Rhetoric, Race, and Resentment: Whiteness and the New Days of Rage

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Voicing Madness: Towards a Rhetoric of Rage

Meta G. Carstarphen

University of Oklahoma

Every year of bitter submission

Been plotting my bitter revenge …

Now you gonna face the hatred

Of the dog you wouldn’t have in your home¹¹²³⁵

—“Days Of Rage,” Tom Robinson Band

Setting the Stage

It was 1979. A London-based band unveiled a new album at the peak of its popularity. Fueled by its “social movement” reputation, Tom Robinson used provocative lyrics and punk-infused rock beats to move their youthful listeners. During the previous year, singer Robinson and his self-named band headlined an inaugural “Rock Against Racism” event in Victoria Park, London, in front of eighty thousand attendees, according to senior reporter Patrick Sawer. Nearly twenty-five years later in 2013, as Sawer reflected upon the release of the band’s retrospective album, he summoned up both the band’s influence and the times from which it sprang. Sawyer wrote that this band “provided the soundtrack” for protests as “thousands marched in the streets … against racism, for women’s lib, for trade union rights.”

The beats and lyrics of protest have changed from generation to generation—even within the same era. In 1979, lyrics from the song “Days of Rage”—some of which began this essay—seemed to reflect the tenor of the times. In these contemporary times, we might observe the same uneasy shifts and intensified disagreements that many believe marked days long gone. It seems long past time, as I strive to explore in this essay, for an examination of the “days of rage” as an emblem of unspoken, even uneasy, rhetorical conversations yet to be had.

Obama, Race, and Journalism

When presidential candidate Barack Obama ascended to an intensely mediated stage, he materialized the embodiment of our national angst about race. He was both black and white and did not easily fit into a binary of race that habitually named color but ignored whiteness. Even though his career up to that point reflected some of the privileges of the consummate insider—a law degree from Harvard and an elected position as a U.S. senator—his body reflected the image of a perpetual outsider. During the Obama presidential campaign, and certainly after his election, journalism and the media writ large experienced a paradigm-shattering reality. Suddenly, a discourse that had built its authority upon objectivity and truth had the task of “reporting” about the salience of racial identity while appearing to be fair. In journalism, I have observed that race reporting about the government, until the presence of Barack Obama forced a change in national political discourse, remained predominantly issue-oriented instead of person-focused, which ignored “new demographic realignments” (“Uncovering Race” 410). When he won the national election for president—twice—the dilemma of how to “report” about Obama continued to magnify. On the one hand his very personhood included the materiality of what it meant to be raced as “Other,” while he simultaneously inhabited, arguably, the most powerful position of authority on the world stage.

Race remains a troubling construct. The palpable realities of living-while-raced play themselves out in a multiplicity of ways. For communities of color, racial definition has become a constant signifier, while whiteness more often than not has eluded recognition. A multi-fractured term, it is one that Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono characterize as difficult to embrace “without focusing on power relationships” (3). Even then, they acknowledge that race and racism remained definitively illusive in some ways, because of “changing cultural conditions and new technologies” (3). Reflected through a media culture representative of contemporary U.S. culture, Lacy and Ono frame the concept of race as one that is “ambivalent, contradictory, and paradoxical” (1). Significantly, this argument also frames mediated environments as conduits, in part, for how we come to know, or what we think we know, about each other. They call for both critical inquiry and an intentional pluralization of “rhetorics” in order to accommodate and invite work that incorporates “many voices” and “many modes” in examining racial constructions (4).

Postracial Reporting: Shifts Similarities

I have long argued that much of journalism, coded with the “racial enthymeme,” has been adept at transmitting biased perspectives in the form of objectified reportage (“News-Surfing” 27). For example, after the 2008 ascension of President Barack Obama, influential newspaper commentator Maureen Dowd disdained the need for a national conversation about race, declaring that Obama’s election “was supposed to get us past that.” Yet, despite her assertion, the racial enthymeme persisted, morphing into new constructions.

In her 2011 analysis, for instance, Rona Tamika Halualani unpacked a rhetorical strategy all too common in reports across the U.S.—framing communities in “minority majority” structures.” When she looked at how regional newspapers in California used the term “multicultural,” she argued that lumping communities of color together as one rainbow majority seemed to highlight racial progress, as it simultaneously and silently spoke to the latent fears of majority [Anglo] populations that they were losing control (248). When compared to how these same communities might have been racially marked in past decades or generations, this discourse highlighted the “embracing of cultural differences between and among groups” as a celebration of increased diversity (249). At the same time, Halualani observed that this focus masked the dominance of white hegemonic structures, including policies, elected officials, and resources that could reflect how little real power these amalgamated populations truly held. Bathed in the objectified newspeak of journalism, reports such as these use racial enthymemes and implicit messages to unwittingly heighten racial anxieties. These fears, when coagulated around color lines, have only accentuated the illogic of race.

Race has offered no singular, consistent experience, and therefore journalists have not been able to offer a commonly agreed upon explication of it (Carstarphen, “News-Surfing”). Originating in pseudoscience and mercantile avarice, constructions of race have proven to be virulent and adaptive, as Kent and Ono and others have brilliantly argued. Even now, we can watch the subtle crawl of new scientific capabilities and technologies tilt from evidence to enthymeme. Certain companies, for instance, have now placed a new commercial value on racial identity. They market directly to us that technology has now afforded us with opportunities to purchase tests of our DNAs. In this new world, do we compare ourselves to others with similar characteristics in order to redefine the “science” of race, subtly igniting old arguments while posing new questions? What is race? What is the value of the racial signifier? Lisa Gannett examined this search for new strategies of racial recognition under the guise of “biogeographical ancestry,” and found that even these techniques align themselves to “European scientific and philosophical traditions” as well as the U.S. “one-drop rule” about mixed lineages (182). Gannett cautioned scholars and scientists not to rush into “embracing biogeographical ancestry” as a viable concept that could be “an alternative to race” (183).

Unpacking Rage and Social Contexts

While culture, writ large, can point us to the shared histories of whole countries or large language groups, the concept can also encompass the shared fluidities of identity. Consider 1969. From October 8–11, about six hundred activists gathered in Chicago in an extended action of civil disobedience organized by the Weatherman contingent of the SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society (Boyd 144). After Chicago’s highly valued commercial district, known as the “Gold Coast,” experienced nights of property damage, the intense media coverage not only dubbed this event as the “Days of Rage,” but also set an ideological tone. Richard Boyd’s rhetorical analysis of print reports from major newspapers as well as newsweekly magazines suggested that, despite the perceptible differences in editorial styles and locations, “a range of mainstream accounts” co-produced and supported a common “cultural agenda” (145). Writing against the intensity of other highly covered, violence-infused events, including assassinations, urban protests, and anti-war demonstrations, the press that Boyd described was already primed for sensational occurrences and “locked in an intensely reciprocal relationship” with the Weatherman protesters (147). While the activists sought national mediated attention for their philosophies and agendas, the press made parallels to “domestic and international” revolution with explicit associations with Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and “guerrilla warfare” on our shores (148). Ultimately, by hyper-inflating the unlikely possibility of a violent government overthrow, the coverage portrayed the participants as “irrational” and as the “criminal Other” (159). Consequently, when the inevitable state response came in the form of intense police activity and nationally mobilized soldiers, the violence against the protesters became understood as a reasonable response to an attempted toppling of social and political order. Differentiating violence as a binary between a legitimate, state-sponsored form versus the threatening anarchy of a violence safely “banished to the margins” highlighted the media’s role in creating an enduring historic narrative (160). Indeed, magazine journalist and author Bryan Burrough recreated another version of these intense events in his 2015 book, Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI and the Forgotten Age, which garnered a review from The New York Times critic Maurice Isserman. In his thoughtful critique, Isserman found Burrough’s account faulty for highlighting young idealists caught in an “unwinnable struggle” without giving more “historical context” that would help explain the “forces that produced and shaped” the violence and rage behind the actions. This included “anti-civil rights bombings” as well as “anti-Soviet and anti-Arab” violence promoted and activated by right-leaning groups.

Rage on the Margins

Underlying these differing observations of historical times is a rhetorical conundrum that goes beyond the naming and classification of events. It reflects an appropriation of rage solely to describe the anxieties of marginalized communities. With repetition, cultural identities become fixed in historical memory as the enraged versus the rage-less; the irrational versus rationalized.

For example, Lisa Shaver’s carefully wrought work on evangelical Christian rhetoric highlights words of moral outrage used by nineteenth century female activists to draw attention to three major campaigns calling for “abolition, temperance and moral reform” (2). In efforts to express righteous anger against the evils of slavery, alcoholism, and sexual predation, white women from otherwise genteel backgrounds were intentional in their use of cutting words like “serpents,” “fiends,” and “libertines” against their powerful targets. These terms, used repeatedly in speeches, pamphlets, and writings by these adherents, aspired to express the emotional commitment of genteel women unafraid to employ strong language for affect. Shaver concludes that these women, “unified by their rage,” experienced success in their sustained rhetorical campaigns because they changed “public sentiment,” as evidenced by legislative actions and shifts in public attitudes (17).

