Chapter 7 focuses on the 1970s, when anti-colonial movements sought to turn global hierarchies upside down. Their efforts moved from the US civil rights movement to expose the racism and sexism embedded in professional work, as in education, social work, and medicine. Teachers observed their ‘hidden curriculum’, which excluded those they long claimed to help. Lawyers noted their close alliance to capital and sought, for the less-powerful, alternative routes to legal service. Engineers, who up to this point claimed that they had literally built civilization, began to ask whether they had in fact condemned society to live in concrete boxes and breathe polluted air. Even accountants were not immune. The high and fluctuating inflation that characterized the end of the moral-economic order established after the Second World War produced a legitimation crisis that required, in Britain, a Royal Commission on something as fundamental to capitalism as the calculation of profit.

One of the most powerful ways to counter the isolation that often accompanies social media use – whether that use is professional or personal – is to foster community. That community can take various forms. For researchers and online investigators, it may mean working collaboratively or celebrating the cultures of those you are researching. For everyday users of social media, community may mean reaching out to others to talk about what you’re observing or to share your thoughts and feelings online. However, not all attempts to develop a sense of community are equally beneficial: According to recent research, for example, venting can have positive or negative effects, depending on how the user engages. In this chapter, the authors discuss what is known about effective ways to combat the isolation that can be endemic to online engagement, and how to proactively foster community in online and offline spaces to minimize the risk of psychological harm and maximize psychosocial well-being.

While people have similar biological responses when viewing graphic online imagery, our unique identities mediate that affect. This chapter explains how reactions to disturbing images can vary significantly from person to person, and how important it is to understand what makes each of us – and each other – more or less vulnerable to potential psychological harm when engaging online. The chapter explores how we can better protect our kids and communities by becoming more aware of the potential impact of social media content on ourselves and on other people, and the steps we can take to lessen the risk of harm.

In this chapter, we offer a number of recommendations for those who are in a position to do something technically, structurally, and legally or otherwise to minimize the risk of psychological harm that comes with the public’s use of social media and other online sites, especially their engagement with graphic or other upsetting digital material. We outline the policy implications of what we’ve learned from more than three years of desk research and original interviews that we have conducted with dozens of people, ranging from technologists to psychologists to content moderators to human rights investigators and beyond. We first spotlight the competing interests that underscore social media companies and governments’ policy deliberations with regard to content moderation. Next, we lay out our suggestions for companies, governments, and individuals with regard to how to improve the experiences of both content moderators and everyday social media users. We close with suggestions for creating a more “pro-social” online environment, one that not only better mitigates the risks of psychological harm but potentially encourages greater connection, resulting in wellness and even flourishing.

In the concluding chapter of Graphic, the authors recount the story of a pivotal trip they took to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where they absorbed the stories and insights of a diverse cohort of women who had gathered to discuss the concept of resilience. Through a World Cafe–style event, where the women discussed their perspectives on both trauma and healing, the authors gathered several insights that can be used to help foster positive experiences in peoples’ engagement with social media and other online spaces. This final part of the book underscores key themes from earlier chapters, including the power of humor, community, and connection to minimize psychological harm when engaging with graphic material online and, ultimately, to maximize well-being.

This chapter outlines the history of graphic visual content and its ability to advance social and human rights. The authors trace a path from 1863 and the United States’ civil war, when photos of beaten slaves were used to advance abolitionist causes, to contemporary images of atrocity in Ukraine, now being used to rally condemnation against Russian aggression. The chapter also discusses the social significance of other seminal, historical imagery, including videos of the beating of George Floyd and Rodney King, photos and videos of John F. Kennedy’s killing, photos from the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, images that documented the beating and killing of Emmet Till, and iconic photographs from 9/11 and the War on Terror. A discussion of the qualitative and quantitative similarities and differences between historic images and digital images shared online today follows the description of these photos and their role in advancing social change.

While graphic online content may be upsetting, people who regularly work with such content – like journalists, content moderators at social media companies, and human rights investigators – have developed various strategies for minimizing the risk of psychosocial harm when engaging with such material. Many of these strategies can be adapted by the general public to limit the risk of harm and maximize the potential for positive outcomes from their online engagement. Such strategies include tactics aimed at increasing our control over when and how users view graphic online material, varying how users engage with upsetting media, treating such content like “toxic waste” and limiting exposure of the user, their loved ones, and their households, and striking the balance between looking at and engaging with such content, and knowing when it may be better to look away.

Too often, people mindlessly scroll through their social media feeds and other online spaces to catch up on the activities of their friends and family or simply to pass the time. However, this behavior can leave them vulnerable to the more insidious aspects of online engagement, especially if they come across graphic online content – whether intentionally or without warning. In this chapter, the authors of Graphic discuss how bringing greater intentionality to one’s online engagement can serve as a protective force. They summarize the most recent research and insights from their interviews with diverse experts to illustrate tactics for deriving greater meaning from time spent online and ultimately how to use that engagement to not only protect oneself from psychological harm but also to potentially even flourish.

