The Erasure of Black History, Media, and America’s Capacity for Empathy

By Rachael Payton, Senior Director of Communications and Marketing 

When civil rights activist Bayard Rustin wrote “Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence” in 1955, it was more than an ideological essay. It was a call to action that, as the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN, says, “urged individuals to confront injustice peacefully, courageously, and honestly.”

In America, we pride ourselves on our patriotic courage and regularly call for peaceful intervention in areas of conflict, but we seem to have an uncomfortable relationship with honesty. So, here is an honest truth: Black media and history is being silenced while empathy is simultaneously under attack.

Seemingly with no time to breathe in between unprecedented moments, we’ve recently seen more than $2 billion worth of rollbacks to initiatives that make space for every citizen to have equal access to the American dream, we’ve seen 300,000 Black women laid off and counting, we continue to see Black history exhibits under threat of censoring factual accounts of slavery’s impact in America, and Black journalists are being fired or arrested for doing their part in speaking truth to power. 

While on a visit to Memphis, a Princeton University African American studies major who was also in town to learn about data centers and environmental injustice asked me, “Do you get stuck in pessimism?" In about 40 seconds, my brain scanned through 400 years of Black history in America. I thought about how far we have come, how far we have gone back, and how much further we have to go. Her question is one that has come up often in my friend circles lately and for many, it’s a hard question to answer. 

Over the past year, Black and Brown American journalists have been let go in mass from national media outlets like CBS, CNN, NBC, Teen Vogue, and the Washington Post at alarming rates. As The Guardian reported, newsrooms have historically been less diverse than the actual U.S. population, making these media layoffs even more stark.

Most notably in Minnesota, we saw former CNN anchor, Don Lemon, and local freelance journalist, Georgia Fort, arrested by FBI agents after reporting on the ground alongside local advocates about the ICE occupation in Minneapolis following the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. When you look at all of these losses and intimidation tactics, coupled with nearly 40% of local newsrooms vanishing all across America, frontline truth telling is being weakened. Our capacity for empathy is being chiseled away right before our eyes.

People cannot see themselves in what they do not know or cannot translate. When American journalists on the frontlines of political upheaval are intimidated or completely removed from the mainstream public eye, these stories get lost in the sauce. The voices of the communities hit first and worst are muffled. And we stifle America’s ability to strengthen the muscle of empathy, to which former United States Secretary of State and First Lady Hilary Clinton says “is not a sign of weakness; it’s a source of strength. [It] does not overwhelm our critical thinking, or blind us to moral clarity. It opens our eyes to moral complexity.”

When we see Black media and history being silenced and erased, it is easy to get stuck in the wave of pessimism. When this foundational pillar of American history is missing or trivialized, it’s even more difficult to connect the dots between present-day disparities and the historical systems designed to produce and sustain them. Without that understanding, empathy cannot take root to build more just systems.

Between 2021 and 2023, about 25 states quietly introduced bills to remove learning emotional and social intelligence skills like empathy, collaborative problem-solving, and emotional self-regulation from their public school curriculum. While most of these bills failed, what does it say about the undercurrent of America’s future capacity and appetite to see one another as equals?

I’m reminded of Emmet Till’s story, a young boy whose monstrous, racist murder by the hands of two grown men made national history, not because of what they did, but because it was photographed. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made a noble decision to have an open-casket funeral for her son. She knew the world needed to see, not just hear, what the physical ramifications of racism looked like in the form of a brutally murdered young boy. It was Black media like nationally recognized Jet magazine and smaller Black publications like The Chicago Defender that helped circulate not only the image of Emmet Till’s body, but a resounding cry for empathy and a visual call to “confront injustice peacefully, courageously, and honestly.”

Without empathy, policies that aim to close divides—socially, economically, and otherwise to benefit all people—will always struggle to take hold. This current wave of the erasure of Black stories, while not new, is systematic and purposeful: it removes ugly feelings of guilt, avoids accountability, and allows harmful policies to be passed without public resistance. When people aren’t equipped with history, they lose the instinct to stop and ask essential questions that help us learn where we came from, how we got to where we are, and how we can get to where we want to be.

It is in that absence of diverse storytelling, that the old “me vs. them” mindset rushes back in, allowing society to point the finger at Black communities rather than at the institutions that engineered these inequities over centuries.The erasure of Black history and media is ultimately the erasure of empathy. And when empathy disappears, justice becomes impossible.

So, to answer Makenzie from Princeton’s question, no, I don’t get stuck in pessimism. I’m stuck in a cycle of radical hope, radical empathy, or as the CEO at Dream.Org, Nisha Anand, would say, in constant search of radical common ground. All of these I strongly believe not only can coexist with one another, but have been key ingredients for the movements that came before us. We have come so far, we have so much farther to go. But to lose hope and live in pessimism would be counterproductive to the preservation and continuation of the Black media, culture, and history that has gotten us this far.