The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice by Marc Lamont Hill, Todd Brewster

Episode Date: May 28, 2022

Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice by Marc Lamont Hill, Todd Brewster A riveting exploration of how the power of visual media over the last few years has shifted the narrative on race and reignited the push towards justice by the author of the “worthy and necessary” (The New York Times) Nobody Marc Lamont Hill and the bestselling author and acclaimed journalist Todd Brewster. With his signature “clear and courageous” (Cornel West) voice Marc Lamont Hill and New York Times bestselling author Todd Brewster weave four recent pivotal moments in America’s racial divide into their disturbing historical context—starting with the killing of George Floyd—Seen and Unseen reveals the connections between our current news headlines and social media feeds and the country’s long struggle against racism. For most of American history, our media has reinforced and promoted racism. But with the immediacy of modern technology—the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, and the internet—that long history is now in flux. From the teenager who caught George Floyd’s killing on camera to the citizens who held prosecutors accountable for properly investigating the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, ordinary people are now able to reveal injustice in a more immediate way. As broad movements to overhaul policing, housing, and schooling gain new vitality, Seen and Unseen demonstrates that change starts with the raw evidence of those recording history on the front lines. In the vein of The New Jim Crow and Caste, Seen and Unseen incisively explores what connects our moment to the history of race in America but also what makes today different from the civil rights movements of the past and what it will ultimately take to push social justice forward.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show hey i'm just here for the brain bleed ladies and gentlemen thanks for tuning in guys be sure to go uh tell your friends and relatives to sign up for the show. Go to youtube.com

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LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. See the big LinkedIn newsletter that goes out every day. And the LinkedIn group that we have over there, a big C-class of people, 122,000 people, I think it's up to now. As always, we have the amazing, most brilliant minds and authors on the show and none of them are me.

Almost slipped the landing on that one. Anyway, we have got amazing gentlemen on the show. This book came out May 3rd, 2022. The book is called Seen and Unseen, Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

by Dr. Mark Lamont Hill and Todd Brewster. Todd, you didn't have that doctor in your name there? No, unfortunately, I didn't have that doctor in your name there? No, unfortunately, I didn't get that far in school. No. Mark, this is why Mark leads the ticket here. Dr. Mark Lamont-Hill is currently the host of BET News and Black News Tonight and is the Steve Charles Chair in Media, Cities, and Solutions at Temple University. He is the founder and director of the People's Education Center

and the owner of Uncle Bobby's Coffee and Books in Philadelphia. I'm hungry now. He has authored or co-authored six books. Todd Brewster is a longtime journalist who has worked as an editor for Time and Life and as a senior producer for ABC News. He has taught at Temple University, Wesleyan University, and Mount Holyoke College, and was a night fellow at Yale Law School. He is a co-author with the late Peter Jennings of the best-selling books, The Century, The

Century of Young People, and more. We'll get into some of those details. Welcome to the show, gentlemen. How are you? Very well. It's great to be here, gentlemen. How are you? Very well. It's great to be here. Thank you for having us. All right.

I need you all to calm down just a second. You know, just take it down a little bit. We're very serious gentlemen here. There you go. I know it's hard when you have two guys on because you're like, who's going first? So give us your dot coms, if you would, where people can find you guys on the interwebs and learn more about you. ToddBridge.com. Yeah. Just ToddBridge. you. ToddBridge.com.

Yeah. ToddBridge.com. MarkLamontHill.com. All right. I don't know. MarkLamontHill.com is where people should be. MarkLamontHill.com is okay, and all my social medias are just Mark Lamont Hill. There you go. So what made you guys get together and write this book?

Man, you know, we are two people who care about issues and during the pandemic we were trying to figure out trying to make sense of the killing of george floyd along with all these other wild things that were happening from rihanna taylor to ahmaud arbery you know we were trying to figure out later on kyle ridhouse. We were trying to understand how technology and media tell a story and help us understand race and help us fight for justice in this country. And so we decided to do it together because we had some friends in common, professional relationships in common. And then we became friends and two people who appreciate each other's work a great deal. And so we said the best

thing to do at this moment is put our heads together and use our different talents and figure out how to tell a story that will help America understand race better, that'll help the tech nerds understand why tech matters, that'll help the media, you know, the media observers and you and me and everybody else sort of help them figure out, you know,

