Seen and Unseen Quotes

“Slavery was illegal, sure, but segregation now kept Black people under the white man’s thumb, and, looking forward, arrangements were being made to preserve the nation for the Anglo-Saxon race.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“As justification for this discrimination, immigration-reform advocates cited the intelligence studies of Carl C. Brigham, a Princeton psychologist also credited with inventing the original Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), introduced in 1926. “At one extreme we have the distribution of the Nordic race group,” he wrote. “At the other extreme we have the American negro,” with Jews and Mediterranean peoples falling in between, though “closer to the negro.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“Together, they became the focus of a familiar Klan theme, the protection of the national gene pool from “inferior” peoples.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“Anyone who still believes that the present rash of violence against Black people—or, we should say, the sudden technology-driven awareness of the persistence of violence against Black people—isn’t historically rooted”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“But while our new technologies are very good at assembling small pockets of resistance, broad-based consensus is frustrated by the bewildering new mood of competition that our techno-democracy has forced upon us. Operating in a digital environment where all our voices are roughly equal, the racist and the antiracist occupy the same amount of space. The situation is further complicated by the persistent belief that “leaderlessness” is a virtue of the internet and of social media, and that modern-day justice movements need to eschew command structures and hierarchies because they are inherently corrupting. That may seem appealing as an idea, but in practice it has meant that small groups of extremists, whose absolutism could not have survived in a majoritarian world, thrive, and that any attempt to use the new media to make a better, more equitable society must contend with those who, motivated by fear and bigotry, would tap into the same technology’s vulnerabilities to violently steer us away.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“But while our new technologies are very good at assembling small pockets of resistance, broad-based consensus is frustrated by the bewildering new mood of competition that our techno-democracy has forced upon us. Operating in a digital environment where all our voices are roughly equal, the racist and the antiracist occupy the same amount of space. The situation is further complicated by the persistent belief that “leaderlessness” is a virtue of the internet and of social media, and that modern-day justice movements need to eschew command structures and hierarchies because they are inherently corrupting.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“as Baldwin told us, “the visible reality hides a deeper one” and that in the end, “all our action and achievement rest on things unseen.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“the nation hadn’t merely struggled with a few mistakes but that it owed its very existence to an ideology of white supremacy”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“But to particularize is to miss the pattern. Floyd was just the latest, and most public, example of a well-worn racist narrative, one deeply engrained in American life long before Emancipation, in which a violent end is explained away as a failure of biology. It’s the one that says that the Negro can’t handle freedom, that he is preordained to a life of dependency, that he is morally vacant, that he cannot be trusted to make noble use of his “equality,” or, worse, that he is all of that and also a bloodthirsty monster, more beast than human.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“The details and particulars of Floyd’s struggles would be later used, if not to justify his fate, then certainly to lessen the collective white guilt surrounding his death—the notion that, sure, it’s sad that he met such an awful end, but given where his life had been going and all the “bad decisions” he’d made, are we surprised?”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“all these victims, each of them gone from us now, share one thing: our knowledge of them was enhanced through the modern media tools available”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“The video of the killing of George Floyd has a lasting impact because we believed it, saw it as a faithful representation of what happened on the streets of Minneapolis that day, and because it was shared over and over again as if it were actually happening over and over again, which is of course a core part of its message. There is one George Floyd on video but many more who see the same fate away from the scrutiny of the lens.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“The video of the killing of George Floyd has a lasting impact because we believed it, saw it as a faithful representation of what happened on the streets of Minneapolis that day, and because it was shared over and over again as if it were actually happening over and over again, which is of course a core part of its message.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“creating images of despair and injustice that seared the popular consciousness”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice

“have changed the pace, tone, and character of this longstanding practice.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Seen and Unseen: Technology, Social Media, and the Fight for Racial Justice