In contrast to the mobilized anger of a movement, Bryan J. McCann examined the racial discontents of a disgruntled African American autoworker who murdered three coworkers after a series of escalating disagreements with management over work conditions. During the ensuing trial, McCann connected the defense strategy for the accused, James Johnson Jr., with a rhetorical juxtapositioning of “black rage” against “pathologized blackness” (149). By their portrayal of Johnson’s subject-position as a marginalized other with little recourse against white racism, the defense’s argument used racial rage as causation and explanation for Johnson’s inevitable dysfunction. By fundamentally constructing the defendant as “an already troubled man” due to his life experiences and racial identity, attorneys convinced the jury that the accused had little or no other option for his woes than violence (149). Unlike the fictional Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son, whose racial oppression did not exempt him from being convicted of murder, Johnson’s did.

These rhetorical analyses have edged closer to an idea that discourse can be, and has already been, intentionally used to communicate discontent. But two similarities between them bear more critical scrutiny. For one, the exercise of rage becomes situated in the affective states of two subjects who arguably represent a “marginalized” group in their contexts. Both activist white women and an African American blue-collar worker were in actual and symbolic positions of powerlessness, given the political streams of their times. They had neither money, nor political position, nor social clout to exert their will. Accordingly, these analyses suggest that both subjects leveraged the affective influence of their respective emotional states for strategic influence. They used their discontents to insert themselves into conversations around them that defined and restricted their material realities. Yet, the implicit counterpoint in this argument is that the dominant powers do not use rage (unless provoked). Secondly, the semantics of rage in both of these inquiries quickly became replaced by the “twinning” of this word with anger; rage subsumes itself into a less threatening, less volatile notion of anger. In discourse, both popular and theoretical, rage often connotes a state of anger, but a dictionary definition clearly links it to a step beyond frustration, directly linked to violence, even to the point of an irrational or uncontrollable fury.² Herein lies a call to fully excavate rhetorics of rage apart from discontent as a way of making meaning from the discourse of violence, anger, and madness.

In the Heart of Darkness: Rhetorical Rage

Rhetoric and dissent are old companions and the scholarly trail connecting the tension of power and speech, of authority and dissent, is as old as our understanding of the field. Yet, even within our attempts to broaden the frameworks of rhetorical knowledge and history, we sometimes strain against the inadequacy of our own terms. Ruth Amossy, for one, strongly advocates for accentuating rhetoric’s particular role in argumentation and discourse within the imagined public sphere. Her challenge is provocative and uncomfortable, calling as it does to examine the primary purpose of polemics as a “discourse endeavoring to attack another” (56). Reflecting this intentionality includes, among other characteristics, a definitively sharp, and discordant style and tone in its discourse, which Amossy describes as “verbal violence” (57). This role of “polemic discourse” can be an uncomfortable space for rhetoricians, holding to the community-building and discourse sharing possibilities of the field. The rules of logic, order, and even fairness get shoved aside in the face of discourse whose sole aim is, as Amossy described it, to vanquish the “adversary by any means” (53). Ultimately, she has argued for a study of the “rhetoric of dissent” as well as the “search for agreement” in order to provide a more complete view of rhetoric’s potential (60).

These times of fractious political discourse, heightened racial anxieties, and national uncertainties seem to invoke new “days of rage” as palpable as those from four decades ago that have been chronicled in song and narrative. Still, the lyrics that began this essay highlighted the rage of the angry Other. We should wonder what the sound of madness and violence sounded like from the fringes of the silent majorities and ask, were they really silent? I would argue that hegemonic rage has always existed as an invisible but vocalized force, and we have all but ignored its sounds and consequences. Imagined through an expanded rhetorical framework of rage, new work could unearth previously unexamined expanses of action and discourse, especially in the context of racially constructed whiteness. Along the way, there remain many questions and complexities. We may be challenged, in such a theoretical reframing, to affirm a canonical view of rhetoric as consensus-building and persuasive. We may be hard-pressed, against the claims of logic and familiar structures, to find a science in the rhetorics of rage. We might even be intellectually repulsed by the appeals such rhetorics make to our baser emotions of fear and hate. Finally, we might be frustrated by the falsely ethical contexts in which rage reinvents itself, for example, within whiteness and other hegemonies as a symbol of fairness and justice. But during these unquiet times lie unexplored territories for rhetoric. Violent expressions, and expressions leading to violence, cannot be viewed solely as the province of the marginalized, the powerless, and the racialized Other. There is a larger role for a rhetoric of rage, and we are uniquely equipped to call it out of the shadows for what it is.

Meta G. Carstarphen, PhD, APR, holds an endowed professorship in Strategic Communication in the Gaylord College of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oklahoma. Her published research has explored identity, history, and public mediated communication. Her books include Sexual Rhetoric: Media Perspectives on Sexuality, Gender, and Identity (1999); Writing PR: A Multimedia Approach (2004); American Indians and the Mass Media (2011); and Race, Gender, Class and the Media (2017). In 2017, she became editor of Communication Booknotes Quarterly (CBQ), a Taylor &Francis/Rou-tledge journal. She can be reached via Twitter: @DrMCar.

(De)coding Whiteness:Rhetorical Refinement of Coded Rhetoric by White Nationalist WomenAppropriated by U.S. Politicians

Wendy K. Z. Anderson

University of Minnesota–Twin Cities

While staggering racial discrepancies exist regarding legal enforcement, drug laws, mass incarceration, criminal justice, education, employment, economic security, career advancement, civil rights, media access, and housing, desires to end “political correctness” and claims of “reverse racism” infuse U.S. political discourse (Alexander 2; Lipsitz 15; Tucker). Donald Trump’s claims to “Make America Great Again” capitalized on concerns central to the White Nationalist movement: White fears about immigration, concerns about the structure of the global economy, resentment over perceived unfair racial policies, growing acceptance of multiculturalism with an emphasis on promoting racial and ethnic group pride and identity politics, rising expectations of racial and ethnic minorities, high black-on-white crimes, and the exponential growth of the internet (Swain 2). Trump’s coded rhetoric validated racism and consequently, independent, Republican, and even Green party candidates (such as David Duke, Tony Harvater, and Rick Tyler) used “pro-white” campaign slogans such as “Make America White Again” and “White Lives Matter” (Southern Poverty Law Center, “Fringe Racists”). However, racist rhetoric did not begin with Donald Trump.

In the last twenty years, White Nationalism has proliferated online (Berbrier 432; Blee “Women in the 1920s,” Bostdorff; Duffy; Ford and Gil; Marcel; Stewart; Waltman). Klan chapters more than doubled from seventy-two to one-hundred and ninety between 2015 and 2016 (Potok). However, few studies on conservative white women’s rhetoric exist (Blee, “Women of the Klan”; Hogg 393, 404). White Nationalist women’s webspaces at the height of White Nationalist online growth in 2007 became a place of rhetorical refinement for coded white supremacist values pervasive in U.S. cultural and political institutions today. By comparing White Nationalist women’s online rhetoric around 2007 with Donald Trump’s rhetoric during the 2016 presidential campaign, I illustrate how online social movement spaces are public spheres for rhetorical refinement for coded rhetoric, which can be appropriated within U.S. politics to perpetuate ideologies like “inferential racism” (Hall 20). By unmasking coded rhetoric, I offer insight as to how White Nationalist women and Donald Trump signal white people’s potentially unwitting whiteness ideologies that reify and justify a white perspective and privilege, and further fuel White Nationalist action (McKerrow 100; Nakayama and Krizek 299–300). I am using the term resistance to mean some active (verbal, cognitive, or physical) behavior of opposition (Hollander and Einwohner).

Identifying the White Nationalist Movement

Although all rhetoric is coded in a semiotic sense, popular media outlets are producing segments on decoding “diet” or racialized rhetoric to clarify how a rhetor codes values and ideologies to reach a specific audience. In August of 2014 College Humor published a segment on “Diet Racism” showing white people making “sort of racist” claims to comparatively illustrate the implied style of white racism. Comedian, activist, and television personality Franchesca Ramsey in episodes of MTV’s “Decoded,” provided critical depth to the white-centered articulations of diet racism by “decoding” systematic racialization through historicizing uses of terms, stereotypes, images, and events that privilege white people while undermining people of color. Cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall identified this subtle form of racism as “inferential racism,” or “naturalized representations of events and situations relating to race, whether ‘factual’ or ‘fictional,’ which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions” (20). Unlike “overt” racism (cross burning and racial epitaphs), inferential racism stems from unexamined, underlying racial bias, which is rhetorically coded into our language.

Decoding inferential racism becomes challenging when audiences want to believe they/we, and/or, their/our communities are not racist or do not embody racism. In an attempt to deny personal responsibility in addressing systematic racism and, consequently, retain white privilege, people claim colorblindness or that “everyone is equal,” thus preempting the reality of systemic racism with their desire for equality. Arguments of colorblindness do not take into account the ideological implications of social movement rhetorics. Individuals who, and organizations that, overtly embody racism function at the cultural margins, where rhetoric is most generative. Social movement activists must adapt their rhetoric or the movement dies. Similar to Burke’s critique about surface analyses of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, through focused attention on the unethical nature of particular ideologies, scholars may miss the genius of rhetoric deemed unethical by the researcher, assuming that other “rational” people will recognize efforts as ethically suspect (Philosophy 165).⁴ By reducing White Nationalism to “bad” or “taboo” rather than unpacking and engaging their arguments and contra-humanist ideologies, scholars miss that coded rhetoric is refined within social movement contexts to suit various audiences.

