Rhetoric’s rac(e/ist) problems

ABSTRACT

This introductory essay makes the case that rhetorical studies as a field and the Quarterly Journal of Speech as the journal of record for that field are racist. Racism need not imply that evildoers in pointy hoods are pulling the strings of the journal and field; indeed, the assumption that racism is rooted in the bad thoughts and deeds of intentional individuals is part of the problem and is further evidence of the field's ignorance on the subject. Drawing inspiration and guidance from Ibram X. Kendi's work on antiracism, and anchoring my analysis in Paula Chakravartty et al.'s “#CommunicationSoWhite,” I make an honest effort to diagnose aspects of rhetoric's racism problem and suggest some of the attitudinal and material shifts that will be necessary to challenge the whiteness of rhetorical studies. An introduction of the remaining essays in this #RhetoricSoWhite forum concludes the introduction.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• antiracism
• rhetorical studies
• decoloniality
• whiteness

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the scholarship of all of the scholars of color in rhetorical studies, particularly those who have come before (many of whom are cited throughout this Forum). Without their leadership, none of this would be possible. I also want to acknowledge the bravery and vision of everyone who contributed to this Forum; their work is truly inspiring. Thanks to the 2018 Public Address Conference (especially Anjali Vats, whose smart paper oriented my response) and 2018 National Communication Association Convention audiences for discussion about earlier versions of some of these ideas. Thanks to Stacey Sowards, in particular, for her feedback on the introductory essay. And thanks to Mary Stuckey for being so quick to make the space for this Forum when I initially approached her.

ORCID

Darrel Wanzer-Serrano http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6826-4932

Notes

1 Jesús Colón, “How to Know the Puerto Ricans,” in A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (New York: International Publishers, 1982), 147.

2 The Nuyorican movement includes many highly acclaimed authors, poets, and playwriters, including but not limited to Sandra María Esteves, Pedro Pietri, Miguel Piñero, Esmeralda Santiago, and Piri Thomas.

3 Jesús Colón, “A Puerto Rican in New York,” in A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches (New York: International Publishers, 1982), 197–202.

4 Colón, “A Puerto Rican in New York,” 197.

5 Colón, “A Puerto Rican in New York,” 198.

6 Colón, “A Puerto Rican in New York,” 198.

7 Colón, “A Puerto Rican in New York,” 198.

8 Colón, “A Puerto Rican in New York,” 202.

9 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xv. On social imaginaries, see Darrel Wanzer-Serrano (as Enck-Wanzer), “Decolonizing Imaginaries: Rethinking ‘the People’ in the Young Lords’ Church Offensive,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 1–23. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 1–19. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).

10 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xxi.

11 de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xxii.

12 Anna M. Agathangelou and L.H.M. Ling, “An Unten(ur)able Position: The Politics of Teaching for Women of Color in the Us,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 4, no. 3 (2002): 368–98; Bernadette Marie Calafell and Shane T. Moreman, “Envisioning an Academic Readership: Latina/o Performativities Per the Form of Publication,” Text and Performance Quarterly 29, no. 2 (2009): 123–30; Sharon L. Fries-Britt, et al., “Underrepresentation in the Academy and the Institutional Climate for Faculty Diversity,” Journal of the Professoriate 5, no. 1 (2011): 1–34; Christine A. Stanley, “Coloring the Academic Landscape: Faculty of Color Breaking the Silence in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities,” American Educational Research Journal 43, no. 4 (2006): 701–36. Rhetoric used to contain scholars of color (e.g., labeling their scholarship as “narrow” or “trendy”) function as a kind of racist code language that Stuart Hall calls “inferential racism.” See, Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes,” in Silver Linings: Some Strategies for the Eighties, ed. George Bridges, and Rosalind Brunt (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981), 28–52.

13 Helene A. Shugart, “An Appropriating Aesthetic: Reproducing Power in the Discourse of Critical Scholarship,” Communication Theory 13, no. 3 (2003): 281.

14 Peter Garnsey, Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Book, 2016).

15 Karma R. Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric’s Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162–72.

16 Robin J. DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3, no. 3 (2011): 54–70. DiAngelo has documented well the ways in which talk of racism can trigger white interlocutors.

17 Paula Chakravartty, et al., “#CommunicationSoWhite,” Journal of Communication 68, no. 2 (2018): 254–66.

18 Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995): 305.

19 Fernando Delgado, “The Dilemma of the Minority Scholar: Finding a Legitimized Voice in an Intellectual Space,” in Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the 21st Century: A Communication Perspective (Washington, DC: Speech Communication Association, 1997), 51.