the role that media plays, all of this messiness. So it's like, it's a perfect opportunity. There you go. I would agree 100% with all that. I mean, I out, you know, the role that media plays, all of this messiness. So it's like, it's a perfect opportunity. There you go. I would agree with a hundred percent with all that. I mean, I think, you know, sadly, we need a lot of help understanding things these days and the events of the past few years have been, you know, it's been a turbulent period and we hope that the book helps us get some of these stories in perspective and teaches those who read it more about

what's happening now and what has happened in the past and definitely uh relevance here because i guess tomorrow is sadly the second anniversary of the of the murder of george floyd so we're kind of at a pivotal moment and of course people watch our videos 10 12 years from now so it'll be interesting to mark that well it's interesting because one of the things that we hope we've answered in this book is why George Floyd, the George Floyd video stuck, why it created the outcry that it did, why it drove people to the streets in protest. What's left unanswered is the question is how long people will be remembering that video. And here we are two years out. A lot has happened in those two years. And I think the history will make that judgment finally of what impact that video has had. But it's that story that we've hoped to mine in this book. Definitely. Mark, did you want to throw in

for any of that? I mean, I think Todd hit the nail on the head. You know, I'm always trying to understand how we got here. And one of the things I've learned as a writer is that writing becomes its own form of inquiry. You know, sometimes you write and you learn and you write and you dig and you study and you learn and you write more. And so, you know, in many ways, we wrote this book not just for millions of people who vote but for ourselves to help understand how the country is where it is and why we're here. Just to add to that, I mean, one of the things that I always try to tell my students that writing makes you precise, right? I mean, you look at something, you say, I'm going to describe that. And then you say, no, it's not quite that first word that I've that I've chosen is another word. And then maybe it's not that word,

it's another word. And the same thing happens in, in good conversation, frankly. And, and, and I feel that one of the, one of the many wonderful things of working with each other, it has been that Mark and I, I think feed off of each other very nicely. And we end up, our ideas get better the more we talk about them. And so that process is what you're seeing through this. Probably makes really good writing is, you know, the two of you are teaming up. When I wrote my book last year, I would have loved to add somebody to bounce stuff off of. Instead, it was just my editor who threw all the manuscript out and said,

rewrite it all and it'd be fun. So this is kind of a conversation you guys want to have with America about what's going on. Try and bring people up to speed or give them a deeper education on what's going on in our society and some of the different ills that we need to fix. Absolutely. I think a few things here. I mean, one, we're storytellers.

I want to tell the story of George Floyd. I've got to tell the story of George Floyd and Piano Tender, and Ahmaud Arbery, and Geneva Charles, all these amazing people. We want to tell, we want people to get a fuller picture of who and what people are. You know, George Floyd, with the neon is 99 minutes, you get a story of America. You get a story of policing. You get a story of a crisis.

You get a story of a particular interaction. But you don't the story of george floyd that story doesn't start with the neo-ethnic it starts when he's born and we want to understand the humanity of folks so we want to tell these stories with texture and nuance and we don't want to be boring but you know but we also want to do some other things you know want to give america a sense of history. You know, one of the things that America often does is, you know, as Gorvyn Alcott of the United States of Amnesia, right, we like to forget, you know, what is too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget, right, as the song goes. And so part of what we want to do is say, hey, you can't talk George Floyd

without talking about the history here. You can't talk about Kyle Rittenhouse without talking about history here. And so we want to walk people through a long history of people using technology and media to expose injustice, to fight for justice and to tell the truth. But to also know that not just the good guys that have technology, everybody has. And everybody has a different vantage point. And, you know i i can't remember if it was eddie goddard jr someone to come on our show who basically said it was the first time that

i'd heard it and i was shocked by it and he said you know the george floyd killing was was the first time that we saw a modern day lynching that's really what it was and i remember the more i'm thinking about that absolutely it was because it's you, we talk about this in the book that it's, you know, a shooting is an instant, a lynching is a performance, right? I mean, it's something that takes time and you're watching someone die before your eyes. There was a pleasure to be found in that among the white supremacists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that we mark very ably titled our first chapter the spectacle of death and for the white supremacists in the late 19th early 20th centuries those lynching black victims it was spectacle it was an opportunity it was a social event it was something to take pictures of it was something where you thirsted for souvenirs and and it had that quality, the George killing, not so much in that spirit as the fact that it was a spectacle. And this time, the book that watching the George Floyd video, you feel guilty yourself.

