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

So, please excuse us if, in presenting what we have learned ourselves or added to our knowledge from the experience of others, we might sound at times a little critical, preachy or even sermonizing. The theme lends itself to committing such errors.

Jesús Colón, “How to Know the Puerto Ricans”¹

A cold open

In 1961, Jesús Colón (1901–1974), a noted Black Puerto Rican writer and progenitor of the Nuyorican cultural and intellectual movement, published A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches.² In the title essay, which appears last (as the fifty-fifth entry) in the volume, Colón reflects back upon a key moment of textual engagement from his youth.³ In 1915, two years before setting sail on a ship bound for New York, Colón was flipping through his newly acquired eighth grade history textbook, A History of the United States, when he stumbled upon a document beginning with a phrase that, in his words, “stuck with me all day like one of those musical phrases of a nameless song that keeps coming up in the sound of your whistling, again and again, sometimes for hours.”⁴ The document was the US Constitution, and the phrase was its famous opening “We, the people of the United States” – a phrase he could not get beyond because it struck him as so powerful in its egalitarian and inclusive impulse. He repeated the phrase over and over, reflecting on how it meant that “We [Puerto Ricans] belonged” as part of the U.S. national imaginary. Walking home, he “accented the phrase with the pounding of [his] feet on the centuries-old cobblestones of the streets in old San Juan. We-the-people-of-the-United-States.”⁵

A short period thereafter, Colón recounts, he ran into his history teacher, a Montanan named Mr. Whole, while passing a local YMCA. He writes that the teacher “hailed me from the porch. He invited me to play a game of checkers. I sat in front of the checker board between us, ready to start the game. Out came somebody in authority. He informed Mr. Whole that I could not play there with him as I did not belong to the white race. Mr. Whole said not a word and the game, not yet started, ended.”⁶ In the remainder of the essay, Colón reflects on the status and makeup of “we the people,” wondering if there are “first and secondary people … ; gradations and classifications not only because of race but because of money and social position.”⁷ He explores the ways in which Puerto Ricans and others are systematically excluded from “the people,” yet refuses to reject the premise of the Constitution’s opening phrase. Instead Colón mobilizes “we the people” as a promise yet fulfilled, underscoring its futurity, that “when,” not if, “that phrase is realized in its totality, Puerto Ricans will have the right to choose the form of government they really want” and shed the racist-classist-imperialist chains of colonial oppression.⁸

There is undoubtedly much of interest in Colón’s story, not to mention his other writings, lived experiences, activism, and public testimonies; but I want to quickly narrow down the focus to one of the formal qualities of “A Puerto Rican in New York.” His story models a certain kind of con/text construction through which, Michel de Certeau might say, Colón assembles a bricolage through “poetic ways of ‘making do’” with this one textual fragment that was so central to the US social imaginary.⁹ Colón, as a reader of this fragment, “insinuates into another person’s text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralizes himself in it like the internal rumblings of one’s body … . This mutation makes the text inhabitable, like a rented apartment.”¹⁰ Such “procedures of contemporary consumption” and, we might add, construction, constitute what de Certeau calls “a subtle art of ‘renters’ who know how to insinuate their countless differences into the dominant text.”¹¹

Such an art of renters is a necessary tactical option, even in formal spaces like academic journals, where historical and structural factors have contributed to a kind of intellectual redlining that excludes scholars of color. When such is the case, we make do, insinuate ourselves, carve out space, but are never truly permitted to take up permanent residence (even if we hold onto the hope of some future state of emergent and transformed belonging). We move in and out, living from place to place until we lose residency in the (white) scholarly suburb. My own words, however, betray my position as I anchor my opening salvo in a white French cisgender man (de Certeau) so that I might be able to capture the attention of whoever might remain persuadable in my audience. I rent some French Theory because a Puerto Rican, I know from peer reviewers, is imagined as too niche, too narrow, to particular.¹² Funny how Nixon, or Bush, or de Certeau aren’t thought of in the same way.

