Posted on November 29, 2024 in Featured Review
Authors:
Lee BakerWhen the Hood Comes Off: Racism and Resistance in the Digital Age, by Rob Eschmann. California, 2023. 312p, 9780520379725 $85.00, 9780520379749 $27.95, 9780520976894
When the Hood Comes Off documents how racism manifests online and how anti-racist activists mobilize to combat it both online and off. Eschmann (social work, Columbia Univ.) began this eight-year study in 2014, notably in the wake of the Fergusson unrest sparked by the fatal shooting of Michael Brown that same year. He continued his research during the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and later through a pandemic-fueled year of racial reckoning initiated by the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd in 2020. In 2021 Americans witnessed the Capitol riot, the Atlanta spa shootings targeting Asian women, and the establishment of Juneteenth as a federal holiday. These were perhaps some of the most violent years in the first part of the twenty-first century. They were also the most critical years for internet activism ever. They all serve as the background for Eschmann’s critical study in which he captures this important moment in internet history, American history, and indeed the history of the world, framing it as an intellectual puzzle.
To introduce his book, Eschmann deploys a poignant anecdote of playing online active shooter video games as an undergrad with his cousins. None of them would communicate via headsets in real time because of the routine, violent, and derogatory racial epithets directed at them because they were Black. Exploring this phenomenon further, Eschmann found research documenting how computer-mediated communication differs from face-to-face communication in that the anonymity of the former entails fewer norms regulating hate speech or just vile language. This discovery led him to question how people of color, women, and queer folks experience explicit racism, sexism, and homophobia online, because when the “hood comes off,” people are free to act a fool.
From the beginning of his research, Eschmann embraced the notion of the “digital dualism fallacy” (p. 8). Challenging those who believe the online world is separate from the so-called real world, he examines how online activism can help dismantle racism in the real world and how online hate can impact an individual’s real-world self-worth and well-being.
A series of big questions animates each of his eight distinctive chapters—“How does the internet shape the way people talk about race? How are online experiences and responses to racism different from in-person experiences? What impact do these changes have specifically on people of Color, and on society?” (p. 7).
As he notes, centering ‘the experiences and perspectives of marginalized people’ can often ‘highlight the ways oppressive systems work and identify biases and blind spots that exist in dominant ways of thinking.’
p. 8
To answer these profound questions that lie at the heart of his critique of digital dualism, Eschmann interviewed college students who identify as Black, Latinx, and Asian. As he notes, centering “the experiences and perspectives of marginalized people” can often “highlight the ways oppressive systems work and identify biases and blind spots that exist in dominant ways of thinking” (p. 8). Although these interviews were essential sources of evidence, this study is much more than an ethnography or an oral history, as the author also includes close readings of influential writings on critical race theory and mines the historical record on internet communication. He also developed a sophisticated quantitative method for analyzing tens of millions of tweets to show how many times a word or phrase was used on Twitter yearly. Further, Eschmann writes in an approachable style, inserting witty aphorisms in just the right places to add some levity to the seriousness of the subject, making this important book with its somber findings accessible to a wide audience.
Eschmann marks 2021 as a watershed year when the hood came off and virulent racism seemed to be more acceptable. It fits within a series of violent backlashes the United States has periodically experienced in the wake of periods of racial progress. After Reconstruction, for instance, there was a rise in lynchings with the institutionalization of Jim Crow in the 1890s. In 1917 there was the East St. Louis riot and later the Red Summer of 1919, when at least twenty-six cities across the country experienced pogrom-like violence razing entire Black communities, which climaxed with the Tulsa race massacre in 1921. This backlash resulted from the gains made during the Great Migration and from Black GIs returning to fight for freedom at home. In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, that backlash took the form of the so-called war on drugs, the rise of mass incarceration, urban renewal projects, and the Republican Party’s Southern strategy.
Eschmann brilliantly captures the latest wave of backlash, which was ignited during and simmered through the Obama administration but was fueled by the Trump administration, accelerated by the anti-woke movements following the racial reckoning of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Social media played an important role in both fueling and resisting this latest backlash.
Like the African American veterans who used firearms to resist the violent pogroms in 1919, Eschmann describes how their great-grandchildren used Black Twitter and #BlackLivesMatter to shift the discourse and power dynamics in online counter-spaces, in classrooms, on the streets, and in everyday quotidian spaces. The first chapter poses the book’s central research question: “What does the style or expression of racist language in a virtual world … tell us about the nature of racism in the real world?” (p. 3). Subsequently, how does resisting that expression in the virtual world spill over into the real world?
