This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. This is Right Now on The New Republic. We have a great guest today. Sarah J. Jackson is a University of Pennsylvania communications professor, and she has a great book out this week. The book is called Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Media Makers Push America Toward Freedom. So Sarah, welcome.
Sarah J. Jackson: Thank you so much for having me, Perry. It’s great to see you.
Perry Bacon: And obviously, this book speaks to me—and I read it. Sarah had it sent to me a few weeks ago, and I read it. But, because I’m a black person in media, I think it actually has resonance to readers beyond just people who work in the media or people who are Black. I might be the target audience in a certain sense, but I think it has a broader resonance. I think it’s a great book, and I’m recommending it to people.
But I want to talk about it a little bit. I want people to actually read the book. It’s called Second Sight. It came out yesterday or today?
Jackson: It officially came out yesterday, yeah. So very exciting. I’m still on the new publication high.
Bacon: Do show it. Bring it back again.
Jackson: Yeah, so here it is.
Bacon: OK. That’s a great cover, too. I like that.
Jackson: And the back cover—look, if you read it on a bus or a train, you really look cool, because this graphic designer did a great job on the cover for me.
Bacon: So explain the concept of second sight, first of all.
Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of people are familiar with Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness, where he talks about the experience of being Black in America as this jarring and oppressive experience of awareness of who you are, who your community is, what your values are, et cetera.
And then the always-present skewed and warped vision of Blackness—of you as an individual and of your community—that comes from white supremacy. And this has created what a lot of theorists of double consciousness took from Du Bois and have written extensively about. So people are probably very familiar with that.
But what I have always been fascinated by is this thing that has gone less explored in Du Bois’s theorization of double consciousness, where he says one of the consequences of double consciousness—which of course is the consequence of marginalization and oppression—is this profound gift called second sight.
And second sight is this gift that allows African Americans to have a sort of pulled-back and expanded view of the country. Because when you’re on the margins, or when you’re an outsider looking in, as bell hooks would later frame a similar idea, you can see a more expansive picture.
So you can both see and subscribe to and care about and be invested in the values, the norms of the nation, the identity of the country, and so forth. But you can also better see and better assess and better critique the gaps—where the values don’t come together, where there is room for improvement, where people have not yet imagined alternatives.
And so second sight is really this beautiful gift that Du Bois says results from double consciousness. And so I really wanted to explore how, in the case of my work—because I am a media scholar, and I work on technology, media, all these other kinds of media forms and the role they play in democracy and the public sphere—I really wanted to think about how that African American second sight gets built in, across generations, into the stories that Black media makers like you tell.
Bacon: Yeah. Media makers—I want to talk about the way you define the term, because I think I initially thought the book was going to be about journalists who work at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. But you have a definition of media—we have Phillis Wheatley, we have Ryan Coogler.
We have a long tenure in terms of years and decades. We also have a very diverse definition of media. Talk about why you chose “media makers” as in not just—because you’re telling a story about politics and values, but you chose media makers, not just journalists. Talk about why.
Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. So look—the American public sphere is fundamentally shaped, and the stories we tell about ourselves, the narratives we have about the country, are fundamentally shaped by media. Journalism, of course, is core to that.
A healthy journalistic system and democracy should go together like this. But our public consciousness, our public politics, our public culture aren’t only shaped by journalistic media. They’re shaped by narratives at large, stories that we tell about ourselves.
And one of the great examples of this in the very negative sense is the film Birth of a Nation. For folks who are tuning in who are familiar with Birth of a Nation—it was this white supremacist propaganda film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan, really helped to perpetuate in popular culture Lost Cause myths.
And this film was extremely powerful in normalizing those myths in the culture. And in fact, there’s some research that shows that it also directly caused violence against Black communities in areas where it was released and shown at the time.
And so what we know is that journalism and these other forms of media work hand in hand—filmmaking and, as you mentioned, in the book I talk about slave narratives and literature, because people forget that the printing press was a form of revolutionary technology. We’re all living in an era where we think of the internet as our era’s form of revolutionary technology.
But at one period, the printing press was a revolutionary technology that made it possible to circulate media, circulate ideas, whether those were newspapers or pamphlets or books of poetry. In another era, photography was a revolutionary medium, and that was helping people reimagine and envision what America looked like. And so Black media makers were engaged in intervening in photographic technologies.