You feel almost as if you are our party to Derek Chauvin. And if we think of a collective consciousness, as I think we should, we are in a way responsible for the killing of George Floyd. So, yes, I think Eddie Glow is exactly right. It is a modern day lynching. And it's one of the things we do in the book is, as we're referencing before, is show the historical antecedents of these events, that they didn't happen in a vacuumose around the neck of so many black victims in the late 19th century during the time of Reconstruction and the years afterwards. Yeah. The length of the video, the smirk on the smart ass smirk on the officer face, you know, the people are screaming what we're all screaming in our head. Get off his neck. He's dying. And in the,

here, the humanity of him calling out for his mother and realizing that he's at the door and you're the whole thing is just, it's a horror show, but also it's a reflection of us and 450 years of, of horror show of what this nation has done and built. Absolutely. This is a legacy.

And in many ways, what we saw in Minneapolis was simply a reenactment of very, very old American ritual of state violence, state-sponsored violence. Sometimes it's the police. Sometimes it's the police allowing it to happen or the government allowing it to happen. We think about the lynchings of the 19th and 20th century. And it's gruesome to watch.

It's difficult to... Part of why our eyes couldn't avert from it was trying to make sense of it. Part of why it was so painful to watch was by the extingu of it. Part of why it was so painful to watch was my big extinguished eyes. Yeah.

In many ways, the reason why that video resonated, because I think that's a really important question we have to wrestle with too, is why this video? We've seen lots of videos, lots of things. This one was nine minutes long. Nine minutes long and it was painful to watch. It was like a still photo in a sense that you saw the knee on the deck for nine minutes. It was also a video and it endured and it felt bad and wrong and we had to sit with recesses of our minds. They were forced to acknowledge a truth that we could often deny before by saying,

oh, there's some bad apples, or oh, it's not as bad as they say, or oh, Black people are exaggerating, or oh, those white allies aren't telling the truth, they're just trying to score points. And suddenly that video sparked a national and really international outrage and outcry precisely because it was really raw and it was in our face.

And there's a tradition of that happening that we have to take seriously if we want America to get that education. We want America to not just grow old, but also grow up. Yeah. And we definitely need... You know, Chris, as Mark was talking, I was thinking about how we're doing a talk at a library tonight together, and I was talking, I was thinking about how we're doing a talk at a library tonight together. And I was putting together some, just some visuals to have.

So we would have them as reference points. And I thought, should I put the George Floyd video in there? And I, it's a funny thing. We've talked nine minutes and 29 seconds. I don't know of anyone who's actually sat down and watched all nine minutes and 29 seconds. Mark and I discussed this a few weeks ago, how, you know, there's, is it necessary that we all do that? And I think we came to an agreement, it's more necessary that we know

that someone had their knee on the neck of George Floyd for nine minutes and 29 seconds. It's one of the few examples of a stunning photograph, and I'll call it a photograph in the grander term, video and still photography, where you, its existence is its power, looking at it is almost too disturbing, you know. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, it was also interesting to me, just the smirk, the look on the cop's face, you know exactly what he knows what he's doing. And it's almost like i've gotten away with this before i'm going to keep doing it and one of my friends is a body language expert and i remember watching the trial with them and seeing the part where he gets the guilty plea or guilty sentence and he really thought he was going to get off when you look at his body language

absolutely he really expected it and he expected it when he was on george floyd's neck absolutely impunity is the expectation when it comes to law enforcement in everyday since throughout history we have given police officers the benefit of the doubt we have created media law pop culture all the infrastructure is about framing the police as well-intentioned, good people who have to fight bad people in a complicated, messy system. And so because of that, we're inclined to give them grace and mercy at all times. And I'm not saying that people don't deserve grace and mercy, but the problem is George Floyd also deserves grace and mercy.