Rhetorical social movement scholar Charles Wilkinson defined social movements as the embodiment of “[l]anguaging strategies by which a significantly vocal part of an established society, experiencing together a sustained dialectical tension growing out of moral (ethical) conflict, agitate to induce cooperation in others, either directly or indirectly, thereby affecting the status quo” (91). Power over the symbols used to create their identity provides legitimacy for a movement. Typically, the power of identification “accrues to the institutions because they are the keepers, protectors, and proselytizers of the sacred symbols, emblems, places, offices, documents, codes, values, and myths of the social order,” and those who control word creation and cultural inclusion control the cultural meaning (Stewart, Smith, and Denton 63). However, social movements use rhetorical refinements to keep themselves viable.

Rhetorical refinement, or how rhetoric is expressed, revised, and retested in a social movement context to ensure code palatability in a larger political sphere, is a required legitimation task for social movements. As noted by Michael McGee, symbols (or codes) are used to identify specific values, and mediate ideologies (4). Rhetorical refinement codes a “rhetoric of [racism]” to justify and preserve racial necessity and control (McGee 6). In the case of our current political sphere, due to their refinement, rhetorical codes can become rhetorical resources that are appropriated by other individuals and organizations not explicitly associated with White Nationalism to signal whiteness and recruit members from mainstream audiences. Due to women’s exclusion “from official political participation precisely on the basis of ascribed gender status,” online spaces become access points to influence the public sphere (Fraser 63). Although political rhetors like Donald Trump may have never directly read White Nationalist women’s websites, the rhetorical refinement may be appropriated to signal whiteness.

Refining “Pro-White” as “Pro-Social” Rhetoric to Reach White Women

Communication and sociological scholars describe the White Nationalist movement as stemming from “hate,” “racist,” “separatist,” “extreme,” “radical right,” or “white power” groups, reducing its complexity and the racial bifurcation asserted through terms like “pro-white” or “white nationalist.” By recognizing their “pro-white” stance, scholars acknowledge the negative or “Other” group perspective taken by White Nationalists (Burke, “Definition of Man” 498). The legacy of colonialism provided roots for other/self constructions, where the “Western self is itself produced as an effect of the Western discursive production of its Others” (Frankenberg 17). White is a responsive identity term, only created after attempting to separate oneself from an out-group. By implying an out-group, the “pro-white” terms allow White Nationalists to rhetorically sidestep claims of “overt,” hate focused racism, reducing claims of structural racism to only prejudice (Hall 20). However, the “pro-white,” White Nationalist label evokes “the [non-white] Other,” thus coding colonial, white supremacist values within rhetoric more palatable (socially acceptable) for white communities who are adverse to racist labels, while offering possibilities for societal acceptance of White Nationalism and increases in racial discord and violence (Berbrier; Blee, “Women of the Klan”; Bostdorff; Crenshaw; Waltman). Further, by changing the way they name or frame their content, White Nationalists “cloak” their racism to forward white supremacist values (Daniels 6).

Although White Nationalist organizations portray women in subservient roles such as mothers and wives (Futrell and Simi), White Nationalists increasingly portray women as activists to improve “the image of white racial activism and advocacy” (Berbrier 432). Many White Nationalists see women as the cornerstone of their households, guiding their families, including their husbands, involvement in the movement (Blee, “Inside Organized Racism” 147). For example, the Knights of the KKK’s websites contain images and descriptions of strong female roles such as Valkyries (Viking women) and Amazon warriors (Blee, “Inside Organized Racism” 143; Bostdorff 353). Through both portrayals of white subservient mothers and activist images, the coded rhetoric of White Nationalists subsumes “anti” racialized “other” messages with “pro-white” ones, idealizing how white women can be wives, mothers, and movement activists for White Nationalist organizations. The rhetorical refinement of coded whiteness appears “more conversational and reasonable [in] tone, [and] style,” attracting economically or culturally aggrieved audiences who might not identify with overt racism (Bostdorff 353).

Potential Avenues for White Nationalism in U.S. Politics

Interrogating White Nationalist women’s rhetorical refinement offers insight as to how mainstream politicians “code” whiteness to reach a broader U.S. audience (Southern Poverty Law Center). Inferentially racist codes fit more easily into U.S. mainstream value systems than overt racism (Rokeach; Steele and Redding; Stewart and Cash). U.S. opinion polls show that “favorable assessments of black chances for success often accompanied extremely negative judgments about the abilities, work habits, and character of black people” (Lipsitz 19), thus illustrating “post-Civil Rights” or “post-racial” attitudes concerning equality and the potential for making people of color a scapegoat for the litany of concerns noted above (Squires; Swain 2). Favorable assessments of white success with negative assessments of black personal character illustrate an external loci of control for people of color, or that external influences and not a person of color’s abilities are responsible for their success, while their efforts or existence become the limitation or downfall of [white] American “greatness.”⁵

Unmasking Coded White Supremacist Values

Rhetorical codes manifest through shared white supremacist values. Stewart and Cash, Rokeach, and Steele and Redding identified five core values (with corresponding sub-values) dominant in U.S. culture (see Appendix 1). Although I analyzed texts initially for all five sets of values, in this study I concentrate on how White Nationalist women and Donald Trump use survival, social, and independence values to code rhetorics of whiteness, furthering inferential racism (Anderson 88–93).

Valuing Safety and Security to Code White Privilege

To justify their white privilege, White Nationalists and Trump identified survival values of health, safety, and security through biological and physical boundaries. White Nationalists simulated whiteness through bodily material referents (Baudrillard 20; Burke, Philosophy 194) of white, young and innocent, fertile, and/or technologically empowered women and girls (Women for Aryan Unity and Friends; kirkwomen; National Socialist Movement Women’s Division). For example, the kirkwomen’s website features a long blonde-haired, large-breasted, and unblemished or untanned white-skinned woman, in a tight black shirt and skirt, holding a semi-automatic assault rifle (kirkwomen). The physical referents of long hair, large breasts, and youthful, but mature skin, all construct sexual vivaciousness as the health of a white woman. The addition of an assault rifle makes an argument about her potential violent empowerment, or ability to use technological means, to assault or kill another person. By embodying the value of health, White Nationalist images like these create a simulacra of either a sexualized, white woman warrior ideal, or that white women are physically able to be warriors in this representative fashion.

Similarly, Trump asserted the biological “perfection” of his daughter as he joked about incest (Solotaroff; The View). When asked if he would be okay if his daughter were put on the cover of Playboy, he responded, “Although she does have a very nice figure. I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps, I would be dating her” (The View). By calling attention to the physical prowess of his daughter and how she came from himself, Trump gestured to her biological “perfection,” focusing not on her whiteness but on the value of health illustrated by her attractiveness. Both instances make the argument of deserving privilege because of their “healthy” perfection.

In addition to valuing white health, White Nationalists assert physical boundaries as illustrative of white safety and security. For example, in their photo gallery webpage, the National Socialists Movement (NSM) Womens’ Division provides images of anti-immigration signs with the words “Protect our Border” and “Close the border!” (“Photo Gallery”). By using the term “border,” the NSM Womens’ Division defined the nation by physical borders. White Nationalists defined physical boundaries to assert their white privilege as Americans as separate from “others.”

Similarly, Trump capitalized on increasing fear of safety and security. During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump argued for identification and surveillance of people of the Muslim faith and identified people of Mexican descent as criminals (Obeidallah; Washington Post Staff). In his campaign announcement, Trump asserted,

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people … I’ll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan. (Washington Wire)

By identifying people of Muslim faith and Mexican descent, as well as people from nonwestern or non-white backgrounds, he creates an out-group of “others” based on non-“American” origins.⁶ His choice of identity politics by referring to physical boundaries illustrates how “constructions of citizenship in America are tied to racial hierarchies,” or that by identifying a physical boundary determined by whiteness, Trump justifies racialized assertions and poor treatment of non-white “others” to preserve American values of safety and security (Epps-Robertson 109).

Both White Nationalists and Trump highlight the same values of health, safety, and security by idolizing [white] factors and demonizing [racial other] identities; one identity which deserves privilege and one that threatens privilege (Thompson 358–59). Although not surprising that citizenship is tied to racial identities, the value of safety and security becomes uniquely coded through personal and community health. Arguments of superior physical boundaries and biology become reasoning for white privilege.

Valuing a [White] Community by Coding [White] Identity

Once the safety and security of white people are established, White Nationalist women and Trump use survival values to socially situate boundaries on an historic, patriotic identity of white privilege. White Nationalists assert “white” as synonymous with American by locating patriotism in “European heritage” and negating “non-western ways” (Angry White Female, “Home Page”). White Nationalists such as “Snow White” identifies pride in multiple European heritages: “I am Scottish-Irish-German-Dutch and I get cranky if you make me fess up to that little bit of French in there!” (White). Snow White proudly asserts her European roots, using European as synonymous with American. By identifying multiethnic, yet [white] European roots, [white] heritage becomes “an anchoring point for an American identity” (Nakayama and Krizek 301). Connecting an American identity with white European roots facilitates Americanness as white property due to a heritage of superior white identity (Harris 1736).