Film, podcasts, journalism—all these things. This is why I use the scope and the framework of media making, because you can really see how they speak and talk to each other.
Bacon: The book is organized not chronologically but in some ways around these three ideas where the second sight—so let’s talk about those. You first describe Black media as a second sight to what you call “life.” Explain what you mean by “life.”
Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to jump ahead from your question a little bit.
Bacon: Sure.
Jackson: When people get their hands on the book, which I hope they will, they’ll see that the three core chapters of the book are “Life,” “Liberty,” and “The Pursuit of Happiness.” And we know these ideas by heart, we think, because they come from the Declaration of Independence. And of course, we’re a couple of weeks out from the semi-sesquicentennial—which nobody wants to say—but it’s the 250th anniversary of the first Fourth of July.
And I sandwich those three values between these Black theoretical concepts of second sight and sankofa, which is a West African ideal that you must look back to look forward—you must understand the past in order to imagine the future.
And so really what I’m trying to do by engaging life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the book is think about how we might reimagine those ideals, those ideas, through the second sight of Black media making over the course of time.
And so in the “Life” chapter, I take up stories from across different historical contexts that Black media makers were telling about what American life could be if its values were really adhered to and embraced. And what American life was, and how life was or wasn’t valued. That’s one of the chapters where I talk a lot about the struggle of Black journalists to really make everyone’s lives matter in this country, in terms of being able to tell those stories. But I do a similar thing also with “Liberty” and with “The Pursuit of Happiness.”
Bacon: Talk about “The Pursuit of Happiness” chapter a little bit now.
Jackson: Oh, yeah, absolutely. That was one of the more fun chapters to write, because a lot of the imagination stuff comes up in that chapter. I got to write about the film school—the LA film school called the LA Rebellion, which includes folks like Julie Dash, who is an incredible and very influential filmmaker who made a film called Daughters of the Dust, where she uses speculative futurity to tell a multigenerational story.
In that chapter, I get to talk about things like Octavia Butler’s writing and also things like the BlackStar Film Festival, which is based in Philly, where I am. And I really try to think about, in that chapter, what the stories are that Black media makers have told us about what happiness looks like.
There’s this great quote from Du Bois—I think I lead that chapter with it—about it not just being these constrained ideas of the American dream, but the ability to live freely, to love freely, to—I think he says something like “stretch one’s arms and one’s soul.” That’s what happiness looks like.
And so in that chapter, I really try to think about how Black media makers have given us a map towards a bigger, better future where Americans could actually be happy and experience joy and embrace complexity and do all these things. So I love that chapter, because it comes after the “Life” and “Liberty” chapters, which have some harder content in them.
And I hope that I can tackle both the harder content and also think about some of what is, I think, the dual role of second sight in Black media. The first role is the critique—really tackling this gap: what isn’t being addressed? What isn’t being covered? Whose lives aren’t being valued? How might we expand how we understand life and liberty? And how are there still really severe issues to solve in our country around those?
But then also the imaginative power of imagining a future where we have those things, and then we can get to the happiness part. We can get to these visions that we haven’t even gotten close to yet, but we can imagine.
Bacon: Let me talk about some media products you mention in the book, so people can understand the idea a little better. You mention the movie Sinners and write about that extensively. Talk about how that is an example of second sight.
Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. There are so many things about Sinners, and I love talking about Sinners right now because Sinners this year became the most Oscar-nominated movie of all time.
Bacon: Oh, OK.
Jackson: Which is amazing.
Bacon: Meaning it had the most Oscar nominations?
Jackson: Yeah, exactly. It received the most Oscar nominations of any film ever.
Bacon: Wow. OK.
Jackson: Which is remarkable. So yeah, I talk about Sinners because Sinners is an example where Ryan Coogler is a contemporary filmmaker—compared to his predecessors, he has, relatively and extremely, much more freedom, much more economic support and power. But he still faces some of the same challenges in telling stories that center African American second sight.
And so the film itself, of course, centers that second sight. Because ostensibly it’s a film about vampires, but anyone who’s seen it knows that it’s a film about dispossession, about the stealing of Black culture, of the spirit of Black tradition, and the violence—the real violence—that is typical, whether it’s the scenes about sharecropping or the very remarkable monologue about lynching.
And so at the same time, he’s using this speculative form and the horror form of the vampire to give us an allegory that can better help us understand what the Black experience has been in the United States, which is a bit of a vampiric one in terms of our relationship to the nation. And so these are the ways that he embodies this in the film itself, in writing the film itself.