And throughout history, when people are shot by police, abused by police, it's been very difficult for them to have their voices heard. It's been very difficult for their truth to emerge and be honored. Part of what it means to say that Black lives matter is not just to say that they shouldn't be killed, it's

also to say that our experiences have to count, that our stories have to count, that our testimony has to count. And so often throughout American history, the only way that we can be black is by our history. I think we lost you a little bit there, Mark, if you can hear us. Yeah. Maybe I should all jump in here. So I would say absolutely

we can hear you now go ahead we lost you for about a minute there yeah okay sorry basically what I was saying was is that throughout history even when we've gotten the witness for the smoking

gun videotape it still often isn't enough it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough for Rodney King. Rodney King, you know, wasn't, you know, didn't get justice because there was a videotape. You know, Walter Scott

didn't initially get justice because there was a videotape. You know, it's not enough, you know, to say, again, to say Black Lives Matter is not just to say don't kill us, it's to say trust our witness, believe our stories,

believe our testimony, honor our experiences. And this country has done that. And so part of what we do in our book, Seen and Unseen, is show the various ways that technology has helped to tell those stories, but also how sometimes that still doesn't work. You know, Chris, you mentioned this, the smirk you said on Derek Chauvin's face. There's also a nonchalance, right, to his body language. And it's critical to understand that because this is not the heat of the moment. This is not him feeling his own life as threat. This is not a crime of passion, right? This is a crime of ordinariness. And one of the things we say in the book, which I think is true, is that and it goes right to what Mark just said about respecting black lives through respecting their stories, respecting their their testimony for black people. This was shocking, this video, but it was also not surprising. surprising yeah it had the quality of ordinariness right and the ordinariness was not only in the fact that this happens over and over again in more ways than we are able to keep record of but this is the tip of the iceberg kind of thing but also it look at the body language of the man committing the murder yeah it's as if he's thinking about, what, what he's going to have for dinner. You know, it has this, this quality of that, that life does not matter to me. I'm, I'm You know, the fact that he just targeted black people, you know, many of my black friends

just have been terrorized by that. And I've seen them talking about it on Facebook. And it's just a horror show. So give us an overview of the book. I think there's four different stories that you weave in here and tales. Yeah, we tell the story of George Floyd, of course, of crosses of really two chapters. And in part, what we're telling there is also the story of the democratization of surveillance

video in a sense. I mean, it's a very different world now that we all carry around in our pockets, something that is capable of producing high quality video of anything that we happen to see in front of us. That combined with the amount of surveillance cameras that are positioned in along streets means that we're never very far from a camera's eye, right? So that's a whole different world we're living in. It allows us to see things that we have not seen. It allows people to be seen who have not. Then we tell the story of Ahmaud Arbery. And Ahmaud Arbery, as your listeners probably know, was the boy or young man who was out jogging. I think he was, was he 21? I think he was 21, right?

Jogging in Georgia. And he is quartered by three self-appointed sort of citizens arrest practitioners who block him and eventually get in a confrontation with him. They're armed. He's not. And they kill him. That story is about the video, certainly, that was taken, ironically, by one of the killers, but also about the notion of a campaign that can be mounted these days through social media to bring justice in a way that couldn't have happened in years past. Arbery is actually shot and killed in February of 2020. And the prosecutor chooses not to prosecute them, the father-son team that had

actually been the main aggressors here. But it's because of the social media contact and the ability to organize through it that outrage was built over the fact that this young man had been killed while jogging, and that then finally brought those men to justice. And as you know, they were convicted of killing Maude Arbery. We also tell the story of Charlottesville, the march on Charlottesville over the Charlottesville's decision to take down Monty and Mr. Robert E. Lee and to Stonewall Jackson. And we tell the story of Kenosha, where the violence there ended up with a 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse killing two people who were protesters in that day. Do you parallel them?

You know how he was, I mean, it was just astounding how he just walked by the cops with his gun like hey you know how's it going hey and they're just like yeah just go home yeah i mean go ahead go ahead mark no no i'm just gonna say it's somewhat stunning the way he was treated by police in the way many of the sort of self-deputized vigilantes who were out there were not only ignored by law enforcement they were were even thanked at one point by police officers through their car speakers. So the idea is that we have different rules, different standards, different expectations for different

folk. But this is why media and technology is so important. We talked about the lynching earlier and the same photographs that were used to spark outrage for lynching and how violent it was. Those same photos were passed around as postcards by people who were white supremacists and not just like people in clans rooms,

but everyday people who would go to lynchings like picnics and they would take home black body parts as souvenirs. I mean, technology is what you do with it. Text is what you do with it. And similarly, Kyle Rittenhouseittenhouse you know when people were looking at his live raw footage some people saw it as you know a kid who'd been radicalized and went down to the ground to shoot some you know some some people on the opposite side of the aisle and some people who you know who you know who he disagreed with others saw him as an american patriot who was going down there to