Far from funny, it’s pretty predictable. As Helene Shugart argues, “in order for one’s work to be legitimized, recognized as scholarship, one must conform to the scholarly tradition,” which includes its norms of citationality and what “counts” as appropriate sources.¹³ When that’s the norm, however, the dominant views, scholars, and epistemic frameworks are reproduced. Within that context, I argue, rhetorical studies (as a “field”) has a race problem. It is built largely upon the back of a pro-slavery segregationist (Aristotle),¹⁴ is overly focused on an intersectionally exclusionary politics of citizenship (as Karma Chávez has eloquently demonstrated),¹⁵ and by fact if not design has all but excluded scholars of color from its journal of record, the Quarterly Journal of Speech, for more than a century. On second thought, this isn’t a race problem; this is a racism problem. This field and this journal are racist. Did that make your hair bristle? Good. I can work with that.¹⁶

Part I: the backstory and a preview

The idea for this forum, something rarely used anymore in QJS, emerged after publication of Paula Chakravartty, Rachel Kuo, Victoria Grubbs, and Charlton McIlwain’s “#CommunicationSoWhite” in a special issue of the Journal of Communication.¹⁷ The motivation for this forum, however, predates their essay. The overwhelming whiteness, both embodied and intellectually, of rhetorical studies is not new. Some might be experiencing it as nascent, their attention drawn to it for the first time (a) in the context of the National Communication Association’s (NCA) implosion over the Distinguished Scholars Award on- and offline in the summer of 2019 or (b) in the context of one of several ad hoc #CommunicationSoWhite panels that ran at the NCA annual convention in 2018. Scholars of color in rhetoric and communication have been making these arguments for at least two decades, if not more. In 1995, for example, Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek conclude their “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric” essay with a nod to the field, to the ways in which the power relations mapped out by whiteness “influence communication research and our everyday lives.” Their “essay is an invitation for communication scholars to begin to mark and incorporate whiteness into their analyses and claims – an invitation to become reflexive.”¹⁸ Seemingly, few accepted that invitation, and those who did found their work marginalized, even as it began to proliferate.

A couple of years later, Fernando Delgado penned a (too often) overlooked essay titled “The Dilemma of the Minority Scholar: Finding a Legitimized Voice in an Intellectual Space” for the NCA published book Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Twenty-first Century: A Communication Perspective. Delgado critiques the field of twenty years ago for the same mistakes it makes today. “The field has a problem,” he writes. “There are far too many symbolists and not enough materialists when it comes to dealing with diversity. The frustration of many minorities is that we become symbols whose materiality is only infrequently (and sometimes punitively) recognized.”¹⁹ Like Nakayama and Krizek, Delgado is concerned with the whiteness of the field, with the ways in which we are “bounded by our own knowledge limitations and unacknowledged conditions, often of our own making,” which reinforce the status quo and reproduce a “hierarchical model for allowing some voices and silencing others, creating certain spaces and closing off others.”²⁰ And although unstated in his essay, Delgado most certainly knew then what Chakravartty et al. helped quantify last year: that the Quarterly Journal of Speech is one of those spaces that had largely been closed off to certain (non-white) voices.

Chakravartty et al.’s point is simple, well evidenced, and elegant. “Knowledge production that reinforces Whiteness as its undisputed, unexamined frame is incapable of asking what we might learn from the experiences of those who have been, for decades if not centuries, dispossessed of their lands, policed, bombed, detained, indebted, and rendered illegal.”²¹ Furthermore, the mere “physical presence of marginalized scholars does not necessarily entail their legitimation as producers of knowledge, either in terms of publications of citations” in large part because “publication and citation practices produce a hierarchy or visibility and value.”²² And what of rhetorical studies in general and the Quarterly Journal of Speech in particular? In their analysis of twelve communication studies journals, our esteemed journal of record fared the worst with only three percent of articles published since 1990 having first authors of color (about twelve essays) and only one percent featuring race-related keywords.²³ Their methodology may not have been perfect,²⁴ but that should not distract from the damning results. Whether by intent or by effect (and probably a little bit of both over the years), these publication practices that mirror the commitments of our field are racist.

