Chapter 3 introduces the 15 activists who are interviewed for the book. They fall into five broad groups: (1) the Black Lives Matter activists; (2) the “Day 1’s”; (3) the Masters of Agitprop; (4) the Bards; and (5) the Rogues. The Black Lives Matter activists were leaders who self-identified as members of the formal organization. The Day 1’s were the frontline protestors of Ferguson who believed their actions galvanized the movement. The Masters of Agitprop were the creatives who used art as propaganda for the movement. The Bards provided the soundtrack to the movement, blending hip-hop, poetry, and prose to spread news. Lastly, the Rogues were associated loosely with all of these groups, but refused to be labeled Black Lives Matter activists for a variety of reasons.
Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism tells the story of this century’s most powerful black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters, spurring a global debate on excessive police force, which disproportionately claimed the lives of African Americans. The book reveals how smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered black activists to create their own news outlets, continuing a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism. It identifies three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people—slavery, lynching, and police brutality—and the journalism documenting their atrocities, generating a genealogy showing how slave narratives of the 1700s inspired the abolitionist movement; black newspapers of the 1800s galvanized the anti-lynching and civil rights movements; and smartphones of today powered the anti–police brutality movement. This lineage of black witnessing, the book shows, is formidable and forever evolving. The text is informed by the author’s activism. Personal accounts of her teaching and her own experiences of police brutality are woven into the book to share how she has inspired black youth to use mobile devices to speak up from the margins. Bearing Witness While Black conveys a crucial need to protect our right to look into the forbidden space of violence against black bodies and to continue to regard the smartphone as an instrument of moral suasion and social change.
Black bodies at risk are in constant conversation with each other. The Black witness who films a fatal police encounter on her phone is talking to the Black victim, promising not to leave him in his final moments. The distant Black witness who sees that video then talks back to the witness and the victim, creating powerful imagery that amplifies the tragic footage. In this manner, those working under the broad banner of the Black Lives Matter movement have reimagined a dynamic Black visual public sphere, where moral arguments about police brutality are sustained through an assemblage of strategic visual appeals. In this essay, I argue that this call-and-response of Black corporeal iconography forms the vanguard of embodied protest journalism in the 21st century. I explain how the concepts of “strong objectivity,” which is rooted in feminist standpoint theory, help validate and liberate the flesh witnessing of the marginalized. Moreover, I offer two broad categories of imagery that Black activists create most often in response to fatal police shootings: historic juxtapositions and symbolic deaths.
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