But the film is also a great example of the ongoing challenges that Black media makers face, even in this era where they receive great recognition. Because he talks in interviews—and I interviewed dozens of contemporary Black media makers for the book, as well as doing the historical and archival work—and Ryan Coogler has talked about the fact that Sinners was really the project he wanted to make. He made this incredible independent film, Fruitvale Station, about the murder of Oscar Grant by BART police in Oakland. It was this remarkable, well-received independent film.
But he couldn’t get the kind of funding and support from the Hollywood studios to make a film like Sinners at that point, even though he had made this beautiful, remarkable film. Because there are biases built into all of these industries, whether it’s journalism or film or anything else. They say, Will mainstream audiences want this? Will this sell? Is it worth investing in?
And we know—we could get into a political economic conversation for the rest of our time if we wanted to about where the money’s coming from and how much folks in media are dependent on that.
And so Ryan Coogler has said essentially that he had to make the Black Panther movies and the Creed movies and prove that he could make box office hits that made a lot of money before he could make a film like Sinners, which is really his heart project. Because the only way for him to get the funding and the studio support for Sinners was to make these other big box office hits.
And of course, I get into in the book how there’s a bit of a double standard there, because most white filmmakers don’t have to make a movie like Black Panther—which was, I believe, the highest-grossing Marvel film up to the time that it came out—in order to be taken seriously for funding for another movie. They don’t have to do quite so much overachieving.
And so yeah, there are multiple ways where his experience as a filmmaker—which he also talks about being really influenced by the folks that came before him, John Singleton and Spike Lee and Gina Prince-Bythewood—is this pull-through legacy of Black media making in second sight.
Bacon: So talk about Du Bois himself. He is an intellectual, but he’s also in some ways a magazine editor. So talk about that role in second sight.
Jackson: Yeah. I love this. I hope people—I’m a nerd and I’m always happy to talk about Du Bois or honestly any of the folks in the book. But people understand and know Du Bois as this really foundational thinker across a few fields—sociology, primarily, in the United States, but also across theories of identity and difference, of race, of propaganda and so forth. In fact, if you want to nerd out later, we can talk about how Du Bois was one of the first people to use the concept of misinformation in his writing.
Bacon: Really? OK.
Jackson: But Du Bois was also a media maker, and this goes back to your earlier question about why I use this expansive framework of media making. Because yes, Du Bois was the editor of The Crisis magazine for several decades, which was the NAACP’s magazine. And he oversaw what he really understood as a project of positive propaganda—countering the denigrative representations of African Americans in this country, and also engaging in a lot of really heated, sometimes political, debates about things like whether Black men should join the military, and things around housing and housing segregation and so forth. And he was this very fiery editor.
He, of course, in that regard, was a journalist. He also often wrote editorials for Black newspapers and so forth. But he was also a creative. A lot of people don’t know—Du Bois also wrote speculative fiction. And again, I think this goes back to why I use this broader term of media making, because I think we would be doing Du Bois himself a disservice if we just said, Oh, he was a scholar and a journalist, or He was a scholar and an editor, or He was a scholar and an activist. Because Du Bois was also writing kind of kooky, honestly, speculative fiction throughout his life.
Bacon: I’ve not read any of it. It’s interesting.
Jackson: Yeah, it’s fun if you can get your hands on it. It’s fun to think through what he’s thinking when he’s writing this stuff. Alien invasions, all kinds of things in his writing.
But he was also supporting multiple types of media projects, and so one example of that was that when Paul Robeson was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, Du Bois was an ally of his and helped to found an alternative radical Black newspaper called Freedom, which Paul Robeson and his wife, Eslanda Robeson, edited and ran. And this was a really—at that point, Du Bois had actually stepped down from working at The Crisis because it had taken on a more conservative bent, and Du Bois, over the course of his life, became more and more politically radical.
And so you see this in his own work, how he’s constantly engaging in media in these different ways. And you find this around a lot of different figures who you think you know what they did. Like Gordon Parks is a great example. Gordon Parks, incredible photographer—quite literally helped to shift American consciousness about what American life looked like, how expansive it was, what Black life looked like in particular, both the beauty and the nuances and the hard things and all of it. He worked for Life magazine.
