Elihu Katz Colloquia: Robert D. Eschmann, Columbia University
- Annenberg School for Communication, Room 500
"When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age"
About the Talk:
Before the Civil Rights Movement, racism was open, ugly, and legal. Today, however, discrimination has been outlawed and racism tends to be more subtle. You could say that whereas racism showed its face in the 1950s, nowadays it’s masked – hidden behind supposedly color-blind institutions and interactions.
But for anyone who has ever read comments under a YouTube video or online news article, it is clear that not all racism in today’s digital age is subtle. From the thousands of racial slurs posted on social media each day, to the resurgence of White nationalism through a rebranding as the Alt-Right, and even the 45th President’s official Twitter account, it seems that some online spaces provide opportunities for people to be openly racist without social consequences. I call this the unmasking of racism. Whereas we have understood post-Civil Rights Movement racism to be masked behind friendly interactions and supposedly color-blind laws, it is being unmasked in online spaces that reveal the types of open and ugly racist attitudes and actions that many people in the US thought were behind us. This runs counter to how scholars have been thinking about racism in the post-Civil Rights Movement era. How does our understanding of race and racism change when racism shows its face – when the hood comes off?
About the Speaker:
Dr. Rob Eschmann is a writer, educator, filmmaker, and scholar from Chicago. Dr. Eschmann writes on educational inequality, community violence, racism, social media, and youth wellbeing. His book, When the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Era (University of California Press, 2023), systematically explores the ways online communication has changed the expressions of racism, its effects on communities of color and society, and resistance to racism at individual and structural levels. He is Associate Professor at the Columbia University School of Social Work, and a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society.
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