The Author Events Series presents Sarah J. Jackson | A Second Sight
In Conversation with Sara M. Lomax
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, along with 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 work-arounds. This tension has sharpened their commitments to truth.
Now 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.
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.
Sara M. Lomax is the president and CEO of WURD Radio, LLC, Pennsylvania’s only African American–owned talk radio station. She is credited with transforming the legacy station into a multimedia communications company providing innovative original programming on air, online, and through community events. In 2021, Lomax cofounded URL Media, a network of multicultural media organizations that share content, distribution, and revenues to increase their long-term sustainability.
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The views expressed by the authors and moderators are strictly their own and do not represent the opinions of the Free Library of Philadelphia or its employees.