Similarly, during his campaign rallies and debates, Donald Trump coded [white] patriotic identity as “hardworking” [white] Midwestern “Americans.” At the Iowa Freedom Summit, Trump stated,

I have great respect for Steve King and have great respect likewise for Citizens United, David and everybody, and tremendous respect for the Tea Party. Also, also the people of Iowa. They have something in common. Hard-working people.

Due to the dominance of white people in these groups, Trump coded [white] American identity in “hardworking,” Midwestern, Tea Party descriptors. Further, Trump solidified his racial bifurcation as he contrasted his implied whiteness with racialized others. In his June 16th speech announcing his candidacy for President, Trump constructed a non-American racialized other as dangerous, undeserving people, harkening stereotypes used by former President George W. Bush and nineteenth century white U.S. journalists and other citizens (Thompson 360; Fehler 349). Trump’s definitions of [white] America not only justify and validate white identity and privilege, but also assert a white birthright to greatness. In his speech on foreign policy, Trump stated, “We will not apologize for becoming successful again, but will instead embrace the unique heritage that makes us who we are” (“Foreign Policy Remarks”). By calling attention to “heritage” and negating people of immigrant status, Trump signaled to [white] people that patriotism is found within [white], [European] American heritage with him as our “medicine man” to bring us to that greatness (Burke, Language 282; Thompson 366).

Valuing Independence through Cultural Appropriation and [White] Domination

By valuing white privilege and a [white] American patriotic identity, White Nationalists and Trump argue for valuing [white] independence through justifying racial domination. White Nationalists desired independence from “political correctness” or multiculturalism, which they viewed as a restriction of their freedom of speech. For example, Brenda Walker argued that the government supported political correctness toward people of immigrant status “rather than law enforcement” (Bevens). White Nationalists claimed that programs for “others” infringed on their right to speak their perspective. White Nationalists appropriated cultural studies rhetoric to describe the racial discrimination they experienced. For example, White Nationalist blogger “Angry White Female” argued, “I, contrary to White ‘lemmings,’ refuse to act as a member of a conquered race. I will not learn the languages of the conquerors, nor teach them to my children. I am an upstanding White woman, and will not be forcefully assimilated into my own country” (“About Me”). By using the term “assimilated,” Angry White Female framed her victimhood as “reverse racism,” an impossible context in the U.S. where white culture is dominant. Through the construction of oppressive inevitability, White Nationalists argue their power and authority [property] of Americanness and justify coercive acts of change. However, their expressions are examples of white fragility, where [white] people code themselves as victims instead of a dominant group to recent conversations about racial inequity on themselves (DiAngelo 54–55).

Similarly, during his campaign Trump nostalgically reminisced on a past time when violence toward others (“weak”) would gain independence from “political correctness” (Campbell). Through his assertion of independence values, Trump incited the violent roots of the White Nationalist movement, justifying aggressive actions toward non-conforming “others.” For example, when heckled during his rally speech in Nevada, Trump asserted, “We’re not allowed. You know. The guards are very gentle with him. He’s walking out, big high fives, smiling, laughing. I’d like to punch him in the face” (Diamond). Trump further asserted that he would pay the legal fees for someone who did engage in violence against another protestor in Iowa. Trump stated, “Knock the crap out of him, would you? Seriously, OK just knock the hell—I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise, I promise” (Engel). Donald Trump identified the lengths he will go to retain white dominance, including encouraging violent actions against others—like his hecklers who were often young Black men—or financially supporting those [white] people who engage in violence against “others.” His justifications of violence fueled future aggression and violence, as seen by the increase in widespread hateful harassment, intimidation, hate crimes, and racist graffiti, most commonly happening in schools (SPLC, “Ten Days After”; Yan et al.). For rhetors like Trump, white fragility justifies the oppression of others, and his assertions of supremacy are coded within an authoritarian nostalgia that, when ignited, become widespread hateful harassment, intimidation, hate crimes, racist graffiti, and violence.

Using Privilege to Unmask, Rather than Reify, Rhetorical Coding

On the cutting edge of blatantly racist rhetoric, White Nationalist women’s online sites become rhetorical resources as to how racism can be coded in U.S. politics. White Nationalist women’s webspaces become sites for rhetorical refinement, where their vivid examples of coded whiteness can be expressed, revised, and retested for mainstream audiences. For white supremacy, values such as safety, security, and health code white privilege to facilitate narrow definitions of [white], European “American” patriotism. Cultural appropriation of white fragility and victim rhetoric are used to justify violence toward others as a means to secure one’s independence. The rhetorical refinement of racism by White Nationalist women comes full circle as U.S. mainstream politicians use it as coded rhetoric, justifying white supremacist values even when they lose; however, more so when they win (Kendzior). Continued support of Trump’s coded rhetoric validates racism, allowing white supremacist values to flourish within mainstream U.S. institutions.

As scholars, we need to unpack rhetorical refinement to ensure that people recognize how coded rhetoric signals values that mask ideologies like racism. Considering the unequal enforcement of civil rights laws, it is dire that we study how forms of violently aggressive civic engagement are justified by coded rhetoric in U.S. politics (Lipsitz 23). Recognizing oppressive structures complicates and implicates the lives and choices of white people. White people may be “embarrassed by the benefits they receive from white supremacy, while others are inconvenienced or even threatened by the resentment it creates,” but vigilance is necessary (Lipsitz xiv). Cultural immigration is a necessary part of the U.S.’s historical, cultural survival. We need to call attention to what “isn’t great” (or the negative), critique “pro-social” values, and engage independence arguments of “political correctness” as more than being rude, but as ethical identity attacks (Rosenberg). We need to support leaders because they preserve and encourage the exercise of democracy and hold those accountable who use paternalistic, authoritarian efforts to gain power for the implications of their appropriated rhetoric. Only through continued critical engagement of rhetorical refinement of racism can we stand together as scholars in the face of attacks on intellectual freedom to help preserve and cultivate the communities in which we live.

Dr. Wendy K. Z. Anderson researches social change rhetorics at the intersection of racism and feminism within digital contexts. She completed her Ph.D. at Purdue University in Communication Studies and is currently working in the Department of Communication Studies teaching argumentation, communication ethics, and free speech at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cites in Min-neapolis. She can be reached at [email protected].

“Who Are These Nine People?” #BlackLives[StillDon’t]Matter?

Davis W. Houck

Florida Sate University

“Some there are who have left behind them a name to be commemorated in story. Others are unremembered; they have perished as though they had never existed, as though they had never been born.”

—Ecclesiasticus 44: 8, 9

“They’ll find some new bodies on the weekend. That’s when everybody goes fishing, so some new bodies will turn up.”

—Julian Bond, July 30, 1964

As newspaper editors around the state raged about the “communist invaders,” the “beatnik hippies” and always, it seemed, the “sex-obsessed sophomores,” the Bowles family did what many Mississippians, white and black, liked to do on the humid, sultry weekends: They went fishing. Formed when the Mississippi River overflowed its banks and cut a new path, the Old River is a sluggish backwater that curves west around the ghostly and long-abandoned Davis Plantation, Briarwood, a twenty-five thousand acre cotton expanse, south and west of Vicksburg, once owned and operated by the President of the Confederacy and his brother.

From their small skiff, and nearing noon, Mrs. Bowles noticed what appeared to be a floating log. As they moved closer, the floating object revealed its secret: Splayed across the log was a pair of jeans, the legs of which were bound together by hay wire. Startled by their discovery, they returned to shore and reported what they had seen near the Palmyra Chute off the Old River. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was called about the Bowles’s ghastly Sunday discovery. A huge press contingent, headquartered mostly in Meridian, more than one-hundred and fifty miles to the east, packed its cameras and film and sprinted towards the Old River; this might be the break they had been waiting twenty-one days for (Finlayson and Wilder).

By Monday morning, July 13, 1964, newspaper reports in nearby Natchez printed what many locals were only whispering: The body—or what remained of it—of missing civil rights worker Michael “Mickey” Schwerner might have finally been discovered. Why Schwerner? The twenty-four-year-old Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organizer and Cornell graduate always wore jeans and sneakers; the brittle corpse appeared to be white; and perhaps most revealing of all, the jeans were fastened by a leather belt with a letter “M” belt buckle. Surely the other two missing workers, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, were nearby in the fetid and murky waters of the Old River. A second headless body, also bound with hay wire, was discovered on Monday. Navy frogmen from Charleston, South Carolina were ordered in to determine if, in fact, the Old River doubled as a Klan boneyard. The grotesque discoveries even had the ear of President Lyndon Johnson, who was informed on July 13 by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that two bodies had been recovered.