In what remains of my introduction to this forum, I start by unpacking the twin concepts of “race” and “racism” so that we might move beyond the flawed “perpetrator perspective” and toward some kind of commitment to antiracism. In doing so, I move through several examples related to tenure and promotion review practices, journal gatekeeping, and the presence or absence of scholars of color writing about race and racism in this journal, which are all elements of what I, for years, have been calling “#RhetoricSoWhite.” I want to un-settle the kinds of intellectual practices and political commitments that make rhetorical studies such an overwhelmingly white space. What I offer, here, is not a set of answers; instead, I want to track through a more fugitive space to question our norms and institutions and to be suggestive of where that might possibly take us.²⁵ As such, I ask, What if we understand the very epistemic ground upon which the House of Rhetoric is built to be structured by a kind of racism that is less about individual and more about collective commitments to the maintenance of white supremacy and the perpetuation of what Chela Sandoval calls the “apartheid of theoretical domains”?²⁶ In the last part of my essay, I introduce briefly each of the wonderful contributions to this forum by Stacey K. Sowards, Godfried Agyeman Asante, Vincent N. Pham, and Tiara R. Na’puti – a mix of junior and senior scholars from differently and differentially minoritized positions in the field.

Part II: race, racism, and antiracism in rhetorical studies

In his 1994 Du Bois Lectures at Harvard University, Stuart Hall describes race as “one of those major or master concepts (the masculine form is deliberate) that organize the great classificatory systems of difference that operate in human societies. Race, in this sense, is the centerpiece of a hierarchical system that produces differences.”²⁷ To define race as a kind of “master concept,” Hall is careful not to downplay the historical specificity that racial hatred has taken over the centuries; rather, he is trying to draw attention to the ways in which race functions as “a system of meaning, a way of organizing and meaningfully classifying the world.”²⁸ In this sense, race should not be thought of as something that can merely be isolated as significant in particular historical moments (although it can be), but as a larger structure of meaning/world-making that seeps into, emerges from, and articulates to a host of significations. Forming what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls the “racial structure,” race infuses the entirety of our social system as white supremacy, forming “the totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege.”²⁹ For Bonilla-Silva, we must “uncover the particular social, economic, political, social control, and ideological mechanisms responsible for the reproduction of racial privilege in a society.”³⁰

Likewise for Hall, critics must better hone their critical blades to do the “work of unhinging and dislodging common-sense assumptions – ways of talking about, making sense of, or calculating for the great, untidy, ‘dirty’ world of everyday life outside the academy.”³¹ By the “world of everyday life outside the academy,” I think that Hall is getting at the ways in which scholars sometimes have the tendency to speak in an insular way – to think through problems in a manner that appears and sounds esoteric; to talk in a way that warrants the charge of being “stuck in an ivory tower” and disconnected from the struggles of the working class. And make no mistake, the tower is ivory insofar as (in the United States, at least) it is predominantly white, highly regulated by the state, and full of fissures, cracks, and imperfections that rough up the smoothness of its edges that come to a final point at the end. “The academy,” though, is also a space of everyday life and livelihood. It is a site where the banality of racism circulates freely and is refined.

There are many ways that I could define racism at this point. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, for example, argue that a “racial project can be defined as racist if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on racial significations and identities.”³² Bonilla-Silva is similarly concerned with structure, as I noted above. Empirically, he explains, the fact that “whites and people of color cannot agree on racial matters is because they conceive terms such as ‘racism’ very differently. Whereas for most whites racism is prejudice, for most people of color racism is systemic or institutionalized.”³³ In the service of simplicity, I want to draw from Ibram X. Kendi’s monumental How to Be an Antiracist, where he elegantly and persuasively defines racism as “a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.” Breaking the definition down further, Kendi posits that “racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing” and a racist policy amounts to “any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.”³⁴ Like for Bonilla-Silva, racism for Kendi is not fundamentally about racial “prejudice” or “discrimination” of the conscious, explicitly ill-willed sort.

