Your Program Guide or watch any time on booktv. Org. Marc lamont hill is the Steve Charles chair in media and solutions at temple university. His books include nobody casualties in americas more on the vulnerable from ferguson to flint and beyond and exit for palestine the limits of progressive politics. And the founding director of the People Education center, a Nonprofit Organization to community organization. Todd brewsters coauthor with Peter Jennings of the number one New York Times bestseller the century. As other work includes lincolns gamble and in search of america. He taught journalism at temple university, was a knight fellow at Yale Law School and was founding director of the center for oral history at west point. Hes also the executive producer of the documentary into harms way. In their new book seen and unseen technology, social media, and the fight for Racial Justice the authors examine the uniqueness of this moment in the overall history of Civil Rights Movement in the united states. Joining them in conversation this evening is awardwinning broadcaster and journalist tracey matisak. Join me in welcoming our guests back to the free library. [applause] good evening my thanks for sharing your evening with us, delighted to be back in person. Thrilled to see you all. All of that said why dont we dive in and talk about the book seen and unseen technology, social media, and the fight for Racial Justice. Let me talk about your Partnership First on this book. Todd wrote the foreword and you did a lot of work with Peter Jennings, talk about how you came to collaborate on this book. Thank you for hanging out with us tonight. A pleasure to be back, we initially met, we have the same agent. Which i had a more cool story but we had a same agent, did wonderful job bringing us together. And what is going on. It was time to think about the foreword for the book, george said this is the guy you want and some of his other work, i knew he was a phenomenal writer, to talk about his book and had an opportunity to read his work and i thought this would be a great thing to do and then you work on other things. The pandemic happened and the uprising happened and george called again. You should think about doing another project. It has always been great but not thinking about this. We talked on the phone it had a bunch of ideas and came up with an idea that resonated with both of us and super excited about writing together and in terms of division of labor. Every collaboration is different. Some collaborations, one person writes the first draft and another edits and fixes and some trade chapters. Depends on the collaboration but this one every chapter took a different form. A lot of it was brainstorming through an idea, outlining the idea, breaking down every place you are going to go and to pass it to me, and didnt know the history. This sentence doesnt need to be 7 pages. Conversely sometimes i would be so invested in doing Current Events i would be interested in the current mess of the story to give the story more legs. And to be more literary and rich in my writing. It is a fun collaboration. This book has heavy and difficult material in it and im curious what your conversations were like as he worked on this. And of not only in difficult recent events but difficult historical events. One of the things about collaboration we were talking about, every conversation land on something deep and profound and one of the revelations of the process, telling the story of george floyd or kenosha or charlottesville and getting deeper into what the actual details were what retelling allows you to do, what everything is running, we think we know something. The biggest contribution of this book is the roots of done. Theres nothing wrong with admitting failure and trying again. Right . Our last chapter is called another chance and it is in spark response to what baldwin and our book is called seen it on scene, by the way, which is also referenced to baldwin, who wrote a book called the evidence of things not seen, which was a book about the 19 early 1980s, when there was a wave of the murders of children in atlanta. And he went into his last book, actually, he published was was the evidence of things not seen. But it also quotes from its a reference from the bible. So you see, he had this gift for language and we think of him as an activist in part, but he would have reject to that and said the only reason he had to be an activist was because he was a black. He was a writer and he was black. But he really wanted to be thought of as a writer of universal values. And the universal values would include that people who had made mistakes like White America listened to white supremacists. You know, who had incorporated racism into our law. Well, how about reversing it . How about admitting it rather than papering over it . And so its hes an extreme, really powerful influence on the book. I think weve seen whether weve done seen it unseen, because i think it does go right to what are we willing to accept about ourselves. Yeah. And mark, you know, all you have to do is open your news feed. Now to see the reluctance to admit to our wrongdoings as a nation, to see the resistance against teaching the of history, allowing children to understand some things that really happened in this country, talk little bit about that, if you would, about the resistance that we still see today. Yeah, i think we live in a country that grows old but doesnt grow up. It it continues to hold on to very immature conceptions that hinge on us