New Technologies of Resistance: Racial Power and Protest in the United States

African Americans face ongoing technological assault in the United States most visibly at the hands of state agents. Technological transformations that have simultaneously enabled the oppression of African Americans have also shaped African American resistance movements in the United States. This essay addresses how technologies shape the conditions for the struggle between racisms and resistance against racial power. Technologies helped provide the mechanisms through which black liberation movements aimed to raise and transform people's consciousness about racism. African Americans' use of social media technologies to organize and engage in protest against racism flattens hierarchies within social movements, removes the media filters that select particular stories for promotion and circulation, and has the potential to expand movement participation.