Limiting our understanding of racism to a perpetrator perspective is a mistake. In the words of Kimberlé Crenshaw et al., it treats “the exercise of racial power as rare and aberrational rather than as systemic and ingrained.”³⁵ Problematic as it is, however, such a framing of racism oozes into our collective consciousness and becomes the anchor point through which people have come to appreciate the evils of racist acts without having to struggle against the dispersal of racism throughout a variety of social structures and practices.³⁶

White critical race scholar Robin DiAngelo reframes this in perhaps more meaningful terms for us, writing, “As a product of my culture, my racial illiteracy has rested on a simplistic definition of a racist: an individual who consciously does not like people based on race and is intentionally hurtful to them. Based on this definition, racists are purposely mean. It follows that nice people with good intentions who are friendly to people of a different race cannot be racist. Not only does this definition hide the structural nature of racism, it also enables self-delusion.”³⁷ Such self-delusion is what allows scholars, for example, to protest against any hint of racism in the structure of our journals and the peer review process. It’s all about “merit” to them; of course, as legal scholar Richard Delgado has posited, “merit sounds like white people’s affirmative action … a way of keeping their own deficiencies neatly hidden while assuring that only people like them get in.”³⁸ The mere existence of articles by myself,³⁹ Eric King Watts,⁴⁰ Kirt Wilson,⁴¹ Lisa Flores,⁴² and others⁴³ published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech is not evidence of equity. As Chakravartty et al. have demonstrated, only a dozen such peer-reviewed articles by scholars of color have graced the pages of our journal of record in the last quarter century … and I just named the authors of most.

More insidious is how a perpetrator perspective plays itself out in the reappointment and review process. There, white scholars (and “junior partners”)⁴⁴ bearing the banner of some kind of race neutral objectivity, reward scholarship most like theirs and level the charge of “narrowness” against scholars of color doing critical race and ethnic studies.⁴⁵ As “good people” lacking explicitly hateful intentions, their self-delusion excuses them from asking the hard questions about why they’ve never tenured a scholar of color. Do we need to play the game of counting how many underrepresented minority scholars are tenured in rhetoric and/or public address at PhD granting institutions? It’s a quick game, but one that leads to further tokenization. It’s also a game that privileges “diversity” at the expense of equity and justice, and authorizes the reimagined hashtag #NotAllRhetoricScholars, thus missing the point: that it’s the historical structure of our institutions and norms and policies that have privileged white methods, white theories, white voices, and (at the end of the day) white able-bodied cisgender men.⁴⁶

Even when rhetoric and public address scholarship made a necessary turn to Black speech, as Watts has noted, “the complex and radically contingent operations that make (and unmake) ‘race’ were backgrounded.”⁴⁷ Such backgrounding of the theoretical perspectives that undergird critical praxis means that, with few exceptions that perhaps only prove the rule, we still don’t deal particularly well (in any kind of explicit and theoretically nuanced way) with race or racism. Notwithstanding Lisa Flores’s argument that “rhetorical studies is fundamentally – at its core – the study of race,”⁴⁸ rhetorical studies lacks a reflexiveness about the manners in which its theories and institutional practices reinforce white normativity and ensure the inequitable underrepresentation of scholars of color. The hegemony of the perpetrator perspective, tied to white racial illiteracy and, as Lisa Corrigan has discussed, white fragility,⁴⁹ makes it hard for rhetoric to even ask the right sorts of questions about how racism is endemic to the field rather than an aberrational phenomenon advanced by bad actors.

What is the alternative? If the very structure of the field and this journal that is an intellectual home are fundamentally racist, what are we to do? Kendi’s answer (his starting point at least) is simple: become antiracist. It’s not enough to be “not racist.” The “I’m not racist” or “that’s not racist” is the cop-out cousin to color blindness. The “not racist” and “the color-blind individual, by ostensibly failing to see race, fails to see racism and falls into racist passivity.” He continues:

The language of color blindness—like the language of “not racist”—is a mask to hide racism. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan proclaimed in his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that legalized Jim Crow segregation in 1896. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country,” Justice Harlan went on. “I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.” A color-blind Constitution for a White-supremacist America.⁵⁰

The obsession with perpetrators and the slippery escape from accountability via the gated community of race neutrality is, for Kendi, a greater threat than the so-called alt right. “The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-White Americans toward equity is ‘reverse discrimination.’”⁵¹ Such is the dance that has played out on CRTNET nearly every day of summer 2019.