But whoever had drowned the two bodies made one critical error: In their haste to forever sink the evidence of their crimes and the identities of their victims, they didn’t search the bodies’ pockets for identifying clues. On the first body was a jeans pocket with a wallet, a selective service card, and a key bearing the marks, VD1-47. The second body pulled from the Old River also contained a selective service card in a back pocket. In this wholly accidental manner were officials finally able to identify the two headless and badly decomposed corpses as Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee. Both black. Both only nineteen-years-old. Neither involved with civil rights. Both were locals who had gone missing on May 2, 1964 from their homes in Franklin County, a Ku Klux Klan hotbed in southwestern Mississippi. And both, according to the white Mississippi press, were “good negroes.” In other words, they were certainly not mixed up with the “invading Communists” out to change Mississippi’s “way of life.”

This brief essay, part of a larger book project on Freedom Summer, explores the ghostly traces of Moore and Dee in movement memory and movement historiography. More explicitly, I trace how the evidence of Moore and Dee’s bodies function rhetorically as proof that many more (black) bodies were supposedly discovered during the search for the missing civil rights workers, Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. Documentary filmmakers, for example, leverage the moving images taken on July 12, 1964, as telling visual evidence that many more black male bodies were “accidentally” discovered during the forty-four day search that captivated the nation more generally and the FBI specifically. Not only do I interrogate the rhetorical function of these images, but I also examine the historicity of the contemporary claims: Did, in fact, law enforcement officials discover additional bodies? If so, how many bodies were discovered? Some have claimed five, others have argued for eight, still others claim a dozen, and some even claim more than two dozen black male bodies were recovered during the search for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. One journalist has even maintained that accidentally discovered black male bodies were “thrown back” since they were the “wrong” bodies (Adams).

But beyond the historicity of the body count is something even more insidious: These bodies remain—more than fifty-two years on—without a story, without a geography, and without a name. Even as they argue very persuasively that black lives simply didn’t matter back in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, movement veterans, filmmakers, journalists and yes, historians, refuse—in the present—to offer any details about the so-called unnamed black bodies, thereby perpetuating the silences surrounding their disappearance and supposed reappearance. Stated in the form of a question: How can black lives matter without a name? And, by steadfastly refusing to name names and provide the corresponding evidence of their discovery, are proponents of these “unnamed bodies” stating rather explicitly, if inadvertently, that black lives still don’t matter, and in doing so, fuse past and present?

“Other Bodies Being Found”?

I first stumbled on the story of Charles Moore and Henry Dee by way of Goodman-Schwerner-Chaney in 2006. As with most beginnings, it took me some time to understand it as such. The originating event was a documentary, Freedom Summer, directed by Marco Williams and aired on the History Channel. Not unlike many of its predecessors, the documentary highlighted the disappearance of the three civil rights workers early in the program. That event had become “The Defining Event” of the summer project; its importance in American history and popular memory had been portended before white volunteers had even returned to their campuses. But then a curious thing occurred at the thirty-minute mark of the documentary: Grainy black and white footage showed what appeared to be law enforcement personnel in small boats in rivers and swamps. CORE’s Dave Dennis, from the twenty-first century, contextualizes what we are seeing: “During the time that the bodies of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were missing, there were other bodies being found, alright. America did not, the press did not, pick it up. The press did not talk about it.” Director Williams then cuts to Tufts University Professor Gerald Gill, who further specifies, “When they were dredging up rivers and creeks in Mississippi, the Navy had uncovered numerous other bodies, the bodies of black men. There was one instance of a black male torso being discovered wearing a CORE t-shirt. They came up with nine other bodies of unidentified black males.” Dennis then punctuates the segment:

Some of them [black bodies] were on the side of the road, you know, some of them were in other areas, some were buried; the fact is that they found people, bodies strung up in trees, and things of that nature. And the amazing thing about it was, was that when they discovered that they were not one of the civil rights workers, there was like this sigh of relief. (Williams)

Dennis and Gill did not attempt to name any of the recovered black bodies, or specify when and where the bodies had been discovered.

I was dumbstruck: If in fact nine other black bodies were discovered during the forty-four day search for the three missing civil rights workers, and if the nation in 2006 still did not know who they were, and since I wrote about and taught the civil rights movement in Mississippi, by my reckoning, I was complicit in the conspiracy of silence. Not knowing wasn’t an excuse; it was, in fact, precisely part of the larger systemic problem of black erasure as it played out in Freedom Summer historiography.

I learned the names Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee, I located one or two pictures, and I read the details of their deaths. What of the other six or seven (?) black bodies? I consulted John Dittmer’s highly esteemed book, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi. Published thirty years after Freedom Summer, and with an entire chapter devoted to the summer project, surely the black bodies question would get clarified in this masterful and comprehensive work. Dittmer curiously expresses his own historiographical ennui with the summer project by titling his Freedom Summer chapter as “That Summer”—as if it needed any other designation—and referring to the murders of the three civil rights workers as “depressingly familiar.” Dittmer devotes only one fleeting and error-filled paragraph to Moore and Dee:

On July 12, the day after J. Edgar Hoover left Jackson, a fisherman near Tallulah, Louisiana, reported seeing the lower half of a man’s body caught on a log in a bayou near the Mississippi River. The next day the lower half of a second body was discovered nearby. The victims were twenty-year-old Charles Moore, an Alcorn College student, and Henry Dee, twenty-one, neither of whom had been active in the civil rights movement. (251)

Dittmer continues, “On May 2, [K]lansmen had abducted the two young men and taken them deep into the Homochitto National Forest, where they bound them to a tree and beat them to death. Their bodies were then tied to an engine block and dumped into the river.” In addition, “The body of a black teenager, never identified, was also found floating in the Big Black River. He was wearing a CORE T-shirt. Once it became clear that these three victims were not the missing Council of Federated organizations (COFO) workers, the press and the public quickly lost interest” (251-52).

Dittmer gets both men’s ages wrong; Dee and Moore were alive when they were drowned; “the river” is never specified even as it’s assumed to be the Mississippi River (is it a bayou or a river?); and the Klan’s crime(s) remains motiveless. Furthermore, the “never identified” black teenager with the supposed CORE t-shirt, was in fact immediately identified: He was fourteen year-old Herbert Oarsby from New Orleans, who had gone missing from his grandparents’ house in Pickens, Mississippi, and who had likely drowned in the Big Black River on September 7, nearly two weeks after the close of the summer project. And his granddaddy, Tobe Hart, knew nothing about a CORE t-shirt. But did, in fact, the press and the public “quickly los[e] interest” in the Dee and Moore case, per Dittmer’s claim? The Mississippi press covered the story for the better part of a week, and the FBI investigated the case for nearly four months. The New York Times, among others, followed the story well into January 1965 when the District Attorney dropped charges against Klansmen James Ford Seale and Charles Marcus Edwards. Perhaps most importantly, where are the seven other black bodies discovered during the search for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, per Dennis and Gill’s claims? Six, if you counted the erstwhile Oarsby. Was Freedom Summer “depressingly familiar” because of the numbing repetition of erroneous details? Was it “That Summer” because everybody already knew how it began, ended, and the racialized narrative arc that played out? Or had popular culture emptied out Freedom Summer’s significance and nuance?

Dittmer’s account raised more questions than it answered, especially on the vexatious body count question. I next consulted perhaps the foremost historical book on the three murders, Cagin and Dray’s 1988 book (republished in 2006), We Are Not Afraid: The Story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, and the Civil Rights Campaign for Mississippi. Unlike Dittmer, Cagin and Dray flesh out the Moore and Dee murders and offer motives as to the Klan kidnapping and killing. After telling their story in two fact-packed paragraphs, the authors close the Moore and Dee interlude with a final paragraph: “To the horror and disgust of southern blacks and movement people, several black corpses were found in Mississippi by authorities searching for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney” (372). Presumably, given the chronology and placement of their account, Cagin and Dray are referring to “black corpses” in addition to Moore and Dee. Questions immediately arise: How many constitute “several,” where were these bodies discovered, and by whom? Cagin and Dray close the paragraph with a sentence remarkably similar to Dittmer: “[O]ne of the saddest discoveries of the season was the body of a never-identified boy, about fourteen, wearing a CORE T-shirt, which was found floating in the Big Black River” (372). Again, the “season” was over and the “never-identified boy” had a name and a place—even an address. Why didn’t Cagin and Dray offer even a name—and guess at, rather than confirm, an age? Particularly when they had eighteen years to correct the book’s second edition. Were nameless black bodies the order of the historiographical day? Did we need even more Mississippi horror than the dead black bodies we could count—and name? If so, why?

Sensing that I might have stumbled on to something important, or at least a curious question, I decided to consult the sources closest in time and perhaps space, to the events of 1964. First up was William Bradford Huie’s 3 Lives for Mississippi. In a lengthy exposition on Klan intrigue, Mississippi resistance, and detailed re-creation, Huie says not a word about any bodies discovered—black or white—beyond Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney. Similarly, one of the very first academic histories of the summer, William McCord’s Mississippi: The Long Hot Summer, contains no mention of Moore and Dee, and nothing about unidentified black bodies discovered during the hunt for the three men. Too, a survey of current events publications such as the The New York Times, Time, and U.S. News and World Report, among others, revealed no evidence of unnamed black bodies discovered in June, July, or August, 1964. Perhaps most germane, there is nothing in the monastically documented “Running Summary of Incident Reports” kept by COFO during that summer that even suggests unnamed black bodies beyond the two found on July 12 and 13.

