Q&A: ‘A Second Sight’ tells U.S. media history through Black journalists’ lens

In 2020, newsrooms local and national — from the Kansas City Star to the Los Angeles Times and NPR — issued apologies for past racist coverage and pledged to commit themselves to more equitable reporting and hiring. 

But even then, Black journalists talked with University of Pennsylvania associate professor Sarah J. Jackson about a pattern: acknowledgement from mainstream, predominantly white media institutions didn’t necessarily equate to more nuanced stories about Black communities or more substantive recognition for Black journalists. 

“White people get fatigued around these issues pretty quickly,” veteran media leader and co-founder of URL Media Sara Lomax-Reese told Jackson.  

“Institutions have to back up their words with substantial action — which it’s obvious we will have to keep fighting for,” added former Los Angeles Times reporter Erin B. Logan, who now works on loyalty and digital strategy at the Associated Press. 

So Jackson’s new book, A Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom, covers how Black media-makers have historically and continually fought to tell more accurate, nuanced stories about the U.S. through their titular second sight. The ability, named by W. E. B. Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk in 1903, enables Black media-makers to “see through the veil of national mythmaking and to craft stories that reveal, resist, and reimagine.”

Jackson, also co-director of the Media, Inequality & Change Center, sat down with The Objective to talk about how Black journalists and media-makers — even when they have ideological differences — have been able to reckon with the structurally racist gaps in mainstream narratives about the U.S. while imagining what a truly inclusive democracy might be.

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Related: Q&A: Karen Attiah says her firing shows mainstream media still fails at talking about race

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The Objective received an advance copy of the book as a PDF for review. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What sparked the idea for A Second Sight?

Sarah J. Jackson: Part of it was inspired by what I was watching through the Obama years, as somebody who was chronically online and involved in the Black blogosphere, and also … the overlap of the second Obama administration and the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement [after the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 by George Zimmermann]. … I was writing a book about online digital activism and how Black Americans were … using it to force conversations about things like police brutality.

But I also was close friends with a lot of Black journalists of my generation, the young Gen X and elder millennial generation. When Obama was elected, many of them had huge career opportunities, because all of a sudden, all these mainstream media institutions were interested in Black stories and explaining race.

… As the years passed and we saw the backlash that happened with Trump after the second Obama presidency, it became very clear to me … [that] part of what seemed so unexplainable to many people initially about Trump was actually something that we had very much seen before in history. And … the media was really struggling to tell the story and to narrate the story about why it was happening again.

Many of my friends who had had these sort of meteoric rises during the Obama era were saying, “We’re trying to tell our editors that this thing that Trump said is racist … that [what] the Trump supporter here is doing is very similar to this historical thing that happened before.”

Suddenly, they weren’t being heard, because talking about race wasn’t really a hot topic anymore. That all led up to me originally starting writing the proposal for the book, which obviously has become something much bigger.

You spent four years [from January 2021 to August 2025] doing interviews for this book. What was really important for you to include?

Jackson: The network and scope of Black media-making is so enormous that I couldn’t possibly interview everyone that deserves to be interviewed for the book. But what I really wanted to do was get a subsection of the people who were doing work to shift the narratives, like their predecessors had done, across different types of technology and media — so radio, the blogosphere, traditional print journalism, magazines, documentary film-making, television, etc.

What I tried to do there was think about, “What were some of the media techs?” … [meaning] the media products, the films, the podcasts, the articles that were really forefronting or shifting public discussions about race, about democracy.

A great example of this is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations”, which really shifted the conversation about reparations in the U.S. from the margins, where it had always been happening, more towards a central conversation.

I really appreciate how expansive your definition of media was when you were making this book. 

Jackson: This is another takeaway that I want people to have … this expansive understanding that media is not neutral, it’s always shaped by power, but also, that technology and media is not just what we think of now, [like] livestreams and the Internet and YouTube. The printing press was [also] a revolutionary technology that changed the world. Early photography, the first films that included audio … their audiences were essentially what the Internet was for us in 1990. 

Many of the things we think of as new, both in the country’s politics and in our media ecosystem, like morality or alternative media, contested truth, misinformation, these have long histories in our country.

When it comes to the margins, what does journalism lose when it seeks to dampen or deny the history of this norm of Black media-makers’ second sight? 

Jackson: Black media-makers, in many ways, have always worked on the outside or the edges of traditional journalism. And the most obvious reasons for that were racism, because it was presumed that Black people couldn’t be objective, that they couldn’t narrate or tell the most important stories, the most urgent stories. That their positionality … prevented them from playing this role.

[For] a big part of American history, that is part of the story, right?

And then even after the civil rights movement and the very, very slow integration of Black people into mainstream journalistic spaces, there was this assumption that Black stories weren’t universally of interest, which is also a racist assumption.

… White media institutions couldn’t fully contain what I use in the book to talk about the story that Black media-makers are telling, which is second sight. These media institutions were committed to, founded in, professionally normed through mythologies of American democracy that neglected certain perspectives, that erased certain stories, and that clung to ideas and ideologies that were comforting to white people, to the mainstream, et cetera, but that actually might make things uncomfortable and more complicated.

Under all the ideas that certain people can’t be objective or that certain types of stories are of mass interest is really the idea that those stories are actually harder, more complicated [for storytellers] to grapple with.

But as I argue in the book, they’re also more interesting and more imaginative and offer us more potential for what the nation could be, what we can imagine the terms of democracy to look like.

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Related: Q&A: ‘We’re winning when media reparations is common-sense’: Media 2070’s new chapter

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Speaking of imagining, how have your perceptions around justice for Black media-makers and a robust Black media-maker ecosystem changed as you worked on this book?