not allow allowing us to say this original sin, whether we talk about it as capitalism, racial capitalism, racism, slavery theres a theres a theres a theres enough sin in for a few things. But the mix of it is something that we dont ever want to acknowledge. We dont want to come to terms with it. Now, weve done that very weve weve refused to come to terms with the very direct and explicit ways like the race conference in durban, you know, 2022 that summer 2001, right where we literally were like, you know, we are not making an apology. Slavery, right . Thats a very particular thing. But theres also a way in this country that weve decided that any type of race talk, any type of identifying nation of race is an act of racism itself that we would the way that that our our grand democratic aspiration is to be colorblind, to act like we dont see race, we dont see color, we dont know it. And that if we could just be colorblind, everything would be fine. But in doing so one, we we negate difference. We ignore the things that make us who we are. In other words, to see me as human, you have to not see my blackness. Thats thats fundamentally problematic. But it also means that were not willing to come to terms with the things that got us here, that got us through those processes of racialized nation, that made that made race a relevant factor, that made race the social construct a relevant one in our social world, american women to come to terms that. So when you get these fights against Critical Race Theory, which are not about Critical Race Theory, theyve never been about critical race. Theyre theyre not about solutions. When delgado and kimberly creed, theyre not about these legal theories and law School Articles that like five people read right at time. Right. Its not about that. And its a rich body work that everyone i think its worthwhile to read. But its about saying christopher said this very directly. He said, im going to take the word Critical Race Theory and make it signify everything about race that people dont like. Every bad story, every crazy idea, every controversial im going to call all Critical Race Theory so that when people hear Critical Race Theory, they wont want it. They even take 1619 through that in their everything is Critical Race Theory so that when people hear it, they hear danger, they hear victimhood, they hear blame. And in a world where white people dont want to be accountable for White Supremacy or White Privilege and honestly dont even want to be known as white, they dont even want whiteness outed. Right. Thats a very convenient thing to do to make the boogeyman of Critical Race Theory. But its not about 1619. Its about 2022. Its about 2024. Its about these elections. Its about amassing power and knowing that in an enraged outrage, or at least an outrage group of white voters going into that voting booth will mean that well see a swing in the house, well see a swing in the senate, just like we saw trump elected out of outrage, a were losing our country. The same sentiment that animated. The white public, the white south after after birth of a nation and so forth and so on and so on. And in an age of socalled democratization of technology and media, it makes it easier to get that message out. It makes it harder to filter. It doesnt take away the curators. To the contrary is to try to point it amplifies the number of curators so you can get the curator you want right . You know, you can get you can kick out rittenhouse. Ill tell you whats happening down there. You can go, Tucker Carlson to tell you what just happened. And you already want to see it a certain way. Youre going to get out what you put in. Yeah. And thats a very dangerous, dangerous moment. The confirmation bias. Exactly. Yeah. Let me end with this question before we go to questions from our audience. And id like each of you to briefly answer this. You close one of the chapters with the following words consider what it would have been like if technology, including the tools of the nascent art of moviemaking, had been available not only to embitter descendants of the confederacy, like d. W. Griffith, the maker of birth of a nation, but to those who would call out their allies, heres a question what our history flowing through different waters have made us a better people. More important, will the arrival of these tools make us better people now . So i put that question to each of you. Will the arrival of these tools make us better people . Now what do you say, todd . Ill go to you and. Sure, yeah. No, i. I think it depends upon all of how we use the tools, right . I mean, the tools, as i said before, are dont come with a morality. They dont come branded with justice. Meeker you know, its not like the the peacekeeper bombs that you see. You cant you cant take the technology and apply a moral compass to it. It depends on how we use it it is has been an empowering tool to constituencies that did not have it before. It is also a very malleable tool. And that means that we need to engage with it and we need to engage with it daily and regularly in ways that continue to promote. I think the values that the best of us still adhere to, you know, we talked before about baldwin baldwins. We mentioned that baldwins gift for language is in part why hes quoted frequently in social media. But whats also sort of wonderful is the way that social media takes language, carves it up, repositions it, reverses some of baldwins own phrases, as we say in the book. Sometimes it doesnt look like baldwin anymore, but it looks like