White intransigence and the radical rhetoric of Blacks fighting back

ABSTRACT

This essay analyzes the riverfront brawl in Montgomery, Alabama in 2023 to consider an instance when Black speech was met by white intransigence. I define white intransigence as a racist rhetorical convention that entails refusals to move in response to Black claims to public space. I then identify how Black bystanders on the riverfront enacted collective self-defense that beat back white intransigence through a radical rhetoric of embodied, confrontational movement. Lastly, I argue that overcoming white intransigence will require kinetic responses that force it to move.

KEYWORDS:

• White intransigence
• anti-Blackness
• radical rhetoric
• confrontational movement
• space

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Harriott II Riverboat official website, https://www.funinmontgomery.com/

2 The initial news reports referred to the lead deckhand as the Harriott II’s co-captain. Later reports clarified his role on the commercial riverboat.

3 Curtis Bunn, “Black Riverfront Worker Said He ‘Hung on for Dear Life’ during Montgomery Attack,” NBC News, August 10, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-montgomery-riverfront-worker-describes-sparked-viral-brawl-rcna99238

4 In this forum essay, I focus my attention on the vehemence of white intransigence in response to Black speech. A white witness gave a sworn statement that at least one member of the boating party used an anti-Black slur during the encounter with the deckhand, although that word is hardly necessary to confirm the anti-Black racism that took place.

5 I coin the term collective self-defense to describe the Black witnesses’ response because it is in defense of another and of themselves. The Black witnesses also live in a context governed by racist conventions that place their lives at risk. Moreover, due to this context, they grasped the mortal danger the deckhand was in because he defended himself when the white boaters attacked him.

6 Bunn, “Black Riverfront Worker.”

7 Annie Hill, “Free Speech v. Free Blacks: Racist Policing and Calls to Harm,” First Amendment Studies 54, no. 2 (2020): 190, doi:10.1080/21689725.2020.1837655; Myles W. Mason, “Establishing 911: Media Infrastructures of Affective anti-Black, Pro-police Dispositions,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 39, no. 5 (2022): 394–407, doi:10.1080/15295036.2022.2086991

8 Lisa A. Flores, “Stoppage and the Racialized Rhetorics of Mobility,” Western Journal of Communication 84, no. 3 (2020): 248.

9 Flores, 249.

10 During the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the marchers chanted, “You will not replace us.” This declaration underscores the centrality of white intransigence in white supremacist ideology and its race-based claims to space and status. My reference to Black presidents highlights how the right wing framed Barack Obama and Claudine Gay, the first Black president of Harvard University, as being out of place in those roles.

11 Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review (1993); George Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape,” Landscape Journal (2007).

12 Amber E. Kelsie, “Blackened Debate at the End of the World,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 52, no. 1 (2019): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.52.1.0063. Ersula Ore and Matthew Houdek, “Lynching in Times of Suffocation: Toward a Spatiotemporal Politics of Breathing,” Women’s Studies in Communication 43, no. 4 (2020): 443–58, doi:10.1080/07491409.2020.1828709; Matthew Houdek, “In the Aftertimes, Breathe: Rhetorical Technologies of Suffocation and an Abolitionist Praxis of (Breathing in) Relation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 108, no. 1 (2022): 48–74, doi:10.1080/00335630.2021.2019301

13 Theodore R. Johnson, “This August Reminds Us Racism Means Always Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop,” The Washington Post, August 30, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/30/racial-hate-crimes-backlash/

14 Robert L. Scott and Donald K. Smith, “The Rhetoric of Confrontation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 55, no. 1 (1969): 1–8, doi:10.1080/00335636909382922; Robert S. Cathcart, “Movements: Confrontation as Rhetorical Form,” Southern Speech Communication Journal 43, no. 3 (1978): 233–47, doi:10.1080/10417947809372383; Megan Foley, “Of Violence and Rhetoric: An Ethical Aporia,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 2, (2013): 191–9, doi:10.1080/00335630.2013.775706; Andre E. Johnson, “Dislocations and Shutdowns: MLK, BLM and the Rhetoric of Confrontation,” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 8, no. 3 (2018): 137–45.

15 Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, “From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,” Critical Studies in Media Communication (2002).

16 Noor Ghazal Aswad, “Cultivating Radical Care and Otherwise Possibilities at the End of the World,” Quarterly Journal of Speech (2024): 3, doi:10.1080/00335630.2024.2323672