If, as Kendi argues, “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” then “antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.”⁵² We must revisit and seek to transform our field’s organizational bodies, journal editorships, editorial boards, promotion and tenure norms, citational practices and norms, faculty and student recruitment practices, and a whole lot more – we must do that with an eye toward producing and sustaining “racial equity” so that different groups can stand “on a relatively equal footing,” even if that means that “in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.”⁵³ Part of that difference will also need to be focused on how we value certain sources of knowledge and erase or Otherize the rest. While, as Alexander Weheliye notes, “theoretical formulations by white European thinkers are granted a conceptual carte blanche,” he continues, “those uttered from the purview of minority discourse that speak to the same questions are almost exclusively relegated to the jurisdiction of ethnographic locality.”⁵⁴ Thusly, we are charged with “me-search” and told our work is “not generalizable” while others keep gettin’ funky with Foucault, krunk with Kant, and dirty with Derrida and Deleuze. My point, of course, is not that people shouldn’t get funky with Foucault. Rather, my point is that there’s a presumption that doing so is appropriate, relevant, creative, and welcomed. And such courtesy doesn’t apply to scholars of color in our field bringing the work of scholars of color from our and other fields (and especially from the Global South) to bear on our theories and practices. The cost of living near the House of Rhetoric is erasure of ourselves, which only further underscores the need for a wholistic antiracist reexamination of rhetorical studies.

That process won’t be easy and it won’t be quick. As Kendi notes, “the movement from racist to antiracist is always ongoing – it requires understanding and snubbing racism based on biology, ethnicity, body, culture, behavior, color, space, and class. And beyond that, it means standing ready to fight at racism’s intersections with other bigotries.”⁵⁵ We must fight. We must take a stand. We must have some form of hope that we can break from the modern, Western, colonial, anti-Black, racist structuration of rhetorical studies. The alternative would be grim for me and my peers. It would mean following the advice of a (white) supposed “friend” in rhetoric, that this isn’t the field in which to make such arguments. Rhetoric is tied, inextricably, to the West; and to the extent that it’s colonial or anti-Black, so be it. Accept it or leave – that’s the white choice with which I’ve been presented more than once. And maybe they’re right. Maybe, the foundation is just fundamentally flawed and #RhetoricSoWhite is an unalterable fact. Maybe the wood undergirding the façade of the House of Rhetoric is rotted to its core and I should count my blessing that I’m only a renter. Maybe many of us should simply get out while we can. Or maybe, in one of many moves of fugitivity, we should grab some tools and tear this house down once and for all. I’m continuously torn between these alternatives: an optimistic glance toward antiracist futurity and a pessimistic defiant gaze at a house tumbling down. Ultimately, however, it’s not up to me or any of my colleagues of color. The rest of you have some decisions to make.⁵⁶

Part III: rhetorical interventions in rhetoric’s racism

The essays that follow represent different kinds of interventions that speak to varying degrees of restructuring rhetoric via an antiracist politics. As an editor, I chose not to weigh contributors down with a charge to find a solution or address some specific facet of #RhetoricSoWhite; rather, I left it up to each contributor to address whatever aspect of the field’s whiteness was most on their mind, and to do so in whatever way seemed most appropriate. The contributions represent diverse voices from a range of institutions, ranks, and differential minoritizations, but do not make the mistake of tokenizing any one of them. Each contributor speaks for themselves and is not a representative for others you might assume are like them.