Something Different that has evolved from baldwin. Well, weve taken one good and productive and constructive thing, and weve added more constructive things to it, and that is using social media to its best purpose. The use of video as a truth teller is using video to best purpose, right . So if we have the opportunity to use these tools, if we continue to be hopeful, if we continue to engage in the world in a in a belief that it can adhere to these important values, then yes, i think these tools are extremely important as tellers, as just as makers. And something that i think we can take advantage of as we try to create a better society. But its up to us. Yeah. Yeah. Im going to answer your question with a quick story. So we started with george floyd this book was started with george floyd. We said we have to tell the story of george. Then i came to tie it with another idea. I said, you know, we got to have a chapter on and i didnt even know her name yet. It johnetta charles, right . Yeah. Yeah. I said, ive seen this video so many times. So youre asking you about to lose your job now as you were about to lose your job right. So this is woman. If you havent seen it, youre missing the remix. Yall might have seen or heard people say, theres this woman, a black woman. She is walking outside of a strip club, strip club . Yeah. Yeah. After person is just what she said. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So she said, i need to get back in there because i left my, i left my purse. You know. And security wasnt right here. It and eventually Security Guard ends up detaining her holding her right and she sees a camera and and shes like, what . She said, you were about to lose your job. You were about to lose your job, get this date, and then she start dancing. Like, because youre not youre not supposed to be detaining me, right . Youre detaining me for you. Detaining me for nothing. Thats what she said, right . Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was powerful. Oh, yeah. It was a beautiful moment. I think we got to tell this story because its. It speaks to the power and possibility of people feel empowered by the cameras. Yeah, people feel empowered. This was this woman who was who had to struggle with lots of things, was unable to get. Do you think this black woman in the history of black women being beaten, being killed, being sexually assaulted by Law Enforcement . Thats i mean, talk about in everyday life that they held of black women kids but im talking just by Law Enforcement other insecurity, a state power, parole officer, correction officers, etc. She felt empowered in that moment to be able to fight back. That became another tool in her disposal. In her disposal now. And this Security Guard when doing that. Wow. The fact he actually posted a video on his own facebook. I say i think its kind of funny. And you know, he let it go that that wasnt a real issue at the thing but it was the fact that it signified something. But she didnt know. She became an internet viral sensation. This video went all around. We were at rally, liz. We were at election rallies. We were at protest rallies when donald trump was about to lose. He people had made the video you were about to lose your job and they had biden and obama and and it became this whole rallying cry, similar to how. All right. You know, Kendrick Lamars all right was it was a rallying cry in ferguson from ferguson summer right point being she didnt know that she was an internet sensation. She was like your mother. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that was never for channel. Channel youtube. She dont have none of that. So but beyond that, she also was struggling with substance abuse. She was unhoused for long period of time. Yeah. She she was trying to find her family again. She she didnt know any of this was happening because the world underneath her was falling, because the social safety net was unavailable. So there was an entire Water Resistance and tired. What a spectacle that was that utilized the mobilized her but that she couldnt utilize and mobilize. And so i say that to say that these weapons of the week are important. It may be indispensable, but theyre insufficient because they operate within a world where we still have huge gaps between the have nots and the have nots. We live in a world where theres still state violence. We live in a world where people still dont have access to the things they need to be okay, food, clothing and shelter. What can i say . It was a good love, healthy choices. And second chances. We aint got none of that. So does it make us better people . No. Can it make us more accountable . Yes. But only if we commit to actually radically transforming the world in which these media platform and technological advances exist. Until we do that, its all moot. Yeah. Okay. On that note, what do you say we go to our audience for your questions as if youve got a question for mark or todd . Just raise your weve got some Staff Members with microphones and theyll get a microphone to you so that you can ask your questions. So please dont be shy. Its a great opportunity to to talk with both of them about their book questions. But dont ask us about the sixers. Okay . Unless they win it right now. Right . Yes. You meet some great points about the ubiquity of the technology and how its available to everyone to use. But im despairing now because after looking at that gruesome. Murder of george floyd, i thought, well, maybe this kind of thing would stop, but its only if anything, accelerated