impose an order and so it's not just a question of differential treatment it's it's really about different worldviews it's about different ways of reading a person and a text yeah but different values it's about it's about you know there's when when k Kyle Rittenhouse is running from the scene because he's just shot and killed one of the protesters, he's approached by others because they believe he's a mass shooter on the loose. He's a mass shooter on the loose. And then he shoots them. And so you say, who is the aggressor here? Who's the initiator here, right? It's a matter we talk about this a lot. The need for

curators, for people to help us understand what's in these videos, help us understand what's in the photographs is keen. And it's here where we have to attach to people who share the values that we share. And some

people say, well, that's reinterpreting the raw truth in front of you no it's understanding it it's understand right video doesn't video doesn't lie i mean you i mean you can tell me all day long you know don't believe you're what you see in here wasn't there a administration recently that said that the you know but you can see it on the video and you're like no i'm i wasn't born yesterday. That's for real what's going on. You guys also touch on some stuff with Frederick Douglass and I think James Baldwin's in here as well. One of my favorite writers.

Yeah, man. You know, again, it's a fascinating thing when we think about media technology and the question of racial justice for lots of reasons. And the book goes into many really interesting conversations about technology and media. But one of the other things we talk about is the influencer. You know, and what it means to be an influencer.

You know, I don't know if there was, there were celebrities before. There were famous people. There were people with influence. You know, there's always going to be a Chris Voss in the world who can shake public thought and attention but but what does it mean for someone to be able to go on their ig and suddenly have you taking flat tummy tea you know there's a way that influence

happens on social media that we need to think through it and there are people who are shaping our consumer habits there are people who are shaping our our consumption habits through entertainment through whatever but then there are people who are shaping our consumption habits through entertainment, through whatever. But then there are people who are shaping our thought, who are influencing how we think and talk about race. There are people whose words, whose ideas, whose arguments, whose life even have shaped us in really profound ways. Now, mostly when we think about people like that,

we think about people who are living. But it seems to me, in the era of Black Lives Matter, it's something I learned from Todd, and in the book he did some really interesting digging on this particular point. You know, the most quoted person in the context of Black Lives Matter, in the context of this racial justice project, this racial reckoning,

the most quoted person is James Baldwin. James Baldwin from the grave. This influencing conversation, we're quoting him, we're citing him, we're showing his image, we're doing all this stuff because Baldwin had a profound impact. I mean, who better to talk about a struggle, not just for racial justice, but intersectional justice, race, sexuality, gender, class, and all that stuff.

Then Baldwin, someone who himself embodied so many of these identities but not so much of these politics. And so, you know, Baldwin looms large in our book. Not just because, you know, our book, Seen and Unseen, kind of is an homage also to Ev of things not seen his book on the atlanta child murders it's because baldwin and his talk his point about confronting things in order to change them is part of what we're trying to do with seen unseen but it's also it kind of anchors a chapter that talks about how voices from the past come forward again how people from the past can re-emerge and how the words of people even people we love

and admire can become repurposed re-articulated reshape remixed even if you're gonna be hip-hop with it you know in ways that sometimes honor the spirit of the person and in some ways may actually do the opposite of what they intended so Baldwin room's super large for me and Frederick Douglas I'll let Todd take that. But I think for me, Baldwin and Douglas, along with Attica Wells are some of the most interesting figures,

interesting people we talk about throughout history in this book. You know, the interesting thing about Baldwin is you can take almost anything that he looked at, especially in race relations, and you can take almost anything that he looked at especially in race relations and you can literally lift it uh what 55 70 years later however long it's been you literally lift it and put it on today's thing and he's he's right and almost predicted everything

you know there's one there's one thing he says in an interview that really stuck with me and this was in his later years and he wrote you know I'm tired of waiting for progress. I don't have to wait for you to get with the program. And you know, how long do I have to wait? And I, when I see that, I, I look at where we're at now and I just go,

Jesus, we're still waiting. Basically. you know, Baldwin and Malcolm X both were a little bit unkind towards Martin Luther King in the sense that they felt that the reforms that Martin Luther King, what does it mark that, that that the reforms that Martin Luther King, what is it, Mark, that Malcolm X said that I'm not interested in marching to Washington

for the right to sit in the toilet next to a white man? Right, yeah, and sit in the grassroom. To share the same toilet as white folks. Exactly, and the Baldwin, too, was just as, I mean, he didn't look upon the civil rights movement with much enthusiasm because he felt that we had all the incremental steps were just that, incremental, and not likely to lead to reforms that were really necessary.

