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Modern black citizen journalists, armed with little more than smartphones and a speedy WIFI connection, are challenging longstanding narratives of race, power, and privilege in the United States. This book investigates how anti-police brutality activists leverage the affordances of mobile and social media to report original news within the contemporary social justice "beat." Through semi-structured interviews and a descriptive analysis of the activists' social media,
Allissa V. Richardson investigates the journalistic roles that activists perform, the types of stories that they produce, and the relationships that they have formed with their audiences.
About the author
Allissa V. Richardson is Assistant Professor of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School.
Summary
Bearing Witness While Black tells the story of this century's most powerful Black social movement through the eyes of 15 activists who documented it. At the height of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, African Americans filmed and tweeted evidence of fatal police encounters in dozens of US cities--using little more than the device in their pockets. Their urgent dispatches from the frontlines spurred a global debate on excessive police force, which claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children at disproportionate rates.
This groundbreaking book reveals how the perfect storm of smartphones, social media, and social justice empowered Black activists to create their own news outlets, which continued a centuries-long, African American tradition of using the news to challenge racism. Bearing Witness While Black is the first book of its kind to identify three overlapping eras of domestic terror against African American people--slavery, lynching, and police brutality--and explain how storytellers during each period documented its atrocities through journalism. What results is a stunning genealogy--of how the slave narratives of the 1700s inspired the Abolitionist movement; how the black newspapers of the 1800s galvanized the anti-lynching and Civil Rights movements; and how the smartphones of today have powered the anti-police brutality movement. This lineage of black witnessing, Allissa V. Richardson argues, is formidable and forever evolving.
Richardson's own activism, as an award-winning pioneer of smartphone journalism, informs this text. Weaving in personal accounts of her teaching in the US and Africa, and of her own brushes with police brutality, Richardson shares how she has inspired black youth to use mobile devices, to speak up from the margins. It is from this vantage point, as participant-observer, that she urges us not to become numb to the tragic imagery that African Americans have documented. Instead, 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.
Additional text
Richardson offers a compelling inquiry into how activism and journalism work together for Black communities intent upon articulating the inequities of racial and civil discrimination. The author's careful work in interviewing significant figures in Black activism over the last half decade provide a substantial resource for scholars interested in hearing the voices of change.
