Jack Welch The Man Who Broke Capitalism, indicting him for the harm done by his brand of capitalism and showing how some companies are trying to undo it with different strategies. Award-winning journalist Hill ( BET News) and New York Times best-selling author Brewster (The Century) join forces in Seen and Unseen, considering videos like those showing the killing of George Floyd and the harassment of Christian Cooper to investigate how technology has impacted our conversations about race (100,000-copy first printing). Photographer Palley's Into the Inferno recalls eight years spent documenting California's raging wildfires, showing that the state's fire season now lasts year-round and calling for climate action (see also poet Kevin Goodan's Spot Weather Forecast). Former president of the Uyghur Humans Rights Project and now a commissioner for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, Turkel uses memoir in No Escape to reveal China's ongoing repression of the Uyghur people.

Library Journal

2022-03-29
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.

Kirkus Reviews

Brilliant...A brisk, smart, short history of the effects of new communication technologies [on race in America], from the photographs of the 19th century to the movies and television of the 20th and the internet of our own time.” —The Guardian

“Packed with relevant history lessons and sharp analysis, this offers a fresh angle on an issue of vital importance.” —Publisher's Weekly

“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.” —Kirkus

From the Publisher