On white-speak and gatekeeping: or, what good are the Greeks?

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Notes

1 Lisa Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 7.

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

3 Raka Shome, “Postcolonial Interventions in the Rhetorical Canon: An ‘Other’ View,” Communication Theory 6, no. 1 (1996): 40–59.

4 Houdek, this forum.

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

6 Eric King Watts, “The Problem of Race in Public Address Research: W. E. B. DuBois and the Conflicted Aesthetics of Race,” in Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, ed. Kathleen Turner (Tuscaloosa: University Press of Alabama, 2003), 373–97.

7 Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2015), 3; See also: James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

8 Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965).

9 Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places,” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 3 (2001): 273.

10 Works by Afropessimist scholars (e.g. Frank Wilderson's “The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement,” Ill Will Editions, March 2014) and other radicals (e.g. Johann Kaspar's “We Demand Nothing,” The Anarchist Library, 2009), not Aristotle, circulate freely in community centers and info shops as pamphlets or ‘zines as instructions for advocacy, activism, and liberation. These tracts articulate positions outside classical theorizations of persuasion, identification, or political agency and thus help to frame the approaches and attitudes of today's activists more directly than Athenian theories of rhetoric do. Richard Gregg's, “Ego Function on the Rhetoric of Protest,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 4, no. 2 (1971):71–91, essay and Theodore Windt's, “The Diatribe: Last Resort for Protest” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58, no. 1 (1972): 1–14, are now-classic examples of rhetorical scholars attempting to make sense of the protests of the late 1960s. Both essays offered corrective to theories of rhetoric that presumed protests primarily place persuasive demands on their audiences. Still neither takes black or marginal theory as its starting point, choosing conventional [white] lenses instead.

11 Catharine Helen Palczewski, “What is Good Criticism: A Conversation in Progress,” Communication Studies 54, no. 3 (2003): 388.

12 Flores, “Between Abundance,” 10.

13 Karma Chávez, “Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric's Historical Narrative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 162.

14 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imaginary (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 16–17. See also: Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1982) especially 154–60 and Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 63–67.

15 Baugh-Harris and Wanzer-Serrano, this forum.

16 Alternatively, as Kirt Wilson argues, communication studies has a long and continuing tradition of intellectual appropriation toward the end of reinforcing its disciplinary borders and resisting any transformative intellectual exchange without “outsiders.” “The National and Cosmopolitan Dimensions of Disciplinarity: Reconsidering the Origins of Communication Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 1 (2015): 254–55.

17 Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 107. Note that Allen's grounding in Athenian democratic theory directs her to the language of “citizenship;” thus, her argument for black liberation through political inclusion inadvertently shifts invisibility on to non-citizens.

18 Ibid.

19 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952).