His big thing was, when are we going to face what we've done? And he was pointing the finger at white people, of course, but he meant collectively as a society in the sense that I referenced collectivism before. What are we going to face what we've done and say, OK, what are we going to do about it rather than denying it? I mean, we talked about America. Mark mentioned having a kind of moral amnesia. We're also an ahistorical people, right? We don't tend to be people who know our own history. But we we that but that's an ignorance that we suffer at our peril. You know, you mentioned before about, let's see, we lost Mark, but we'll get him back soon, I think, but Frederick Douglass. And one of the revelations we

had in looking at the role of pictures and technology going back through American history was the role that the photograph played for Frederick Douglass in the middle to the late 19th century when he was the most photographed man of that period or photographs of Frederick Douglass in the 19th century than of any other person, including Abraham Lincoln. And the reason was in part because he wanted, first of all, he was interested in photography, interested in what it could do, interested in what photographs might actually be a reformative tool right help the country get through this period when they when they renounce slavery and and tried to rebuild the society and one of the things that he felt he the photograph could do for black people was establish their dignity their

humanity i mean the the the um idea that that he could sit and have his picture taken and the idea that he could speak as the great orator that he was abolitionist was its own calling card for the the respecting the dignity of the race and i mean everywhere he went people would would want it when he want to talk about abolition they'd want to talk about slavery what was it like to be a slave? As if he were a visitor from a foreign place. And the fact that he could stand up there and show his own dignity through the photograph and the many biographies, autobiographies that he wrote was a testament both to his predicament and to his sense of hope. Yeah. Do you guys touch on, you know, when it comes to photographs and video, the Birmingham riots with, you know, the fire hoses and the dogs,

that really flipped the switch during the Kennedy years for civil rights, where people saw the real horror that was going on and went, this is awful. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we don't get into that much detail, but we do have a certainly it's the role of photojournalists in terms of using photographs to show reality and the nation

responding to that i think i think yeah can you guys hear me now yeah yeah you're breaking up just a little sorry sorry, but you're right. I'm writing a book on media tech, a tech problem. But I think that to Todd's point, you know, the civil rights struggle is advanced through, you know, the kind of dramatization of injustice. And you talk about Birmingham and, you know, we, we don't, we, we, we focus more on the Pettus bridge. We focus more on one of the great theaters for this type of spectacle, which is the Edmund Pettus bridge. Dr. King says, you're not going to beat us in the backwoods of Birmingham anymore. You're not going to crack our skulls when no one's watching. I'm going to leverage the spectacle of violence in this case

in such a way that people will see it. See, George Floyd and Mike Brown and reality. I mean, these are all modern day stories, right? But we could look at Emmett Till. August 28th, 1955, Emmett Till is killed and his face is three times the normal size it's swolely it's it's it's impossible to look at they dragged and beat that boy during the tallahatchie river and his mom like most moms would be inclined to have a closed casket but she wanted to have an open casket because she knew that the spectacle of his death and the spectacle of the violence that was visited upon him could have an impact on public consciousness so she used the technology of the day the camera the same camera that frederick douglas used to assert his dignity right and she used the camera and she used the social media of the day jet

magazine was a form of social media for black folk you know johnson family publishing that's what we used to find out who got married what the top songs were the four black people that got jobs that week you know you'd find out about it in jet magazine right so jet magazine was our way of showing information and on this cover of jet magazine is emmett Till's mutilated body. And so that doesn't just lead to outcry, it leads to Montgomery bus boycotts. It leads to the modern day civil rights movement that culminates on August 28th of 63. So we go from August 28th of 55, Emmett Till's lynched August 28th of 63. Why? Because of media and technology. And while millions of people were on the mall for March on Washington, millions more would hear it because of media and technology. And so by the time we get to the Pettus Bridge, right, we fast forward again just to hear some change.

