Transcript: How Black Mediamakers Are Retelling America’s Story

Author Sarah J. Jackson says that Black writers, filmmakers, and other creators offer a “second sight” on America that pushes the country in the right direction.

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.

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........

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