But what a lot of people don’t know about Gordon Parks—and I was actually thrilled to learn this—was that Gordon Parks was the artistic director for the first issue of Essence magazine, which is a women’s magazine focused on Black women, fashion, style, women’s issues, et cetera.
He was one of the founding powerhouses behind the founding of that magazine. He also made documentary films. He also made what is now called one of the first blaxploitation films. And I would argue that a lot of the blaxploitation films that came after tried to do what Parks did in the blaxploitation genre and never quite got there.
And he was doing a lot of different types of media. He was a media maker, just like Du Bois or Ida B. Wells or you or any folks that are working across registers and across technologies.
Bacon: Let’s talk about the Code Switch podcast for NPR. I think people will know what that is already. Talk about that as an example of second sight, because it’s something very contemporary.
Jackson: Yeah, absolutely. If you’ll allow me to do a small shout-out here—Gene Demby, who is one of the founders of the Code Switch podcast and remains one of the hosts, and it’s been long-running now, will actually be in conversation with me about the book in Washington, DC, this Friday for Juneteenth.
So for folks in Washington, DC—Gene Demby and I will be at Solid State Books this Friday to talk about this book.
But Code Switch is a great example of what happens when Black media makers actually are able to integrate second sight into these more mainstream spaces like NPR. And the story behind it is really a great story, because it shows the networks and the development of second sight as a collective.
So the story here is that Gene actually was a blogger. He founded a blog called Post Bourgie, and it was in the Black blogosphere era, leading up to before Obama was elected the first time—so before 2008. He had this blog Post Bourgie, and Post Bourgie was this really vibrant space in the Black blogosphere where a lot of people who you then wouldn’t have heard of but now you have heard of were engaged in these political debates about race in America, politics, and Blackness—
Bacon: Most famously, Jamelle Bouie, right?
Jackson: Jamelle Bouie wrote for Post Bourgie. The list could go on and on. There are names everywhere. There are many people who have associations with Post Bourgie. I list them all in the book. They ended up being editors at the Los Angeles Times. They ended up going on to do all kinds of things.
But this was really a vibrant space for what we might now call the elder millennial or younger Gen X cohort of Black media makers who couldn’t find a voice in the mainstream media that continued to exclude their voices but were engaged in the blogosphere.
And what happened was this moment opened up where, when Obama was elected, all of a sudden all these mainstream, historically white media spaces said, Oh, we need these young, vibrant Black voices to explain this young, vibrant Black president.
And so people like Gene Demby and many of the other people—Jamelle Bouie and others—were able to break into mainstream media. Gene first worked at the Huffington Post, then he worked at The New York Times, and then eventually he went on to co-found the podcast Code Switch with Shereen Marisol Meraji.
And I want to point out—Shereen, who was the other co-founder of Code Switch, is Iranian and Puerto Rican American. So you can be a part of second sight, you can be a part of uplifting alternative narratives and stories—you don’t have to be Black. This is a political and cultural project of telling bigger, better stories about the nation.
But to this day, the podcast continues to interrogate both American politics and American culture through the lens of race, centrally—insisting on race being a foundational way of understanding our nation. And that is simply something that has been absent, largely, from public radio, mainstream radio, and so forth, until we got this crop of shows. And there are a lot of other now—people will know—Black podcasts and Black radio shows. I interviewed other folks in the book from various ones, including folks like Eric Eddings and many others.
But yeah, that’s a great story of how this happens. Now of course, there are a lot of challenges along the way. I kind of told the triumphant version of this. But yeah, it’s a great podcast to this day.
Bacon: We emphasize—and you talk about this in the book—there’s not one single second sight. Stephen A. Smith and Adam Serwer are writing and doing different kinds of media with different kinds of views. The Kevin Hart roast on Netflix was a kind of media—I’m not necessarily a huge fan of it. So let’s discuss the diversity of the second sight, so to speak.
Jackson: Yeah. So I really appreciate that you asked this question, because this is a very important nuance that I want people to understand about my argument here. This is not a racial essentialism argument. This is not an argument that all Black Americans think the same or agree on politics or are participating even necessarily in the same political project. In fact, I would argue that there are some people who are outside of this project.
My book really traces the folks who have a shared sense of, one, wanting to improve American democracy through the stories they tell, whether that’s through film or through journalism. And two, Black freedom—a commitment to what Black liberation or Black freedom means, and an understanding that imagining a freer nation will make us all better.