We suddenly see, again, King saying, I'm going to use technology of the day, the TV news camera, and I'm going to use the social media of the day, evening news, all three channels, right? To do what? To broadcast this spectacle of violence. Why? So that America will be forced to come to terms with it. So again, these tactics, you know, again, same thing we found out when we heard about those four girls in Birmingham. Same thing we found out at sit-ins and all these things bull connor's dogs all of it with with strategically using the technology and tools of the day to do something different one of the things chris that we discovered in the doing this book i think i think mark will agree with me is that courage is contagious right it's contagious so what he

just laid out i mean it is because of what Mamie Till does, leaving that casket open, that we get the Montgomery bus boycott, that we get Little Rock, that we get all the way to the March on Washington, and all the way, finally, to Darnella Frazier,

the 17-year-old who was walking down a Minneapolis street and could have kept on walking, probably felt there was some danger to her standing there. The situation was escalating, but she did pull out her phone, raised it up, and she kept it on a scene of a man dying. There's courage in that. Yeah. It's powerful that we have these sort of tools. I know now there's supposed to, there's supposed to be more police officers that have body cameras on so that

we can try and capture stuff. If they, you know, don't turn them off. I guess there's been some guys that have turned them off at different scenes. There's, you know, more and more,

I mean, just it's, it's, there's video everywhere you go and, and video usually just doesn't lie. I mean, you're like, yeah,

I can see, I can trust and see what my own eyes tell me. What are some other aspects we want to tease out about the book? Well, let me push back on one. I think Todd and I both, go ahead, Todd. No, you go ahead, you go ahead. Oh, I was going to say, video lies a lot.

It does. It does. That's one of the lessons we've learned throughout this project is that video is a text. And like any text, I mean, imagine if we laid a Bible on the ground or on the table, excuse me, laid a Bible on the table or Quran on the table. It speaks for itself. 50 million people arguing.

In fact, there have been centuries of battles and debates and even wars based on what this seemingly objective, clear text says, right? Now you said it feels different because you can see it. It's not open to any kind of disagreement. It is what it is. Until you lay down and have to look at the spectacle of violence between a police officer and a citizen, and somebody says, well, yeah, the officer was threatened. I feel the same way. And someone else says, no, the guy wasn't threatening the officer. The officer intensified or escalated this until you have to watch an interaction. We can debate over and over and over. And just like if we're debating balls and strikes in a baseball game, right? And I'm from Philadelphia,

so that's what we do all the time. We may disagree with an umpire's decision. And ultimately, there may not be no ultimate truth. It's how you see it. It's how you're calling the strikes, balls and strikes that day. It's how big the zone is. It's related to the player who comes up. All of these things matter. There's no such thing as a video that doesn't have a context to it.

And in the United States, that context has to include race, class, gender, geography, religion, all of those things. And so, unfortunately, when Rodney King is beaten and the jurors see that video, they're not just seeing a black guy get beat by some cops. They're also seeing a history of black people being framed as violent so when the when the when the prosecution when the defense officer when the defense lawyer said oh this guy was a pcp traced monster who would have destroyed the city of la single-handedly if they hadn't subdued him bravely that's the story we get yeah and i suppose that's i just just had one thing there though chris because uh that's where i was going to go, Mark. You're absolutely right. But what makes the George Floyd video so compelling is that you stop. Many people stop, I should say, who may have believed that, who had a bias towards the decency and the motivation of police. You stop and you say, maybe I wrong maybe i'm wrong and and and that

was its power part of its power was certainly that it disrupted was transformative in this sense and you saw it across the country the as as mark has said many times as we've been interviewed on this book you know it's because uh of what happened there that we have the discussion about defunding the police it's because of what happened there that other episodes are now looked upon with more credibility right even if the video isn't right quite as compelling because now we we have this sense that yes this is possible this may even be probable in certain circumstances yeah you guys are right too i didn't think about the factor of even like prejudices when people look at stuff, because I know there were some people who looked

at the George Floyd thing and on the Republican side that are like, you know, rule of law and all that, you know, rim raw from Nixon. And I think it goes back further than that. But yeah, it's incredible. You know, and now you see us doing this fight over critical race theory. And people, you know, they don't want to deal with the shame of it. And I think that's one of the mediums of the video and the stuff that we've talked about is that it's a mirror to us. And it's shameful and it hurts. It's painful, especially if you have a conscience or some sort of empathy. And yet we're still fighting over, you know, that maybe we should learn parts of our history that were whitewashed.

We've had a ton of great authors on this show that have educated me on so much that I was never taught was whitewashed in school that I should have learned and didn't. And now it's time for us to reconcile that yeah i think that one of the things that that we should get comfortable with is that history is messy you know it's not uh once one story of glory after another and that's okay you know as long as we face it i mean baldwin said we can't change everything that we face, but we certainly can't. But we must face everything that, I'm not going to get this wrong. We can't change everything that we face, but we should face everything. Everything that's changed needs to be faced.