its pace and these people who are who their social shameless they lie that crazy congresswoman from georgia greene, i think her name is she she she was sending out tweets encouraging trump to declare martial law, which she spelled mrsa el al. She never lets us down. Does you know, and we have tapes this we have transcripts of this. We have them on camera, but it doesnt do any good because the vast audience of of fox dwarfs, whatever you had, i used to watch your show every night. Thank you. And i tried to get my friend, but where do we go from here . I like to think that one show, you know, this shows depth of the problem, right . I mean, i dont think that means that the the of george floyd was not important powerful impactful. Well it had a certain power that we discussed this at length in the first couple of chapters of the book that went beyond, sadly, the multitude of videos that weve had, starting with rodney king and going all the way through. Walter scott and others and in part because it was this long, drawn out death that was like a crucifixion. I mean, it really was something that riveted the consciousness. You marry that up with what we said earlier about James Baldwin and what he understood about his own time. And while he would have loved to have spoken at the march on washington, i think he knew the march on washington was still a blip. The story of american history, and that it would require a steady pace, not a drop by drop, but a river by river, in a sense. Right to be communicating the very things that these videos do tell us about ourselves until we will finally confront our own history honestly and yes, you wake up in the morning, it feels a little as we talked backstage by grant groundhog day, right. I mean, you end up feeling that heres this this days video. Its daunting. Its disturbing. But it should just reenergize us. I do. I do think that i mean, i am a hopeful person i do think that that that jordan the george floyd response was as a powerful, impactful thing. I think it did change minds. I think it moved people to action. But now, now today is another day and we have to pick up the same cause one more time. Yeah, more questions. Yes, jake. Im just curious. You know, this week with elon musk buying twitter. Just curious thing about what were you guys see some of this Technology Going and how we use it . You know, i think people have talked about the culture in his company and tesla, you know, the culture around race there and some of their concerns about where he might take the platform in the future. But just curious where you guys see these things going if, you know, people will still be able to bring light to these issues in the same way on that platform and, you know, just where you see things going. Yeah, you know, i, i its a good question and its, its at the forefront of everyones minds. Assuming the sale goes through, you know, fingers crossed that it doesnt. But it likely will. I think it its disturbing to me for multiple reasons. One, again, its a reflection of a larger problem. Twitter isnt just a Platform Forum in many ways. It functions as a public sphere. Right. It is the ground on which we have the conversations and the debates and all of this stuff. And for someone to live in a world where someone has the capacity to say, im going to effectively buy a huge slice of the public because i dont like the way its working. And i want to take something thats ostensibly private and make it ostensibly public and make it private for me is very, very dangerous. And it speaks to the danger of billionaire ers and just gross amounts of wealth accumulation in the world. The fact that he can buy this for 45 or 47 billion with a b dollars and not really have any other discomfort in his life. So he says everything to you about what . About the gross inequality in the world. Theres another problem for me, which is how beholden many of us are to the whims of these corporatized media platforms. Right. So we can think about twitter as a free space in a democratic space, just like i could say, i can have my own youtube until youtube decides. They want me to handle a show where i can tweet my behind off until they shut down my account, which is i, i dont feel i ever lost a wink asleep on donald trump getting shut down on twitter. There is a conversation to be had about what that means for something that operates as a public sphere to shut him again. Im not saying he shouldnt be shut down because i think there need to be boundaries here. But what im saying is, is that its not an entirely public sphere. And when those of us who challenge the powerful, whoever we are using our voices in the right way, were very susceptible to being shut down. And with elon musk having more and more unilateral control over it, that scares me a lot. He talks about it as a bastion for free speech. No one will be shut out. You can say what you want here. That scares me to. I like the fact that you just cant be a white supremacist on twitter easily, right . You got to at least hide it a little bit. You tuck it in, you know what im saying . But his idea is that somehow just that all things go does that what does that mean for the person whos a child predator, who does something thats not technically illegal but is gross to all of our moral and ethical sensibilities . What does it mean for the anti semite . What does it mean for the for the antiblack racist . What does it mean for those people to now be able to promulgate their stuff . What does it mean for the anti the person whos whos promoting