Jackson: One of the things that really became important as I worked on this book was second sight and the way that it’s incorporated into media stories is doing … two really important things.

It’s critiquing — it’s pointing out the gap between the ideals the nation claims to describe to the norms the media institutions claim to value and what actually exists. But it’s also creating a map and a guide, and imagining what it could look like if the country did ascribe to those ideals, if institutions did represent everyone in how they report and how they tell stories.

As I was writing the book, I really wanted to try to find this balance as much as possible. There are some very sobering and somber stories in the book. … There’s stories about slavery, there’s stories about lynching … There’s a lot of racial violence in American history, and other kinds of violence.

But also, there are these really remarkable moments that I try to point out. For example, W. E. B. Du Bois, who gave us the concept of second sight, wasn’t just doing this dogged media production in editing The Crisis magazine for the NAACP for several decades, but he was also writing speculative fiction. Folks like [filmmaker] Julie Dash, who came out of the L.A. Rebellion early on, were making these speculative, fantastical films in Black American filmmaking.

There always was this sense of [Black media-makers] imagining alternative futures, right?

Which is actually why I start the book with what is, to some people, going to be a big juxtaposition: Phyllis Wheatley in 1773, writing poetry as an enslaved teenager, and Ryan Coogler in 2026, making the most Oscar-nominated film of all time. The throughline is that both media-makers are imagining some kind of alternative and critiquing the nation at the same time, and doing that through the very, very different work that they produce.

One more thing, just to complicate that a little: My argument in the book isn’t a racial essentialism. It’s not saying, “Oh, all Black people tell similar stories” or “All Black people are part of this collective project,” but that second sight is a collective project. Black media-making has been this intergenerational collective project.

… I tried in the book to do this [recording] with nuance, to point out that there are ideological disagreements and differences among Black media makers — even the Black press, which historically had a shared project of Black freedom, of Black civil rights. Some Black newspaper editors at certain points in history were quite conservative on certain issues, while others were much more progressive or radical.

A Second Sight is structured through the lens of how Black media-makers have approached stories on the founding values of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” How would you like to invite readers to engage with the book as we reach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence?

Jackson: We’re going to be hearing both from political leaders and public leaders, but also through media, a lot about the founding ideals [in the coming months]. But we’re likely, I’m predicting, going to hear far less about how those ideals actually look from the margins. How those ideals have or haven’t been met, or have failed, or could be expanded.

… I want everyone to read the book. Because I think it’s very important in a moment like this, where everyone is … trying to understand how we got here and how to make democracies stronger, that media and narrative, and whose stories are told and centered and heard, and what lessons can be taken from those stories to avoid repeating past mistakes, is really urgent, right? And this is something Black media-makers have been doing for a long time.

… I really am working to offer an alternative media history of the nation, one told through Black writers, journalists, filmmakers, storytellers who documented what the official record often left out. … It doesn’t mean that the mainstream story has to be thrown out wholesale. But what it does mean is that you get a story that becomes much more complicated, much more nuanced, much more expansive, and that, I think, helps the public ask critical questions about who we are, who we are as a nation, what our values are, and so forth.

I’m hoping that part of what the book does is reframe the idea of a founding itself, by showing that Black media-makers have been continuously narrating and contesting the meaning of American democracy. … Frederick Douglass, [for example], was doing democratic theory at a level that fundamentally has come to influence how we understand a concept like freedom or liberty.

A lot of the media-makers in this book talked about their legacies and lineages with other Black media-makers, whether in the past or their contemporaries. For you, whose second sight would you like to recognize and consider part of your lineage?  

Jackson: I have a section towards the end of the book where I talk about how the people I interviewed talked about their own relationships and you really can see the legacy — for example, Ryan Coogler credits Gina Prince-Bythewood for paving the way for his generation of Black filmmakers.

For me, personally, I grew up in a house where we had a subscription to Ebony Magazine. It was a big influence on me. I also read The Autobiography of Malcolm X very early. 

… The people who most shaped the way that I think about media are my academic mentors, my professors, the people who educated me into the field of becoming an expert in media. … But to really make sense of it [media], I was really influenced by historians. … For example, when I was an undergrad, I took a class from a professor named Nicole Aljoe, who was teaching slave narrative as literary critique … treating slave narratives as a form of literature, the way you would treat Shakespeare. 

And that really brought an early epiphany to me. She wasn’t a media professor, but I was a student in journalism. And I was thinking, “Oh, if they’re literature, then they’re also media, right?”

… When I took that class … we read Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. And I was a baby feminist, I was raised by a feminist mother, I had a feminist sensibility, [so] I remember being struck then by the fact that this was in many ways a feminist manifesto — she is doing something really courageous and daring by talking about the level of sexual violence that she and other enslaved Black women experienced, because that was actually harder to get published than many of the narratives that formerly enslaved men published.

In my own lifetime and career, since I was that student … many other people of my generation have written about how Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl should really be considered one of the first texts that thinks about what we now call intersectionality. 

So I love that I am also in a lineage of thinkers and an ecosystem of people who are doing this overlapping work … We’re documenting this and offering these alternative histories and stories.

… I would love if this became required reading in both film schools and in journalism schools. Because it’s really, really important not just that the public who are the consumers of media understand what stories they aren’t hearing or seeing or what they should seek out or how these things have been narrated, but also that the people making the media do that work and have some self-reflexivity about that.

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James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective.

This piece was edited and copy edited by Marlee Baldridge.