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

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[e] 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)