So of course, there are many people who are not in the book. And I hate to call out names, but since you called out names, I want to give some examples. Candace Owens is an African American. She is not engaged in a collective project of political second sight.
There is a political valence to being part of this project that involves being in community and in earnest and honest debate, even across difference or disagreement, in community around issues that have to do with the liberation of Black people, the end of things like police brutality, and so forth. She’s not really a part of that.
And so that’s a great example of how just because someone’s Black and they’re a media maker, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re making media that reflects Du Bois’s concept—this political concept of second sight. That’s a perfect example.
But there is an immense amount of diversity within how Black people engage in these projects. And I try to show this in the book through thinking about the historical Black press. The historical Black press—there were always Black radicals who were really engaged in radical projects around labor, around anti-militarism, around Black power and so forth, who were part of the Black press. And often the owners and editors—who were Black—of Black newspapers were more conservative. They often came from families that were part of the Black bourgeoisie, and they tended to be more conservative, and sometimes they were itchy about certain things.
But what I show in the book is that this actually provided a really generative—people talk about now how we need to hear different views and be exposed to different ideas. But if you looked at the editorial pages of a Black newspaper, you would see the Black radicals and the Black conservatives debating each other in the editorial pages. You would see the editor and the fiery young reporter arguing.
And I want to say, Black newspapers always included white writers as well. In fact, many Jewish American writers wrote for Black newspapers at different periods of time, who were also engaged in questions around labor and inequality and other things. And so it’s very similar to the HBCUs, historically Black colleges and universities, and the Black churches, where yes, there is often, especially in the leadership positions, a more conservative valence.
But that sort of protects the radicals in their midst, in a way that—because it’s an internal community debate—they can really be engaging across registers in a way where it’s understood that everyone shares an interest in Black liberation, even if they think the means or the goals are different.
So yeah, absolutely, people aren’t speaking in one mind. But I do try to show in the book how people, even when they’re critical of each other—and some of the contemporary folks I interviewed were critical of other contemporary folks I interviewed—even when they’re critical of each other, they assume that people are also interested in this greater project of expanding democracy and of Black freedom. And so there’s an earnestness in the engagement and debates that is actually, in my opinion, quite generous, for the most part.
Now, again, like I said at the start, there are a few people who fall outside of this.
Bacon: Yeah. We’ll discuss Stephen A. Smith offline. Talk about—you said it’s not racial essentialism. I think that was important to say. But could you imagine a book about the second sight that Native American media makers or Latino media makers or female media makers have? This is not saying that Black people have some original insight that no one else has, or that we have insight above others, right?
Jackson: I do think Black people have some original insight, because there’s something unique about being Black in America and that experience, for sure. So I would say—but what I’m saying is, obviously not all Black people think the same, or apply their second sight the same. And there are actually—I want people to see this book as an alternative media history of the United States. There are, of course, many other media makers who have engaged in projects to try to make the country better, try to make the country broader, more inclusive, more beautiful, more free.
And so yes, of course, there are other folks. And in the book, I give a few examples of white media makers who have allied themselves with Black media makers to show how you don’t have to be Black to be a part of this project. You can uplift.
One of the great examples I give in the book is this—I don’t know if you’ve seen the film Sing Sing.
Bacon: No.
Jackson: It’s a really great film. It’s based on a true story, because I talk about prison media and the newspapers that come out of prisons as being one example of where, unfortunately, because of mass incarceration, Black second sight is also often revealed. But Sing Sing is about a theater project inside Sing Sing Prison where Black incarcerated men learned Shakespeare and performed it and led it.
And the filmmakers who made the film are white, but they did this thing that is very easy to do. Instead of taking the story, writing it themselves, taking the credit, taking the money—instead of appropriating the story—they actually hired and paid equally the formerly incarcerated men who were a part of this project when they were incarcerated. And they gave an equal share. The directors, these men who both starred in it and helped to write it and direct it—there was an equal share of the proceeds of the film.
And it’s actually really unique and really remarkable, because that doesn’t usually happen. Usually the person at the top is being paid more. And so I write about that in the book as an example of the ways that second sight can be supported by anyone in the media industry. Anyone in the media industry—I don’t know about you, but many of the folks I talk to have white editors, or white bosses. They have to go to white investors to get their films green-lit or whatever.
But it’s not that it’s impossible for those folks to understand second sight. They can read my book and then really understand it. It’s that they can make the choice to say, This person’s vision, this person’s insight, this person’s perspective is needed, and I can find ways to support this, to expand the kinds of stories that are being told.