Revealing, too, are the memoirs published by Mississippi movement veterans. Tracy Sugarman’s 1966 memoir is silent on black bodies. The appointed “historian” of Freedom Summer, lawyer Len Holt, also has nothing to say about the discovery of black bodies during the forty-four day search for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, nor do any of the letters published in Elizabeth Martinez’s anthology. Don Whitehead, who had a very close working relationship with the FBI, says nothing about unidentified black bodies discovered during the unprecedented search in his history of the Klan in Mississippi. A bit farther removed in time, James Farmer, who was the Executive Director of CORE, and who was one of the very first movement personnel to ask face-to-face questions of Cecil Price and Lawrence Rainey, says nothing about the discovery of unnamed black bodies, nor do Stokely Carmichael (2003) or Cleveland Sellers (1990)—both of whom walked the rivers and swamps searching for their colleagues. Unita Blackwell (2006), a black Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) organizer from the tiny Delta community of Mayersville, noted in her memoir that only three black bodies—Moore, Dee, and Chaney—were discovered that summer. One of the most interesting memoirs of the summer project, originally published in 1965 by Sally Belfrage, also makes no claims about dead black bodies—until her memoir was re-issued in 1990. In her “Preface” to that edition, Belfrage, in excoriating Hollywood’s heroicization of the FBI in the film Mississippi Burning, describes “dragging the rivers and swamps without somehow turning up any of the nameless black bodies in fact found at the time” (xv). In the span of twenty-five years, it appears, nameless black bodies were discovered and noted.

I wondered what the laconic Bob Moses had to say. Moses was not only the architect of the Summer Project, but given his central place in the rhetorical trajectory of interracial violence anticipating the Project, surely he would have said something about nameless and unidentified black bodies being discovered. Surely the organizer who leveraged black invisibility and thus disposability as the principal reason for Freedom Summer in the first place would have noted such a discovery; it would be proof, after all, of much of what he had been saying since at least November 1963, when the Freedom Vote came and went without anyone getting killed and white college students providing something of a shield. Reflecting on the ongoing killing in Mississippi in 1965, Moses stated, “At the same time that everyone knows about the three [Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney] who were killed and the people who are on trial for that, no one asks about the two Negro boys [Moore and Dee] whose bodies were severed in half, who were found while they were looking for the other three, because nobody knows about them.” Furthermore, “nobody asks why did that grand jury let those people off who were indicted for that crime, on the same day that they indicted the people who were supposed to have killed the other three. And nobody asks because, again, nobody knows about it” (www.crmvet.org/info/mosesq.htm). While Moses can be forgiven for the erroneous claim that a grand jury was convened in 1964 or 1965 in the Moore and Dee case, he does not, just months after the Summer Project, mention black bodies beyond Moore and Dee. Nor does he lump the body of fourteen-year-old Herbert Oarsby into the unknown.

“Unofficial” Activist Accounts

In my quest to answer the missing black bodies question, perhaps I was going about it all wrong since the official sources hadn’t gotten around to recording the deaths. While such reasoning seemed admittedly far-fetched, I had nothing to lose in pursuing the possibility with movement veterans. Why not ask the men and women who were on the ground? Perhaps they knew things that official histories simply did not record. And so I first turned to my friend, Lawrence Guyot, whose prodigious memory and archive always proved useful and insightful. No, the retired SNCC’er and Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) chairman exclaimed—and Guyot almost always exclaimed—no unnamed black bodies were discovered that summer. He was quite sure of it. I next turned to friend and constant benefactor to my students, Reverend Edwin King, the white Lieutenant Governor on the Freedom Vote ticket in 1963. No, he’d checked his detailed files and his many living sources, they didn’t discover any such bodies during the Summer Project; he was almost positive. With some trepidation, I next reached out to Mickey Schwerner’s widow, Rita, (now Rita Bender) who had been most gracious in reliving some of the traumatic days of 1964 with me years earlier via email. She replied promptly; no, she knew of no such bodies either, but encouraged me to reach out to several others who might know. One of those was Jackson Clarion Ledger journalist Jerry Mitchell, whose reporting on the Klan, including James Ford Seale, had helped put several men behind bars, and whose research was legendary. Mitchell confessed that, even as he’d encountered such rumors, he didn’t know of any sources or any proof that such bodies were ever discovered.

And yet the unnamed black bodies claim persisted—in scholarly sources, popular accounts, and documentary film.

Activist versus Activist: History versus Memory

In their award-winning and critically acclaimed 2010 film, Neshoba: The Price of Freedom, Micki Dickoff and Tony Pagano chronicle the quest for justice in the murders of the three civil rights workers. That is, while seven men were eventually convicted and served jail time for their roles in the conspiracy to murder Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, the mastermind of the operation, Baptist preacher and sawyer, Edgar Ray Killen, had never been convicted for his role in the murders. As his (re)trial approached, Killen granted the filmmakers unprecedented access to his wife, his home, and ultimately himself. But in telling the story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney to a new generation of viewers, Dickoff and Pagano revisited some of the black bodies claims made by Dave Dennis and many others. This time Dennis is accompanied by a new witness: Fellow Freedom Summer organizer and Mississippi activist, Hollis Watkins. Unlike Dennis, Watkins had been outspokenly against the Summer Project arguing that it would undermine the fragile coalition-building that SNCC had been successfully doing with blacks in the Delta for more than two years. As many of his colleagues argued, a huge influx of educated and upwardly mobile whites would unalterably affect the racial landscape—organizationally and otherwise.

Dickoff and Pagano tell the story of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney’s deaths early in their film using a mix of archival footage, present-day interviews, still images, and music. A much older Rita Schwerner foregrounds the importance of race to the case: “This case has gotten the attention it has gotten because two of the three men were white.” Archival footage of James Chaney’s mother, Fannie Lou Chaney, follows: “It is no secret, … if it hadn’t been for Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, my son wouldn’t have been known and wouldn’t have been found.” Following interviews with Jerry Mitchell and Chaney’s brother, Ben, the film cuts to black and white moving images from the Old River, most likely taken on July 12. The FBI’s man in charge of the “Miburn” case, a cigar-smoking Joe Sullivan pulls parts of a body in a bag to a muddy and uneven shore, and later handles what appears to be a femur. Dave Dennis talks about the discovery of “two bodies”—again, never named as Henry Dee and Charles Moore—and “everybody holding their breath, hoping that it’s not them.” We next cut to more archival moving images of the Old River, body bags, and Matt Jones’s “In The Mississippi River” cues the next interview. Hollis Watkins states, “As a result of their dragging the Mississippi River, nine additional bodies other than the three civil rights workers were pulled out of the Mississippi River.” After dropping this enormous claim, Watkins concludes the segment with a question: “Who are these nine people?” No contextual clues are offered for what we are watching, and whose horribly decomposed bodies are presumably coming out of the Mississippi River. Given the paucity of information, we’re led enthymematically to assume that these bodies belong to some of the nameless “nine people,” and that those people, per Rita Schwerner Bender and Fannie Lee Chaney’s earlier remarks, are black. Part of Watkins’s claim is factually wrong: No bodies—black or white—came out of the Mississippi River during the search for the three missing civil rights workers. Moreover, the Mississippi River was never dragged for bodies; the Pearl River was, certainly the Old River was, but never the Mississippi.

But Watkins’s haunting question—“Who are these nine people?”—along with the gruesome images of bones and bags, hovers over this brief interlude. While his query functions as a rhetorical question and thus no attempt at an answer is made, other questions come to the surface: Don’t the filmmakers have an ethical obligation to at least identify the remains of what’s coming out of the Old River? By leaving Henry Dee and Charles Moore nameless in death—when they could readily identify them—the claim of nameless black bodies continues in perpetuity, as does the suppressed premise: Black bodies, regardless of the number, don’t really matter. Then or now.

Anniversary Multiplier

With the fiftieth anniversary celebration of Freedom Summer in 2014, the missing black bodies claim only multiplied. But no journalist could name any names, give any places, detail any specifics of murdered black Mississippi men. In an article for Colorlines, for example, Carla Murphy quotes summer volunteer, Heather Tobis Booth: “I was frightened all the time. I was insecure. I think lots of young women especially are. I was afraid that I didn’t know enough, that I might harm someone else with my actions. I was also frightened for my life.” The then-eighteen-year-old stated:

But I realized that poor black people in Mississippi lived with that kind of terror every day. I only learned later that while looking for the three missing young men, they found the bodies of eight other black men. Their hands were found. Their feet had been chopped off. They’d been thrown into the Mississippi River and those murders had never even been reported.

In Askia Muhammad’s fiftieth anniversary article, the journalist claimed, “Ironically, in the desperate search before those three bodies were found in an earthen grave in Neshoba County, authorities dredged many lakes and ponds. They found body, after body, after body of Black men who had previously disappeared without any public outcry.” In The Tri-State Defender, George E. Curry claimed that:

While looking for the three civil rights workers in rivers and swamps, other black bodies were discovered. One was Herbert Oarsby, a 14-year-old boy who was wearing a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) T-shirt. The bodies of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, who had been expelled from Alcorn A&M College for civil rights activities, were also discovered. The remains of five more black men were found, but never identified.