This chapter looks to the early postwar period to explore some of the early legacies of black antifascism. While many scholars have examined the antifascist aspects of radical movements like the Black Panthers, this chapter focuses on this earlier moment of transition in the midst of growing bipartisan Cold War opposition and the alliance between anti-Communism and massive resistance. It explores which aspects of the black antifascist tradition endured and informed postwar struggles. As Du Bois noted shortly after German surrender: “We have conquered Germany but not their ideas.” This chapter explores the critical intellectual response to postwar shifts in domestic and foreign affairs and shows how it circulated in the press and civil rights rhetoric, and among everyday African Americans. Antifascism shaped local practices of militant protest, armed resistance, and self-defense, particularly among African American veterans disillusioned with the false promise of democracy and freedom promised to them with Allied victory. This chapter provides a new perspective on an understudied aspect of the long civil rights movement and postwar far right.

In the late 1960s, Angela Davis and other Black activists asserted that racism was a fundamental component of fascism, and thus fascism became term and framework that Black activists used to describe the federal and state policies and practices that fostered racial inequities or obstructed Black people from achieving justice and equality. Despite the term’s origins in Europe, Black activists, such as Davis, used terms such as “fascism” and “genocide” as both a rhetorical tool and analytical framework which they hoped would wake up and compel the American public to demand an end to policies, both within and outside the American federal and state governmental apparatus. This chapter explores the contours of Black of antiracism and antifascist activism in the 1960s to the 1980s – from struggles against white supremacist collusion with the FBI and local police to assassinate black activists to the fight against state policies, such as forced sterilization of poor Black and Latina women, or the “ghettoization” of Black people in the 1970s.

This chapter examines a collection of suits decided by the U.S. Supreme Court that together privileged antebellum interpretations of doctrine over the promise of the Reconstruction Amendments, standardized the responses to post-emancipation litigation across state lines, and, ultimately, prevented abolition. The Court adopted the majority views developed at the state level as a blueprint for the edifice of Jim Crow.

This chapter begins an extended exploration of how judges conceptualized the emancipated person. It illuminates the pivotal connection between cases that asked judges to resolve disputes that had grown out of slavery (e.g., contracts for the sale of an enslaved person) and those that required them to consider the rights of newly freed people (e.g., the right to testify). It traces judicial deliberations, analyzes the law’s power to “make and unmake persons,” and considers the effects of that power on freedpeople. As property in persons was destroyed, freedpeople emerged – phoenix-like – from the ashes. In this formulation, emancipation revived the formerly “dead” enslaved person, as she emerged from the wreckage of the peculiar institution.

The modern civil rights movement in America was directed and sustained by ministers and churches fervently proclaiming Judeo-Christian religious beliefs. Its leaders were mostly black ministers, who preached religious sermons inside and outside churches, insisting on promised rights. Its organizations were primarily black churches, along with an association of ministers; and the demonstrators were mostly their congregations. Though the movement’s base of support grew to include many who acted on other impulses, and its approach adopted tactics from Gandhi and others, the civil rights movement remained primarily a product of Judeo-Christian faith and its religious speech. Its religious speech was evident in the leadership by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was "first and foremost ’a clergyman, a Baptist preacher,’ a Christian," and he led by the religious speech of sermons, addresses, books, interviews, and demonstrations. That can be seen in each of King’s major campaigns in the modern civil rights movement. Other leaders also advocated Judeo-Christian principles and nonviolence, through speeches and pamphlets, marches, and church rallies. The triumph of the modern civil rights movement came mostly from the religious speech of the larger religious wing of ministers and congregations, not of the much smaller secular wing.

Black resistance movements are among the most surveilled social movements in American history. From slave insurrections to Jim Crow and Black Lives Matter mobilizations, the government and its accomplices have long worked to monitor and control these movements. This chapter explores the history of Black surveillance and control, elaborating on the impact new technologies and shifting demographics have had on Black resistance movements and their strategies to counter this surveillance and control.

In response to the radicalization of the late 1960s, many governments turned to repression. With so many of their comrades behind bars, radicals in the North Atlantic decided to pay closer attention to prisoners, promote civil rights, build alliances with progressives, rebrand themselves as defenders of liberty. At the same time that activists were reconsidering their revolutionary priorities, the United States reoriented its war in Vietnam by using the issue of the POWs to reframe American intervention as a fight for humanitarian principles. Antiwar radicals in the United States and France responded by focusing on political dissidents in South Vietnam. Drawing on their experiences with prison organizing, they connected their newfound concern with civil liberties to antiwar activism, calling for the liberation of political prisoners in South Vietnam. Despite their new focus on rights, anti-imperialist radicals still thought in Leninist terms, framing their internationalism around the problematic of the right of nations to self-determination. Yet in arguing that South Vietnam violated civil rights, anti-imperialist solidarity increasingly took the form of criticizing the internal affairs of a sovereign state, which brought radicals close to competing visions of internationalism like human rights. While most radicals never agreed on a single radical rights discourse, and did not convert to human rights in the early 1970s, their new collective attention to rights, along with alliances with groups such as Amnesty International, shifted the political terrain in a way allowed a rival approach to global change to attract new audiences. In so doing, anti-imperialists lent legitimacy to a competing form of internationalism that shared the progressive aspirations of anti-imperialism but rejected nationalism in favor of human rights.