Bacon: So my final two questions are these. I guess the first is just from reading the notes for the book, it sounds like the book contract was signed in 2020 or early—in a period in which it appeared that Black media makers would have growing influence. And now we’re in this sort of what I would describe as a backlash period where a lot of Black journalists have lost their jobs or have lost their influence.
I have to say, to some extent the second sight has been objected to by Republicans who are trying to ban it. But I would also argue a lot of liberals, or people who consider themselves liberal, who are complaining about wokeness having gone too far—which is like a subcode and a deep criticism of the second sight in ways that I think are a bit over the top these days.
And so I guess reading your account, you might say that there are always ups and downs in the ability of Black people to be in media. But are we in some kind of real decline? I worry we’re in some kind of real decline. How do you view it? This backlash era feels very difficult, in part because I’m personally living in it right now in the media. But is this a dip, or is this a real permanent change? Can Code Switch survive as NPR tries to appease the right, is what I would argue? Where are we right now?
Jackson: Yeah. I think that this is a pattern, and I trace this across the different sets of historical moments in the book. There’s this real pattern that happens in America that—my argument is, if we actually listened to second sight and applied it, we wouldn’t keep being in this pattern.
But what happens is there’s some kind of national crisis. And that might be a war. It might be George Floyd is murdered on video and the country erupts. It might be whatever the crisis is—the civil rights movement, et cetera. And then there’s this opening. There are these openings where Black voices and Black stories aren’t just being pulled in to say, Oh, we’re an integrated newsroom, but you have to do it the same way we always did it. But to actually say, We need bigger, broader stories. We need more critique. We need more imagination. And there are these openings.
And anybody who lived through the Obama era or the post-2020 moment knows that these openings have happened multiple times in our lifetime—where people pledged to do better. They pledged to tell bigger stories. They pledged to fund Black-led projects. All these things.
And then, because this is America, there’s always a backlash. There’s always a fatigue of talking about race. And there’s always this retrenchment. And this has happened many times. In politics, Trump is the epitome of one of these retrenchments.
But if you look at history, this has happened many times. If you think about the aftermath of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery—we had Reconstruction. Reconstruction was this shining, very short, 15-year moment where there was greater Black political representation. There were multicultural governments all across the South of both Black people and white people working together. There were all kinds of renewed ways. In some ways, there were the beginnings of reparations and repair.
And then—because the policies that made Reconstruction possible were not enforced by the U.S. government, as we all know—we had the violent retrenchment of Jim Crow. We got lynching. We got hardline segregation. We got new forms of plantation economies that were no longer based on slavery but were based on sharecropping.
And if you look through history, you see this in every moment. There are moments like this around World War II. There are moments like this around the civil rights movement.
And so I think, if it’s any consolation for you and other media makers, one thing we have to keep in mind is that we’re living in one of those moments of backlash and retrenchment. There’s no doubt. But the stories that are being told through second sight are crucial in terms of our democracy to getting us back out.
And what I really hope when people read the book is that they can imagine a world in which we get out of this cycle of progress and backlash, because we finally apply and think about and really embrace the critique and imagination that second sight offers us.
Bacon: So the last question will be—we’ve talked about a lot of different kinds of media. But where is the second sight? There was a period from 2014 to 2020 where I would say there’s a site for the second sight—it’s Twitter, and you would see Black voices saying important things.
And I don’t want to overcelebrate that, but there’s a period where I think you did see one medium. And I had Kathy Roberts Ford on here last week, and she’s talking about the period where there were a lot of Black newspapers that were very vibrant. I don’t really feel like we’re necessarily in that period now.
So when we’re talking about where is the second sight—is it everywhere? I’m a little nervous about that. But if you were looking for where the second sight is today, where would you tell people it is?
Jackson: I am a great person to ask this question, because my last book was about Twitter. I wrote a book about Twitter activism and hashtag activism and the ways that it was used in the 2012, after Trayvon Martin was murdered, through 2020 moments.
But I do want to say, I think it’s really important that we talk about these kinds of platforms with realism and nuance—which is that the majority of Americans were never on Twitter. In fact, if you look at the percentage of people that were ever on Twitter, it was a very small minority. It just happened that a lot of people in the media and political sphere were on there, and so we all felt like it was really important, and I wrote a book about it, et cetera.