allies of our covid and about vaccines and about masking. Right. And not just trump, but a whole bunch of other folks. What does it mean when theres no mechanism of accountability because you are worshipping at the holy grail of free speech in a sort of abstract, grand and nuanced way . Its not even, as you pointed out, what was historically intended. That all scares me. And it also reminds me of why we need to have our own stuff. Let me add into that. Yes. So ill repeat what we talked about with al sharpton the other day, because i think it is significant, important to keep on referencing. So the on his show on his show, yes. We just have caucuses hanging out. The the notion of speech as the founders interpreted. And were in philadelphia a place where the founders are extremely important, not that they shouldnt be important. Everybody is the place where they resonate on the streets here right. It was in this very city that the concept of freedom of speech was first established with the First Amendment reinterpreted later. And it opened up a wider pattern of expression pretty significantly after the first world war. But the notion was that the speech was to be constructive. They they value political speech at a higher level instance than other forms of expression, because they that that speech contributes to the betterment of society. You know, it was a progressive idea, really, before the word progressive was being used in the way that we think of it now. It was that when i Say Something and then you add something to what i say, we become better as two than we were as one, right . But when speech loses its communicative value, when it becomes essentially more like an assault, becomes like conduct which is regulated, blown away all by all judgments about law and order. We would say conduct is a thing. Were regulating. Then it becomes like an assault and then it doesnt function like speech, it doesnt have communicative value. When you lie, when you use abusive speech that is intended to demean and annihilate entire race of people, you are not contributing to the public dialogue in a way that furthers the ambitions that the founders had when they thought of the freedom of speech, the freedom of speech was supposed to be constructive. So theres two ways in which you want musk is wrong about when he preaches freedom of speech. One is that that complains that its that that that voices are being censored. Were only First Amendment only we regulated government contact not private. The second is his misguided notion of what the founders meant by freedom of speech. And so when i hear him say that, i think two things. I think that. And then i also think, you know, that the americas entire history has been a struggle between two competing. But similar notions freedom, equality. Right. And we often value one more than the other, mostly the freedom more than the equality, but we need to have that balance, the tension between those needs to be part of how we create ourselves. And we need therefore to when we have a public forum, a public sphere, to recognize not only that, we want freedom of speech, but that we want equality of access to speech, because without that, those who are not who are denied it, are denied a freedom, got time for one last quick question on whos got one last question. Yes, sir. So i will say i am todd, son. So im going to ask mark this question. But so i know you cant have the car on saturday. No, but i just read like part of the book. Ive read about 100 pages so far. And i got to the part about how you guys are talking about why floyd resonated with the american public, that that video and i watched the grand rapids video, which was equally as hard to watch. It was basically i called an execution. I asked some people, friends about it. A lot of them had never even seen it. Im wondering if you guys can talk about what you talked in the book with floyd and your take on why the grand rapids video and the aftermath have not generated nearly as much traction online. Yeah, its a good an interesting question. I was talking to the other day and i was saying i think i was doing an interview. I initially thought this and we started to talk through it. Theres the george floyd moment sparked a Huge Movement in this country at the policy level, on the streets of this of all around the country, we saw something we hadnt quite seen before. And you could argue that george floyd is the touchstone moment of this time, in the same way that we could say that, you know, 1955, august 1955. And emmett till was a touchstone moment that gets us into the montgomery bus boycott. But if you would have asked me the day before george floyd was murdered, i would have bet my life that mike brown was the moment i couldnt i mean, the ferguson summer seemed like the thing. It seemed like the touchpoint. It seemed like the thing that had changed this country and conversation that changed the country. I dont use that line. But they had had had at least it was imprinted on our memory. And i probably would have argued the Trayvon Martin was that moment before then. But in between trayvon and and mike brown and george floyd is a whole bunch of stuff that doesnt move the needle. Some are more gruesome. Walter scott is a more gruesome case. Incontrovertible act of malfeasance to me. I mean, the man was shot running away. Eric garner. We had video of him being choked out with an illegal chokehold within, within, with something to be clear to the police, dont shoot me. It was against Department Regulation at the time. It