Finally, and similarly, in Nikole Hannah-Jones’ anniversary piece for The Atlantic Monthly she claims, “The federal government swarmed Mississippi. The FBI opened an office there for the first time in two decades. The nation’s eyes wound up riveted on a place that many felt had existed outside the laws of the land. And as law enforcement dragged rivers searching for the missing civil-rights workers, they found at least nine bodies of black men who’d disappeared well before.”

Whither Black Lives Mattering?

So where are we in 2017 and beyond? Many authors claim there were no bodies beyond Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney as well as Moore and Dee discovered during the forty-four day search; many movement veterans claim, no, there were several black bodies—reaching as high as two dozen; other movement veterans say, no, there were no other bodies discovered. And journalists and filmmakers have offered differing versions of each of these accounts.

In light of a complete lack of any physical evidence, I’m doubtful any unnamed black bodies were discovered in June, July, and August 1964. I have no reason to believe otherwise. Until evidence is offered, I can’t accept the idea that black men in Mississippi mattered so little—then or now—that they didn’t/don’t have a name and a story. No doubt my incredulities say more about me than perhaps any grainy black and white images or a water-logged selective service card ever could.

These days we don’t need such forms of evidence. We know the names Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, and so many more black men/boys, because of the ubiquity of mobile technologies. And because many in the country actually care about black bodies—and want to give them a name and a story. And to see justice done in the wake of their deaths. Or murders. That reality, though, is tempered by one overweening fact, one that takes us back to Briarwood, the Old River, and the horrific murders of two black teens: Justice was forty-three years late; James Ford Seale served only the last four years of his life in prison for the premeditated murders of Charles Moore and Henry Dee. Charles Marcus Edwards did no time, nor did several other Klansmen involved in the kidnap/murder. Too, even as the murders of Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney galvanized the nation in 1964, and have largely overwhelmed our histories and public memories of Freedom Summer, we mustn’t forget that their deaths were never prosecuted as murders, and only one man—Baptist “preacher” and alleged mastermind, Edgar Ray Killen—was ever convicted on a manslaughter charge, and that conviction took forty-one years.

#BlackLivesMatter is a powerful and defiant hashtag in our hyper-connected, one-hundred and forty character world. But even as we acknowledge and deploy it as such, we should note at least one additional rhetorical register: Its optimism. To declare it, to type it, to wear its clothes, is to simultaneously hope for it—even, I would add, retroactively, as in the case of Moore, Dee, and the supposed missing black men of 1964. Hashtags, however, don’t write histories, and if we’re committed to seeing that optimism become a reality, it stands to reason that we must find and document those black lives from the past in our present.

To raise the question, “who are these nine [black] people?” without a diligent, relentless search for an answer is to once again surrender Freedom Summer’s remarkably varied histories to a whiteness that relentlessly names and specifies, and a blackness that exists almost exclusively in the rhetorical void. Today we insist on, and demand names of, gunned-down black men whose private deaths have almost instantaneously become public crucibles. Should we demand no less for our historical claims, especially when we do in fact have evidence as in the Charles Moore and Henry Dee case? And minus that evidence, ought we to insist on an historical sensibility that always offers, at minimum, a name? Simply repeating the numbers—five black bodies, eight black bodies, thrown back black bodies—that we have inherited from our colleagues, movement veterans, journalists and filmmakers reinforces, ironically, the belief that black lives do not matter. Still.

Surely we can do better. Surely we must.

Davis W. Houck is Fannie Lou Hamer Professor of Rhetorical Studies in the School of Communication at Florida State University. He has published several recent books including Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965 (two volumes), Women and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965, and Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press (with Matthew A. Grindy). His current work includes a book-length project on Freedom Summer historiography and memory. A scratch gol-fer, Houck is also working on an ethnographic analysis of Augusta National and the Masters golf tournament. He also edits the Race, Rhetoric and Media Series with the University Press of Mississippi.

Racing the Trump Card: Rhetorics of Whiteness andthe Politics of Adaptive Resistance After Obama

Mark L. McPhail

Indiana University Northwest

David A. Frank

University of Oregon

The election of Barack Hussein Obama to the presidency of the U.S. marked one of the most paradoxical moments in the history of American race relations. For many, it signified an historic moment of racial progress: As the nation’s first non-white male commander in chief, Obama symbolized a fulfillment of the American creed of opportunity for all, and embodied the nation’s professed commitment to racial equality and reconciliation. For as many others, Obama’s election represented a superficial embrace of “acceptable” blackness, a racial rapprochement that ignored and obscured the nation’s long history of racial violence and victimization beneath the veil of “postracial” possibilities. In our 2005 analysis of Obama’s 2004 Democratic National Convention address, we read Obama’s rhetoric as an attempt at racial reconciliation that also revealed and simultaneously concealed a repression of race and racism (Frank and McPhail). To unveil the tensions in the address, we “wrote together separately,” writing in one voice at the beginning and the conclusion of the essay while nesting the independent and conflicting lines of interpretation and analysis in the body of the article. In our conclusion, we called for rhetorical scholars to continue struggling with the problem of race, embedding our plea in the poetry of Robert Warren Penn’s depiction of Jacob wrestling with the angel (Warren).

The image of Jacob wrestling with the Angel of God is one of the most powerful in scripture. We selected it to conclude our first essay, finding in it a proper frame for our struggle with American racism. The eleven years since the publication of our first article on Obama and race made the image even more poignant. In this essay we reflect on the eleven years that has passed since the publication of the 2005 article, and feature Obama’s rhetoric on race during his eight years as president juxtaposed against the emergence of Donald Trump’s rhetoric of white identity politics. That Obama did not realize his promise on the rhetoric of race and that Trump has exploited white anxiety, making blacks and “the other” scapegoats, is clear. Our task now is to draw from strategies and tactics that have worked in the past, and invent new ones to better achieve the aspirations of racial coherence and the need to resign and (re) sign the racial contract (Mills).

Toward that end, we continue our dialogue in search for a coherent rhetoric on race, one that considers adaptive racism and aspires to rewrite the racial contract. As in our earlier essays, we draw upon diverse and sometimes divergent perspectives to explore the problems and possibilities of racial reconciliation in the twenty-first century. While we have pursued different trajectories in our readings of Obama’s rhetoric, our concerns converge in our critiques of Trump’s use of the race card to enact a radical recovery of white privilege and supremacy. Again, we wrestle with the question that has resonated throughout our earlier works, inspired by Golden and Rieke’s provocative analysis offered almost a half-century ago. Can racism be remedied by rhetoric, or is it a problem constrained by the psychodynamics of a problematic moral epistemology characterized by material, spiritual, and epistemological incoherence (6)? Like Jacob, we continue to struggle with the tension between the evidence of our senses and our spiritual strivings, between our recognition of the (im)possibility of racial reconciliation and our hope for a future in which the nation’s professed ideals might one day be realized in a resigned Racial Contract. In what follows we write together separately, with Mark McPhail extending his theory of adaptive racism and David Frank describing a rhetoric of adaptive antiracism.

Mark McPhail: A Theory of Adaptive Racism

An adaptive theory of racism begins with Ronald Heifetz’s observation that an “adaptive challenge” is one that cannot be remedied through technical or structural means. Heifetz describes an adaptive challenge as one grounded in an underlying, unacknowledged, or unspoken belief or set of assumptions. It is a challenge or problem for which “no adequate response has yet been developed” (72). Yet an adaptive theory of racism takes Heifetz’s analysis one step further, asserting that even when the underlying assumptions that define white racial consciousness and unconsciousness are brought into awareness, they remain immune to alteration and transformation. It challenges the widely held assumption that racism is a product of ignorance, or that it can be remedied through any technical means: Instead, it recognizes racism as a shame-based psychological phenomenon that is normative in Western societies by virtue of the counterfactual character of the moral and epistemological beliefs and values espoused and enacted by those societies.

The psychological distinction between shame and guilt is important: “Guilt is characterized by feelings of tension, remorse, and regret over the bad thing done. But the cognitive affective processes in guilt stop short of the self-condemnation involved in shame” (Niedenthal, Tangney, and Gavanski 587). In other words, guilt assumes that an individual has done something wrong: Shame assumes that the individual is essentially bad. The ability to acknowledge a wrong allows for a recognition of the adaptive impulses at work in our resistance to change, and facilitates the reconciliation of one’s assumptions about others with the reality of their lived experiences. The state of being an agent of the wrong, however, reinforces adaptive impulses and results in denial, projection, and an investment in innocence and moral neutrality. As the historical agents of racism and the beneficiaries of the privileges it creates, whites know both consciously and unconsciously that their professed core beliefs, such as equality, freedom, and justice, do not cohere with their lived experiences in relation to nonwhites. This incoherence is what led Golden and Rieke to write that “the study of the rhetoric of black Americans suggests the possibility that the rhetorical goal—communicating with white men about their beliefs and attitudes regarding black men—may be more a psychiatric than a persuasive problem” (6).

