A Tightrope of Perfection: The Rhetoric and Risk of Black Women’s Intellectualism on Display in Television and Social Media

Abstract

Although models for recovering and theorizing black women’s discourse have focused on examples of communicative eloquence, competence, verbal prowess, and depictions of strategy, these frameworks do not completely account for the racialized threats of violence black women sometimes incur as consequences for their participation in public dialogues. To understand how risk and penalty are activated against black women intellectuals on television and social media, this essay analyzes the controversy and subsequent social media backlash Wake Forest University professor and former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry experienced in late 2013 after off-hand remarks about former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s African American grandchild. When read as the consequence of feminist literacy practices and signifying enacted within a hostile surveillance culture, Harris-Perry’s experience reveals an adverse rhetorical condition that penalizes and silences contemporary black women speakers and intellectuals.

Keywords:

• African American
• apology
• black women
• media
• surveillance

Acknowledgments

I express my appreciation to my family for their support, and I thank Nan Johnson, Tricia Serviss, and Laura Wilder for reading early drafts of this essay.

Notes

¹ Well known to many Black women social media participants, Harris-Perry’s tweet features an image from the film Waiting to Exhale wherein one of the four protagonists sets her husband’s car afire in frustration after discovering his years of infidelity.

² See Chavez and Griffin’s Standing in the Intersection for a discussion of intersectionality theory’s contribution to rhetorical and feminist rhetorical scholarship.

³ See Bacon; Carey; Logan (“Black Speakers”); and Pough for recent examples of the competency paradigm that I see as a shaping factor in how we undertake scholarly discussions of black women’s rhetorical lives.

⁴ Within the considerable body of rhetorical scholarship on apologia, I draw attention to: Benoit; Gunn and McPhail; and Ware and Linkugel.

⁵ I am nodding to research on hostile or condescending audiences formed by a resistance to women public speakers by such feminist historians as N. Johnson and Zaeske.

⁶ Bailey coined the term “Misogynoir” to describe specifically an anti-black form of sexism experienced by members of this group. The practice of misogynoir involves the mistreatment of members of this group, their erasure, and specific forms of violence.

⁷ By panoptic theory, I am referring to Foucault’s history of the shift from public torture to designed social control in Discipline and Punish. Panoptic theory revolves around the social structures and behavioral outcomes that have developed since eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prisons devised an architectural system designed to provide small, ruling groups a perspective from which to observe and condition larger groups in captivity. Post-panoptic theory has these conversations with attention to sociologist Mathiesen’s “synopticon,” or the practice of the masses surveilling the few.

⁸ See Richardson, Pough, and Ampadu for more specific discussions of the relationship between literacy, rhetorical competence, and group politics and commitments.

⁹ I reference aesthetic privilege to acknowledge colorism and how fair and light-skinned black women experience social privileges frequently denied to their darker-skinned sisters.

¹⁰ In 2015, the Washington Times ran a story describing an identity theft charge against Saida Grundy from 2008 (Chasmar). I make note of this publication because it suggests an effort to find red flags in the professor’s character and to prevent the public from seeing Grundy as the victim of a witch hunt.