And of course it was important. My last book really traces and shows through evidence how this shifted public discourse, public conversations about things like police brutality, about things like racism and the death penalty and many other issues.
So it was important, but there’s never been a single space. There’s never been a single space where, This is the space where second sight happens and where we have our hope for democratic media.
And again, I think this goes back to your question at the start about the broad definition of media making, because this is a collective project. People are engaged in this project here on Substack. People are engaged in this project once on the blogosphere when the blogosphere was it, once on Twitter when Twitter was it, but also through traditional media, through print newspaper, through radio.
Yesterday I had an event in Philly with Sara Lomax, who’s the CEO of WURD Radio, which is the only Black-owned radio station in the state of Pennsylvania. And honestly, more people listen to talk radio than are on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. And so it’s important that we have these institutions where members of our community hear and learn about civic issues, about democracy, about why they’re invested, why they’re involved.
And of course—again, this might be another episode—we really need to tackle the conglomeration and political economic problems in our media system that mean that billionaires and trillionaires increasingly own more—
Bacon: That Bari Weiss gets to run CNN and CBS and fire all the Black people that work there. Yes. More.
Jackson: More. And that of course restricts whether folks in rural areas get the information they need, whether folks in cities like Philly and New York get the information they need. And there are policy solutions to this, but it is a group project.
So when the 1619 Project came out, for example, this was in an era where everybody was saying that the internet had killed newspapers, that the internet had killed print. Nobody buys and picks up and reads a newspaper anymore. And I believe it went through four print editions that kept selling out.
And this was hilarious, because there had been all this hand-wringing about how nobody will buy a newspaper anymore. The New York Times magazine issue with 1619 goes into the newsstands and sells out instantly. People in bodegas and corner stores and gas stations on the highway—everybody is buying it. And they have to print another edition, and then they have to print another edition.
And so it kind of suggests that if media tells stories that matter, that there is a thirst for among the public, there is an audience regardless of the technology or the platform.
But of course, the reason that project was possible was because somebody like Nikole Hannah-Jones had to work her way—and I interviewed her in the book—through a lot of racist media experiences as a Black journalist and had to prove herself. And then her editors had to say, Yes, now is the time that we’re willing to offer this expansive project. We know it might be controversial. We know it might face backlash—which of course it did. We know it might be open to critique—which of course it was. But it’s worth it for our democracy to engage in these interrogations and questions.
So yeah, I think everybody has a hand in this. I don’t think there’s one place you can go.
Bacon: Because now that I think about it, when we first connected, I think you said something on Bluesky about the idea that we were talking about Twitter being over, and therefore there’s no public square. And you were like, There’s never really been a public square where we’re all equally able to show up and speak equally. In America, there’s never been that kind of—
Jackson: There never has been—because the public sphere in the United States is fundamentally shaped by our media systems, the stories we all share. And for so long in U.S. history, our media systems were segregated—and segregated in multiple ways. There weren’t people of color, but there also weren’t women. There also weren’t—and still, still, working people’s voices are very neglected in our media systems.
And the idea is that we would have a healthier media system if we had more platforms, more outlets, more voices. And if the ones that have power—the big ones that have been here all along—actually adhered to the commitments that they made in 2020, which many have since very much rolled back on. To include the voices of the people—to include an expansive set.
And the irony, of course, is that the people who say that they care about intellectual diversity and political debate in media are often the first people to essentially foreclose the more challenging perspectives that come from Black second sight, or come from other kinds of alternative media spaces. But we actually do need that in our media system.
Bacon: Sarah, thanks for joining me. Anything else you want to say about the book or about your events for the next few weeks?
Jackson: No, I’m excited. I hope people will come out. I’m on Instagram @sarahjjacksonphd if folks want to follow me on Instagram. That’s where I’m posting all the book stuff and book events. I’ll be across a few different cities—New York, Chicago, Boston, DC, Baltimore, et cetera.
And yeah, I hope people read it. I’m really interested to hear how folks receive it. It’s been a real honor for folks like you, who are Black media makers, to tell me they feel really seen in this book. That is phenomenal. And I hope folks both in the media industry and the public—because we’re all consumers of media—will really take some of these stories and lessons to heart.
Bacon: A great book. I really appreciate you writing it. Thanks for joining me. Great to see you. Take care.
Jackson: Thanks so much, Perry.
Bacon: Bye.