20 Delgado,“The Dilemma of the Minority Scholar,” 49 and 51.

21 Chakravartty, et al., “#CommunicationSoWhite,” 262.

22 Chakravartty, et al., “#CommunicationSoWhite,” 257.

23 Chakravartty, et al., “#CommunicationSoWhite,” 256.

24 Chakravartty, et al., “#CommunicationSoWhite,” 258 and explained further in notes. They relied on surnames and census data and tested for intercoder reliability. Are surnames the best way to account for race and ethnicity of an author? Probably not. Absent robust data collection practices by the journals, however, there probably aren’t better ways to start data collection and analysis.

25 Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 177–218.

26 Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 67–79.

27 Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 32–3.

28 Hall, The Fateful Triangle, 33, emphasis in original.

29 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, Fifth Edition ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 9.

30 Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, 9.

31 Hall, Fateful Triangle, 32.

32 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2015), 128.

33 Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists, 8.

34 Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019), 18.

35 Kimberlé Crenshaw, et al., in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw, et al. (New York: New Press, 1995), xiv.

36 Richard Delgado, “Derrick Bell and the Ideology of Racial Reform: Will We Ever be Saved?” Yale Law Review 97, no. 5 (1988): 923–47.

37 Robin DiAngelo, “White People Are Still Raised to be Racially Illiterate. If We Don’t Recognize the System, Our Inaction Will Uphold it.” NBC News Think (2018): https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/white-people-are-still-raised-be-racially-illiterate-if-we-ncna906646.

38 Richard Delgado, “Rodrigo’s Chronicle,” Yale Law Journal 101, no. 6 (1992): 1364.

39 Darrel Wanzer-Serrano (as Enck-Wanzer), “Trashing the System: Social Movement, Intersectional Rhetoric, and Collective Agency in the Young Lords Organization’s Garbage Offensive,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 92, no. 2 (2006): 174–201; Wanzer-Serrano, “Decolonizing Imaginaries,” 1–23.

40 Eric King Watts, “‘Voice’ and ‘Voicelessness’ in Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87, no. 2 (2001): 179–96; Eric King Watts, “African American Ethos and Hermeneutical Rhetoric: An Exploration of Alain Locke’Sthe New Negro,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 1 (2002): 19–32.

41 Kirt H. Wilson, “The Contested Space of Prudence in the 1874–1875 Civil Rights Debate,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84, no. 2 (1998): 139–49; Kirt H. Wilson, “The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 2 (2003): 89–108; Kirt H. Wilson, “The National and Cosmopolitan Dimensions of Disciplinarity: Reconsidering the Origins of Communication Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 244–57.

42 Lisa A. Flores, “Creating Discursive Space Through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2 (1996): 142–56.

43 See, for example, Josue David Cisneros, “(Re)bordering the Civic Imaginary: Rhetoric, Hybridity, and Citizenship in La Gran Marcha,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, no. 1 (2011): 26–49; Nathaniel I. Córdova, “The Constitutive Force of the Catecismo Del Pueblo in Puerto Rico’s Popular Democratic Party Campaign of 1938–1940,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 2 (2004): 212–33; Alberto Gonzalez and John J. Makay, “Rhetorical Ascription and the Gospel According to Dylan,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 69, no. 1 (1983): 1–14; Richard Morris and Philip Wander, “Native American Rhetoric: Dancing in the Shadows of the Ghost Dance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76, no. 2 (1990): 164–91; Richard Morris, “Educating Savages,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 2 (1997): 152–71; Nakayama and Krizek, “Whiteness,” 291–309; Anjali Vats and LeiLani Nishime, “Containment as Neocolonial Visual Rhetoric: Fashion, Yellowface, and Karl Lagerfeld’s “Idea of China”,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 99, no. 4 (2013): 423–47.

44 Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.s. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010): 28, 38.

45 See note 12.

46 Agathangelou and Ling, “Unten(ur)able Position,” 368–98; Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Monstrous Femininity Constructions of Women of Color in the Academy,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 36, no. 2 (2012): 111–30.

47 Eric King Watts, “The Problem of Race in Public Address Research: W.e.b. Du Bois and the Conflicted Aesthetics of Race,” in Handbook on Rhetoric and Public Address, ed. Shawn Parry-Giles and J. Michael Hogan (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010): 375.

48 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 6. In a special forum in another journal, Matthew Houdek argues the “whiteness of rhetorical studies is outrageous.” Matthew Houdek, “The Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: Toward Divesting From Disciplinary and Institutionalized Whiteness,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2018): 292. His piece introduces a collection of essays engaging the Flores essay cited at the beginning of this note.

49 Lisa M. Corrigan, “On Rhetorical Criticism, Performativity, and White Fragility,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 86–88.

50 Kendi, How to be an Antiracist, 10.

51 Kendi, How to be an Antiracist, 20.

52 Kendi, How to be an Antiracist, 20.

53 Kendi, How to be an Antiracist, 18–19.

54 Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 6.

55 Kendi, How to be an Antiracist, 10.

56 Mark Lawrence McPhail, “The Politics of Complicity Revisited: Race, Rhetoric, and the (Im)possibility of Reconciliation,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 1 (2009): 107–23.