The first essay, by Stacey K. Sowards, is titled “#RhetoricSoEnglishOnly: Decolonizing Rhetorical Studies through Multilingualism.” In this piece, Sowards unpacks a key bias of rhetorical studies through the English language. More than simply a question of the language ability of its readership, Sowards reads the demand for English as embedded within complex power relations and dimensions of coloniality. “This English language dominance,” Sowards writes, “is also about power, race, ethnicity, culture, globalization, colonization, first world/third world and global north/global south dichotomies of thinking.” Just as the “not racist” fallacy serves to perpetuate racism in our society, passive acceptance of English language dominance in our publication and education pipelines maintains a white monolingual dominance that marginalizes the ideas and people who communicate in other languages. When scholars draw from languages other than English, a further expectation is placed on them to engage in translation practices that are highly burdensome and to justify their choices’ relevance to the white, English-only audience. Sowards calls for the emergence of thoughtful and embodied multilingual practices that can help us “think in different and decolonizing directions.”

The second essay, Godfried Agyeman Asante’s “#RhetoricSoWhite and US Centered: Reflections on Challenges and Opportunities,” pushes rhetorical studies to be more critically reflective about it’s global geopolitical positionality and exclusions. For Asante, who moved to the United States from Ghana to attend university, coursework in rhetorical and communication studies was obviously and obliviously “framed exclusively as emanating from the west without much examination on the supposed invisibility of people of color and nonwestern others in the origin and intellectual growth of the field.” Calling for an intersectional and decolonial intervention in the field, Asante pushes rhetorical scholars to challenge the white possessive that structures knowledge formation in the breadth of our scholarly practices. “To dismantle whiteness in rhetoric is to enunciate its characteristics, to denounce how it works,” he argues, and to “consider voice and relationality to address the concealments of coloniality and difference.”

Vincent N. Pham’s “The Threat of #RhetoricNotSoWhite” pushes us to go beyond the cognitive dimensions of the field’s racism, and examine critically the emotional and affective dimensions of claims to “truth” within the field and across society. “‘Rational arguments’ alone will not disentangle the emotional investments in being one who knows,” Pham writes. “What will need to happen is a divestment of emotional attachments and a redistribution of material and emotional attachments to rhetorical studies role in knowledge production.” Examining the affective dimensions of racist “truth” in the Birther movement and the ranks of NCA’s Distinguished Scholars, Pham mobilizes critical whiteness studies and global communication studies to enact a set of comparative methodologies that challenge #TeamRhetoric to make a choice between fearing a future in which rhetoric is not so white or working toward a more transformative racial justice.

The fourth essay, Tiara R. Na’puti’s “Speaking of Indigeneity: Navigating Genealogies Against Erasure and #RhetoricSoWhite,” offers a challenge to the whole of rhetorical studies, including all of us writing in this forum. For Na’puti, “Indigenous scholars examining settler colonialism – as an enduring phenomenon of colonial violence and as a power structure that cannot be reduced to discrete events – have long argued that Western ideologies and discourses of race disappear native claims and peoples while naturalizing non-native claims to place and non-native subjectivity.” Her point has multiple layers of importance. First, we have to acknowledge and remedy the ways in which Indigenous-identified scholars have been excluded from the discipline and this journal. To both her knowledge as well as my own, for example, this journal as only ever published the work of one Indigenous-identified scholar (Richard Morris). Beyond such readily apparent exclusion, however, Na’puti calls for us to be accountable for the ways in which critical race studies also enacts forms of Indigenous erasure. Suggesting “indigeneity as an analytic,” she offers rhetorical studies new ways to understand racialization and racism that guard against the harms of erasure and contribute to alternative pathways for the field.

The forum concludes with a brief “Plática” between myself and the forum participants where we examine the still-unfolding (in September 2019) re-evaluation of policies and practices within and connected to the National Communication Association that have contributed to racial inequity. The controversy over selection policies for NCA’s Distinguished Scholars sparked a firestorm that laid bare a host of racist policies and has generated an atmosphere of reckoning and reconciliation. Many rhetorical and communication studies scholars have begun the conscious process of building a more just and transformative discipline. Others have dug in their heels and doubled-down on their commitments to color-blind racist notions of meritocracy. Lacking space and time to comprehensively examine the rhetorical texture of the ongoing discussion (on Facebook, CRTNET, and elsewhere), we still wanted to offer some initial thoughts that might support continued discussion.

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.