wasnt technically illegal, but against regulation. And he didnt need to be killed, clearly. Right. But Daniel Pantaleo did it anyway. That didnt spark the outrage. Sandra bland is to Breonna Taylor and ashley mcbryde. Were going down the list. Right. Tamir rice, 13 year old boy. So why some and not others . Why some . Why the outrage of this and not that some of it is about our own politics. We tend to prefer men than women as victims, right . We this country does not mourn the death of women and certainly not black and brown women. Its simply the case. Patriarchy, sexism, misogyny all plays into how we do this. We prefer straight victims was the same. You saw march for a queer man, right . We trans women this summer that the summer that mike brown was killed, nine black trans women were killed. No outrage, i wont say no outrage, no national story. We prefer them to be middle class for them to be going to college. We think about mike brown. We had he was on his way to college that monday. Not exactly true. Were not true at all. Actually. But it enhanced our narrative when he found out he stole a cigarillos from the store before he got shot by darren wilson. It was like, oh, some version of my middle class boujee friends. Like, oh, wait, no, this this isnt the clean case we thought it was. So theres a way that were looking for perfect victims. And our notion of what it means to be perfect is to be male and straight and christian and etc. Its and cisgendered, etc. , etc. And so this plays into why some of it is about the gruesomeness of it that you had to look at. Mike brown be executed for 9 minutes. Its its hard to look away. Even mike brown. You can you can read Darren Wilsons jury tests, grand jury testimony, and hear him refer to it. Mike, is it in how he was . Look . He was walking through the bullets and all this crazy stuff, you know what i mean . But you dont watch this executed had the power of a still photo because it didnt move. That knee didnt move. But it was the the rawness of live video. So you had to sit with that. Some of it was was a pandemic. We were sitting there doing a pandemic. We were whole. We were angry. We were poor. We were frustrated. We were tired. Wed already heard about my arbery. We just watched Christian Cooper harassed in central park for bird watching is a harvard educated black man. Bird watching central park on memorial day that in a safe brother and even he got harassed and the whiteness was weaponized. So all this stuff plays an image. And then the last thing i said i would pass the time is theres also a way that america has a very low threshold for this kind of stuff, right . White america is only going be outraged about black death, but for so long after ferguson, we started being outraged about trump again and we lost our way. Then, you know, then we found our way back to ferguson, you know, then we will lose our way to something. I just its not sustainable because black death largely is still acceptable. Its normalized in country. And until were genuinely, genuinely and generally outraged by it, i think youll always have these occasional generational moments of outrage. But most of the stuff is going to pass and it was a knee on a neck. It was a knee on a neck is an image that is symbolic of the white strangling of the black race in this country. Get your knee off my neck. Theres an expression that is so important to understanding, but its not give more programs. Its not give me more. Affirmative action is get your knee off my neck. And so it had a symbolic resonance that went beyond it. Its the actual action itself. Theres an element of theater to that, right. I mean, we have to acknowledge, i mean, the brilliance of the birth of a nation was it was a great piece of theater. Its amazingly done. The george floyd video communicator and so many levels of community with that community, with that symbolic notion of the knee on the neck, it communicated in 9 minutes. It communicated like a crucifixion. Hes calling out for his mother, like christ on the cross. These things resonate. I mean, we talk about the resonance of the myth of the lost cause. There are universal resonances with a knee on a neck with somebody being crucified. Right. All that we talk about with a phrase we use in the book is that, you know, a shooting is an instant, a a lynching is a is a performance. Well, that george floyd was a lynching. And lynching has an extraordinarily powerful is Extraordinary Part of american history, something extraordinarily shameful. Its something that that we we all need. We know we need to come to terms with as well as with slavery itself. And how do we bring it back since were coming the end of this, James Baldwin because it was he who said, dont stop at these little bandaids. Right. Look at the bigger picture. Look at the the other the bandaids will always be matched by new scars. Right. Lets lets try to see the whole totality of the problem and then respond to that. Only then when we face whats really happened, can we change. The book is seen and unseen technology, social media and the fight for Racial Justice. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking lamont hill and Todd Brewster for writing this book and their thoughts. With us tonight. On behalf of the free library, i want to thank andy and laura and all of the other events team for bringing all of us together. Thanks to all of you for coming. Please be safe. Enjoy the rest of your evening and well see you next time. Goodnight
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