I think that's what it is. So the idea being that we have to be honest. We have to be genuine. We have to be able to look at ourselves, warts and all, in order to be able to look at ourselves warts and all in order to be able to move forward. Yeah. One of my sayings in my audience, I've heard it enough there, you're probably going to bleed when I say it again. One of my sayings is the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns

from his history. And thereby we just go around and around and never learn anything. And so, you know, facing this, I guess the sad part is, is the volume of what we have to face to where we finally wake up and go, what is this too much? You know, it's almost like school shootings. It's like, when is it enough? I mean, I remember Obama saying that when he gave up in speech,

he was crying, and I think it was after Sandy Hook. He said, when is it enough? And, of course, sadly, you know, I mean, it's been so much more. So very interesting. Mark, did you want to throw in for anything here? I know, you know, ultimately, you know, when I think about the future of this country, when I think about our capacity to be better, I'm still deeply hopeful. I'm not optimistic. I don't think things are just going to work out, I'm still deeply hopeful. I'm not optimistic. I don't think things are just going to work out. But I remain a prisoner of hope.

W.E.B. Du Bois called it a hope, not hopeless, but unhopeful. Sounds like we're in our first six marriages. I'm just kidding. I have to get a joke in there. One joke per show, I guess. One of the things for us is that if we commit ourselves, that if we work hard, if we make sacrifices, if we're honest, if we face the things that we can change, that we can do better. You guys can hear me, right? Yeah. Yeah, now we hear you.

So, by talking about this idea of chance. And for me, we always have another chance. But if we do the same things over and over again, we'll get the same outcomes. Another chance to be democratic. Another chance to be a nation as good as it's promised. Another chance to be whole. Another chance to have a, what Dr. King referred to as the beloved community. We can get all of that, but to do it, we got to do the work. And in this book, I think we do our best to show people what the work can look like. We do our best to show what's possible and we do our best to show

what's left. What's some of the worst of us. And I think the use of media and technology is just a small slice of the story of American justice and racial justice in particular, but I think it's a necessary part of the conversation. And I think this book, I hope I pray this book exposes again, not just who we are and who we've been, but what's possible and what we can

do with that other chance hopefully it can appeal to our better angels the i wish i invented the term but i who did invent that term was it abram lincoln or the abram lincoln yeah yeah yeah so guys it's it's been wonderful having the show anything you want to tease out more to readers to get them to go or the book before we go you You know, I would just say that we're, I think both of us are very proud of this book. You know, you don't write a book to make money. I can tell you that you don't write a book to pad your ego, but you write a book. I mean, a good book because you feel passionately about what it is you have to say. And I think we both feel very passionately about the, the helping people understand these past few years, helping people understand the new terrain, the new country we're in, in a sense with our new technologies and how

we have another chance to address our, our, our store, the American story of race. Um, and so I, you know, I, I urge people to go out and, and, and purchase the book and, and, or get it from your local library or, you know, get your book club just to read it. Because I think it also is the kind of book that sparks a lot of conversation, necessary conversation for our country at this moment. Most definitely. Most definitely. So as we go out, hopefully we'll have Mark pop in here so we can get his plugs. Give me your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs.

Yeah. So just ToddGrooster.com. I'm not the biggest tweeter or social media guy, despite the nature of this book. But you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can reach out to me on my own website. You can reach out to me on Twitter. I'm on all these places, Instagram, Todd Brewster, 3131, I believe it is. So thank you for having us on, Chris. Thank you for coming on. In fact, let me try and plug, I believe Mark's new website is being worked on. Oh, he's back.

Let's see if we can get him in here and get his plugs in. Sorry, I was talking my head off and realized you guys could be here. No problem. Hey, can you give us your plugs as we go out? Come on, phone gods, work with us but i believe mark's book is mark or his dot com and i believe it's being built right now it's mark lamont hill dot com do you know your is twitter off the top of your head by chance i i i don't know what i. Yeah. Well, but you'll fix the thing. Just plug in this search.

It'll come up. Yeah. There you go. So, folks, it's been wonderful to have both you guys on. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Appreciate it.

Thank you. And thanks to Mark. And hopefully he arrives safely at his destination. Guys, order up the book, A Seen and Unseen, Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice by Mark Lamont Hill and Todd Brewster. Also go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. See my book and everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss.

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