” Invisibility is one of racism’s strongest tools. Racism is most powerful when we don’t see it.”
Dr. Rob Eschmann
From cell phone footage of police killing unarmed Black people to leaked racist messages and even comments from friends and family on social media, online communication exposes how racism operates in a world that pretends to be colorblind. In When the Hood Comes Off, Rob Eschmann blends rigorous research and engaging personal narrative to examine the effects of online racism on communities of color and society, and the unexpected ways that digital technologies enable innovative everyday tools of antiracist resistance.
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In this episode Lissa talks with Dr. Rob Eschmann about When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age (University of California Press, 2023), his book exploring racism in the digital age. Rob Eschmann is a writer, scholar, filmmaker, and educator from Chicago. He is Associate Professor of Social Work and a member of the Data Science Institute at Columbia University, as well as Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.
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15:52 Lissa references Elizabeth Alexander’s Poem “Invocation” memorialized at the The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Equal Justice Initiative).
Dr. Hilary N. Green, Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Renée Ater, “The National Memorial for Peace and Justice (Equal Justice Initiative),” in Smarthistory, January 7, 2022, accessed January 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/national-memorial-for-peace-and-justice/.
WHAT IS DR. ESCHMANN READING?
“I’m in the third book of The Three -Body Problem. It is a series about an impending alien invasion and the effect that it has on our society and tech. You can tell it’s written by an engineer because of the way that it describes technology and visions of what technology might look like hundreds of years in the future. As a huge fantasy and sci fi nerd, I’m enjoying this. It’s being made into a Netflix show. I always like to read the books before I see the movie.”
ENJOY!
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