The second chapter begins with a sarcastic but sincere description of a time when “once we were color blind”—a period from the civil rights era to about 2021 when racism was masked in everyday civil discourse. Elaborating, Eschmann notes that “over the past seventy-five years in the United States, racists have, for the most part, stopped telling us when they are racist” (p. 25). He cites Lawerence Bobo and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva to demonstrate that, on the surface, people might not express explicit racism. Nevertheless, systems and people continue to articulate racism without racists.
Since the advent of online communication, people have used anonymity to reduce empathy and unmask racism. Yet, this same technology has also empowered Black and brown activists to fight back with what Eschmann calls a double-edged sword:
How do we make sense of this double-edged sword? Technology has the potential to amplify racist messages of hate, and explicitly and ugly racist content is common and often unmoderated and unchecked in online spaces. Yet internet technologies have empowered a new era of activism, and #BlackLivesMatter has transformed our national consciousness, bringing increased attention to the persistence and brutality of anti-Black racism.
p. 52
Chapters 3 (“Mask On: Rules of Engagement”) and 4 (“Mask Off: Revelations and New Realities”) are insightful and poignant descriptions of the hypocrisy regarding online and offline communication norms, whereby offline polite silence about race is the norm, but online it can be the wild west. In each case, people of color are systematically isolated or bullied. Eschmann is adamant that “the unmasking of racism in online spaces is so important because it makes racism visible to people who cannot recognize masked racism,” and “this increased recognition of racism may increase the number of people who are willing to resist” (p. 103).
Chapter 5 (“Digital Resistance”) opens with Eschmann’s reflections on his own experiences with microaggressions and insightful analyses of microaggressions in the context of color-blind racism. He then analyzes his informants’ reactions to microaggressions and online racist aggression. His theoretical concept of online counter-spaces, in which people form online communities, can be deployed to engage in “online racial checking,” which involves “critical responses to microaggressions or the expression of racist ideologies” (p. 124).
Perhaps the boldest and most theoretic chapter, chapter 6 (“Double-Sided Consciousness”) opens with an epigraph by W. E. B. Du Bois: “double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (qtd. in Eschmann, p. 136). Creatively and fearlessly, Eschmann proposes inverting Du Bois’s concept to look at white people through the eyes of people of color. He suggests:
Shining the light on Whiteness and exposing the destructive spirit of White supremacy … Instead of people of Color looking at themselves through the eyes of others (i.e., White people), double-sided consciousness refers to a reversing of the double-consciousness mindset through a public and communal project that reveals what White people look like—from cultural practices to the manifestations of privilege—through the eyes of people of Color.
p. 141
His most prominent example of this double-sided consciousness was the rise of the sardonic and generative critique of “wyipio” on Twitter, which soared in use by the millions since 2015. This reviewer thought it might be more straightforward to invert the iconic line from Frantz Fannon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), when a little girl remarks upon seeing Fannon, “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!” to: “Community, see the wyipio! I’m frightened!”
Chapter 7 (“Protest, Posters, and QR Codes”) discusses activism in the 1960s and 1970s and compares it to today, highlighting Twitter’s role in this “new school digital activism” which drove the Black Lives Matter movement. Chapter 8 (“Racism is Trending”) is the most quantitative and innovative chapter. For ten years (2011–21) Eschmann documented the number of times each year individuals use certain terms on Twitter, such as microaggressions, institutional racism, #BlackLivesMatter, #AllLivesMatter, cultural appropriation, patriarchy, reparations, and Juneteenth. It is a fascinating and evocative way to capture trends by “scraping” millions of tweets to demonstrate a new type of historical record, which is both illuminating and inspiring. He concludes on an optimistic note. Racism has become unmasked because of social media and activism online and off since 2020. Regarding those people who can no longer cling to the illusion of a color-blind society, he playfully suggests putting them to work in the cause of dismantling structural racism.
Eschmann’s work enters a rich body of research that includes distinguished authors like Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Umoja Noble, and Ziad Obermeyer. This book succeeds in integrating the author’s reflections, his students’ voices, his data mining, and his distinctive reading of a range of popular theorists. Although focused primarily on the United States, Eschmann’s enthusiasm for using online and real-world strategies to dismantle racism is infectious and captivating. His voice, or perhaps his presence on the page, provides an intimate invitation for readers to follow him into his lab, to a local protest, and as he analyzes theories and texts. He motivates readers to join him to get to work and get busy dismantling racism.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals.
Interdisciplinary Subjects: Racial Justice
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences
Lee D. Baker is a professor of cultural anthropology and African & African American studies at Duke University. He received his PhD in anthropology from Temple University.
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