Bearing Witness While Black

Abstract

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.

Social media as public journalism? Protest reporting in the digital era

“…Through these devices and platforms, these authors observe, "activists could not only find their own voice but also their own gaze" (ibid., p. 881), uploading photos and videos that captured the movements' emotions and created a memory record for future generations. Particularly potent are images captured of violence against protesters, which could serve to further public legitimization of the activism (della Porta, 2013; Richardson, 2020). Such are examples of what Olesen terms "injustice symbols" (Olesen, 2015).…”

“…They learned that since 2012, the police have broadened social-media monitoring technology that had been developed to investigate terrorism via big-data algorithm analyses to surveil protesters more generally (Dencik, Hintz, & Carey, 2018). Such surveillance has led to arrests and other dangers (Richardson, 2020;Tufekci, 2018). And across regime types, mainstream news organizations resist surrendering their domination of the journalism field.…”

Epistemology and Journalism

“…Although experts have privileged knowledge in representing specialized expertise of relevance for the particular issue, witnesses rely on authenticity, first-hand accounts, and a "truth to experience" (Montgomery, 2007, p. 168). Social media and mobile media have enabled an increase of eyewitness accounts in news reporting (Hermida, 2010;Westlund, 2013) as well as forms of citizen journalism such as "black witnessing" via Twitter on mobile devices (Richardson, 2017).…”

Bodies out of place: Affective encounters with whiteness

“…Whiteness becomes felt so that Christian is produced as out of place. The affective intensities mark his phenotypically Black body as sticky with threat, activating a well-known history of racial violence enacted by white women on to Black men in tandem with, and sometimes without, the police (Frankenberg, 1994;Richardson, 2020;Ware, 2015). The actions of white women have all too often mobilised affective formations of power toward anti-Blackness, often in tandem with the refrain of Black criminals preying on helpless white women.…”