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How the Wonder and Vision of Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom
by Sarah J. Jackson
Since the nation's founding, Black Americans have had a unique perspective on the U.S. experience—a "second sight"—that reveals the truth about the nation to itself. As renowned media scholar Sarah J. Jackson charts in this bold and daring masterwork, at the center of this effort has been an extraordinary cast of Black journalists, photographers, filmmakers, radio hosts, podcasters and other mediamakers who have drawn on the visionary tradition of second sight to advance democracy and broaden our most fundamental American values.
When Black mediamakers raise their voices and speak uncomfortable truths about America, they shape memories of the nation and push us toward a future more closely aligned with our espoused values. For two centuries, this "second sight" has been an overlooked engine of American democracy.
Drawing from W.E.B. Du Bois's philosophical work, deep historical analysis, and dozens of interviews with today's most active Black mediamakers, A Second Sight shows these visionaries positioned at the margins of their industries and navigating fraught relationships to power. They've warned of the greatest dangers to democracy—from slavery to Nazism, and mass incarceration to misinformation. Their work is central to our culture and politics. Yet it is devalued, met with violent censure, or achieved only via ingenious workarounds to deliberate obstructions. This tension has sharpened their commitments to truth.
Now, in A Second Sight, one of our nation's foremost scholars of American media, Sarah J. Jackson, presents an appraisal that situates Black mediamakers at the vanguard of telling the American story. Brilliant, urgent and illuminating, A Second Sight is an authentic and candid grappling with a discordant thread in the American fabric and, in tracing a bolder vision for the nation, presents a way forward.
"From the 18th-century poet Phyllis Wheatley to Alex Haley's 1970s book and miniseries Roots to Steve McQueen's 2013 film 12 Years a Slave, Jackson explores other bedrock freedoms cultivated by Black media-makers including freedom of association, freedom of the press, and freedom of expression. Jackson manages to keep things light-hearted with plenty of pop culture references and entertaining anecdotes, all couched in solid scholarship. It's a lively and edifying tour of Black historymaking." —Publishers Weekly
"A comprehensive survey of Black media, including print, photography, and film...The author highlights the historic roles of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois. Jackson also recognizes notable exceptions, such as Gordon Parks's decades long work for Life magazine and the apologies issued by the Kansas City Star and the Los Angeles Times for past injustices...This book reveals episodes in the history of Black media involving surprising, if not consistent suppression; reactions to Nikole Hannah-Jones's The 1619 Project might confirm Jackson's thesis. Recommended." —Library Journal
This information about A Second Sight was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah J. Jackson is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication and co-director of the Media Inequality and Change Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Her previous books, Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press and #HashtagActivism, examine the relationship between media, race and social change. In 2020, she was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship to support research on A Second Sight.
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