Review by Choice Review
Seen and Unseen by Marc Lamont Hill (Temple Univ.) and Todd Brewster, a veteran journalist, is sure to be quick reading for most readers. This volume is a well-written journalistic account of the explosion of images taken on cell phones and shared on social media to broadcast scenes of police brutality against African Americans. Without these video recordings and photographs captured by ordinary citizens and reporters, it would be difficult to convince authorities and the wider world of the terrible, racist actions that law-enforcement officers inflict on unarmed citizens, citizens to whom they are sworn to serve with equal protection before the law. In lucid prose, coauthors Hill and Brewster contend that in a white-supremacist world: It was white people who owned the cameras and white people who made the movies, white people who ran the publishing companies, edited the newspapers, and funded the research, and white people who wove tales that sentimentalized the Confederacy, adjusted the lessons of the Civil War to be more favorable to the South, and argued that Reconstruction failed because Black people, inferior by their very nature, had nonetheless been entrusted with equality and authority at the expense of the interests and feelings of the defeated white majority. In short, 'Negroes' were what white people saw them to be, wished them to be, and even forced them to be. How do you answer the 'Negro question'? Let white people do it for you (p. 2). Although the United States is still far from achieving full equality, the nation has nonetheless progressed since Reconstruction, implementing, for instance, publicly funded education for all--in recent years, Americans have even witnessed Confederate statues brought tumbling down in public squares. Given such developments, Hill and Brewster cast their book as a counter-thesis to the assertions above, arguing that, thanks to today's booming information technology revolution, owning cameras and making movies are activities that have been relatively democratized. No longer does one group exclusively run publishing companies, produce films, or edit newspapers. Analyzing the videos of the public murder of George Floyd by law enforcement officers in 2020, the authors recognize the important role that information technologies played in the hands of Black teenager Darnella Frazier, who bravely recorded the moment for history and justice, lest the officers cover up their own body camera footage. This indicates that technology in the right hands can be used to provide greater security and accountability for people who are oppressed in public places where there may be fewer concerns about privacy rights. This book expands on what C. W. Mills called "the sociological imagination" in his 1959 book of the same name--namely, the ability to see the intersections between private troubles and public issues through individuals' lives. In a major omission, Mills failed to include racism and sexism among the private troubles facing individuals, focusing almost exclusively on class struggles. Hill and Brewster seek to amend this shortsightedness, extending the focus of the sociological imagination to include racism. However, their book would have been strengthened sociologically, politically, theoretically, and historically had the authors also thought to include sexism and imperialism in their assessment. Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. during the 1965 marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, the authors see the modern use of technology to document police brutality as part of the broader nonviolent strategy of the Civil Rights Movement, though it most resembles the Black Panthers' police watch program. As King declared, "the movement would no longer let white men 'use clubs on us in the dark corners,'" but would rather "'make them do it in the glaring light of television'" (p. 6). Although the revolution would not be televised, the television could be revolutionized through "the work of sympathetic photojournalists, both white and Black" (p. 6). In light of the modern Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, this raises the question of whether BLM supporters who similarly document and advocate against police brutality can be considered only as sympathizers or as allies contributing to the principle of interest convergence as Derrick Bell articulated it in Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992)--the idea that social change arises when minority groups' interests converge with those of the majority. In The Red Record (1895), Ida B. Wells documented that of the thousands of lynchings reported in white newspapers, about one-third affected white men. Similarly, struggles against systems of oppression--such as the struggle to abolish slavery, the working-class movement, the anti-imperialist nationalist movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the movement for women's suffrage, and the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa--have always been multicultural, bringing together scores of people irrespective of identity differences. Accordingly, comrades in any struggle for justice should not be seen simply as sympathizers because the eye never forgets what the heart has seen, according to an old African proverb. Moreover, according to statistics published by The Washington Post[1] and The Guardian[2] newspapers, about half of those killed by the police in the United States are white, although African Americans are killed by police at a disproportionately higher rate. Given these statistics, "The Spectacle of Death" stemming from police brutality, as Hill and Brewster refer to it in chapter 1, is a problem facing society at large, not just Black people (p. 11). As Kimberlé Crenshaw and Stuart Hall have theorized, the intersectionality of racism, sexism, and imperialism represents a threat to all, necessitating coalitions and alliances for resistance. As the authors here argue, anti-racism should thus be embraced by all people. Those white people who buy into the myth that they are inherently superior to all other people have been misled by propaganda campaigns. Modern media can be used to undue this harmful consequence, and instead influence more people to take a stand against racism, sexism, and imperialism in support of the abolition democracy advanced by Angela Davis. Such organizing could bring an end to the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, as articulated by bell hooks. Hill and Brewster warn that "while our new technologies are very good at assembling small pockets of resistance, broad-based consensus is frustrated by the bewildering new mood of competition that our techno-democracy has forced upon us" (p. 194). This requires more organization by activists for social justice rather than "leaderlessness," which is sometimes celebrated as a virtue in a world where autocratic leaders like former President Donald Trump seem to flourish (p. 195). In chapter 5, "Another Chance," the authors remind readers that the use of photography as a means to document state-sponsored violence against peaceful protesters did not begin with BLM. Newspapers, movies, and books published and produced by Black activists and other intellectuals have long documented similar struggles for resistance, a legacy that today continues under BLM. The only photograph included in this book captures the moment a white supremacist struck a Black man with a car and sent him flying into the air during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The same driver killed a white woman (Heather Heyer) when he deliberately ran her over with his car. Two white police officers also died in a helicopter that crashed while they were policing the crisis. As Bob Marley sang, "when the rain fall, it don't fall on one man's housetop." In the same way, racism affects all of society, not just one group. Using their journalistic skills, Hill and Brewster detail readable stories of the struggle for civil rights from the distant past to the present to demonstrate for readers how these struggles affect Americans across every ethnic group and stratum of society. All of this has been thoroughly documented and "seen." What remains "unseen" is adequate attention to the urgent struggles for reparative justice by people of African descent. Whether reparative justice or punitive justice is the preferable response to these harms remains to be seen. The authors have seemingly left this up to readers to decide for themselves. Overall, Seen and Unseen is a valuable contribution to the field of racial justice, although it could also be read as a contribution to intersectionality, or critical articulations of the nexus of race, class, and gender. This could help to reinvigorate discussions of critical race theory in public education, which have been banned in recent years by many states in the United States on the mistaken assumption that such discussions are too divisive. In fact more discussions of this nature are urgently needed if Americans are ever to achieve full equality for all. Notes 1. Fatal Force. 2015. Published by The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/. 2. The Counted. 2015. Published by The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Onwubiko Agozino, Virginia Tech
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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)
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Review by Library Journal Review
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.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 evi-dence 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