Golden and Rieke’s analysis was a prescient characterization of the reception of the rhetorical goals of Barack Obama, regardless of whether he was offering conciliatory attempts at racial rapprochement or legitimate policy initiatives. From the antagonistic assertions that they would be his “Waterloo,” to public accusations that he was a “liar,” to refusals to accept his nominee for the Supreme Court—Obama’s opponents and critics have made it clear that he has no authority, even as President of the U.S., that they are bound to respect. The attitudes and beliefs that led to segregation and “Separate but Equal” resurfaced during the Obama administration with a vengeance and, unfortunately, Obama has declined to name this resistance to his legitimate authority as racially motivated, either directly or indirectly. Within a climate in which adaptive racism has been reinforced and reinvigorated, even Obama’s most well intentioned efforts have had little effect on moving the nation toward the “more perfect union” he so eloquently articulated in his race speech. Even more troubling, the attitudes and beliefs that undermined the Obama presidency have, I believe, fueled the rise of Donald Trump.

These attitudes and beliefs are reflected both implicitly and explicitly in the rhetorical tactics of Donald Trump and his followers: The denial that President Obama was born in the U.S., only recently disavowed by Trump, evidences a stubborn refusal to accept documented fact (VOA News); Trump’s response to Hillary Clinton’s account of his documented record of racially motivated discrimination and discourse as “the last refuge of the discredited politician” and subsequent characterization of Clinton as a “bigot” (Chait); his professed beliefs that a Trump presidency will “promote the values of tolerance, justice, and acceptance” and “steadfastly reject bigotry and hatred and oppression of any form” (Morrow). All of these reflect the defining characteristics of an adaptive racism, one presciently described by Golden and Rieke in their suggestion that racism is a psychiatric, rather than rhetorical problem. Golden and Rieke’s reading of African American rhetoric anticipated a theoretical turn that engaged the adaptive impulses of racism:

When the black speaker tells his white audience to look deep inside their own belief systems and purge their racist ideas, he is confronting the most central, the most ego involving of all attitudes of the listener […] the task may require a more intensive effort toward the restructuring of beliefs, attitudes, and values than can be accomplished through the ordinary channels of communication. (7)

Any such effort must recognize and address the adaptive impulses of racism.

These impulses are characterized by a psychological resistance to social and institutional change that is grounded in the incorrect belief that racism is an aberration in American society, a product of ignorance that motivates a minority of individuals to enact violent or discriminatory behavior. They also reflect an underlying belief, expressed historically in the traditional racism of slavery and segregation, that the lives of black people have no intrinsic value. While the physical violence of “traditional” racism is no longer as visible as when it was enforced through state sanctioned violence, the “modern” racism of the post-civil rights era has revealed a pervasive anti-black sentiment expressed by far too many white Americans which continues to justify the exclusion and subordination of African Americans obliquely (Van Djik). Couched in the language of “state’s rights,” “reverse discrimination,” and “law and order,” theories of modern racism maintain that while the behaviors have to some degree changed, the attitudes and beliefs arguably remain largely the same.

Philosopher Charles Mills suggests that this “new racism” reflects the beliefs and attitudes embedded in the historical incoherence between an abstract “social contract” and an empirical “Racial Contract”: The Racial Contract is not a contract to which the nonwhite subset of humans can be a genuinely consenting party (though it may sometimes be politic to pretend that this is the case)” (The Racial Contract 20). In contrast to the idealized social contract, the Racial Contract is “not a pact ‘between everybody’ (‘we the people’), but between just the people who count, people who really are people (‘we the white people’).” While the social contract is premised on an abstract moral neutrality, the Racial Contract uncovers “a moral psychology (not just in whites but sometimes in nonwhites) skewed consciously or unconsciously toward privileging [Europeans and their descendants], taking the status quo of differential racial entitlement as normatively legitimate, and not to be investigated further” (40).

Acknowledging the Racial Contract, Mills argues, means accepting that many of the most basic beliefs that we hold in this society in terms of the values that we espouse and the epistemologies we embrace are at best questionable, and at worst fundamentally false: That is, they do not cohere with actual lived realities. As such, they remain largely unspoken and unacknowledged—for example adaptive—and thus require what Heifitz describes as a “different idea of leadership and new social contract” (Leadership 2). In the case of racism, this new leadership must intentionally engage in what he calls “adaptive work”: “Adaptive work consists of the learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face. Adaptive works requires a change in values, beliefs, or behavior” (Leadership 22). In advancing antiracist leadership, any adaptive work aimed at establishing a “new social contract” must invariably address and engage the Racial Contract. This is the task that my colleague, David Frank, will now pursue in response to my analysis.

David Frank: A Rhetoric of Adaptive Antiracism

I have taken seriously Mark McPhail’s work on race, which I believe provides scholars of rhetoric with the tools to explain racism. The trajectory of his explanation has unfolded over time, drawing from the insights of Lacan, Heifetz, Mills, Gresson, and a host of scholars from a number of disciplines. His first book is more optimistic about the possibility of racial rapprochement through rhetoric than his more recent work, which confronts a racism that is deep and capable of mutation. The most recent strains of racism, McPhail cogently argues, is adaptive; it is not simply anchored to ignorance but is grounded in a set of unspoken and unacknowledged beliefs that resist moral suasion and rhetorical intervention.

Adaptive racism, McPhail argues, allows whites to acknowledge racism, but to declare they had no role in creating and feeding the disease. Guilt and shame are foundational to his approach and explains the mechanism for the adaptive qualities of racism—that whites, particularly those who are affluent, have adapted to racism by acknowledging it is wrong and inconsistent with their values, and that they are innocent of fostering or contributing to the factors supporting it. Less affluent whites who have not adapted their racism to the abstract principles of equality, remain committed to overt declarations of racial intolerance and are then blamed by affluent whites as the source of racism in the U.S. (Taylor).

Racism, as McPhail observes, has adapted, like a cancer, to its scene and audience. As Taylor and others have demonstrated, poor whites labeled “white trash” are viewed by moderate whites as “irrationally committed to white supremacy and violence that wealthier whites [have] at least discursively escaped” (Taylor 60; Isenberg; Vance). Wealthier and moderate whites professed commitment to the abstract ideas of equality, blamed “white trash” for their rejection of this ideal and for their crude racism, and condemned blacks for their “disorder” and turn to violence. The wealthy and moderate whites could then declare themselves innocent of racism while supporting the impersonal institutions that sustain white privilege.

The less affluent whites lacking a college education make up the audience for Donald Trump. And this audience is suffering. Whites at midlife are now dying at higher rates than African Americans (Case and Deaton). Trump is speaking for white Americans who feel abandoned and that they are losing their country. This audience projects their fears onto people of color—Muslims, and those not deemed “American”—and depicts them as causes of their suffering (Dreher). They express their suffering with overt and unvarnished expressions of racism, which Trump echoes and which the Republican elite reject. Majority Leader Paul Ryan put it right when he declared Trump guilty of “textbook racism” rather than the rhetoric of racial innocence Ryan and other Republican “moderates” express. Racism, at the end of the Obama presidency, is now expressed with a crude outspokenness by Trump on behalf of “white trash” and through the code of racial innocence by more moderate and affluent whites. What, then, can be done about these most recent mutations?

At the end of his analysis, McPhail concludes by returning to Golden and Rieke’s question: Can rhetoric itself play a palliative role in addressing adaptive racism (6)? McPhail is pessimistic that it can, and given the current state of race relations in this country, he has significant empirical support, which was reinforced almost daily by Trump during the presidential campaign, that the disease of racism is a psychological rather than rhetorical problem; one resisting the powers of persuasion and reason. His case is compelling. I do, however, believe that rhetoric has the capacity to develop a program of adaptive antiracism that accounts for the most recent mutations of racism. Accordingly, I return to McPhail’s line of thinking, his sources, and insights to suggest the outlines of a rhetoric of adaptive antiracism.

In their insightful article on Jeramiah Wright and Barack Obama, McPhail and Gunn draw from the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan. Without question, Lacan does shed some light on the psycho-dynamics of racism. Yet, Lacan does not give up on rhetoric. Rather, he “refuses to portray racial difference as pure alterity” seeking instead to foster “a more precise and historically subtle account of group identification and racial fantasy than we find in Hegelian accounts of whites and blacks, where both racial groups are locked in immutable conflict” (Lane 297). Contact between the races—between whites and blacks—according to Lacan is enacted through rhetoric. Lacan is not satisfied with the truly reasonable conclusion offered by Golden and Rieke that racism is more a “psychiatric than a persuasive problem” (6).

Lacan seeks to unleash all the inventive powers of rhetoric on psychiatric problems; indeed, he wants to “ring rhetoric’s neck” in order to “shock rhetoric into thinking discourse differently, awakening rhetoric from its imaginary slumber to return it to a fuller, more analytically rigorous conceptions of rhetoric effect” (Lundberg 39). Rhetoric’s apparent ineffectiveness in confronting white racism, Lacan would argue, is due to a failure to enlist its full capacity. How then should rhetoric be deployed?

McPhail rightly points to Ronald Heifetz’s theory of adaptive leadership. Both McPhail and Heifetz seek to bring a community’s values into concert with its actions; a sign of coherence. Darius Prier, in using Heifetz’s theory of adaptive leadership, one that draws on all the resources of argument invention, provides a telling case study of an effort made by the black community to persuade a Board of Education to change the name of an elementary school to Rosa Parks. Prier documents the sophisticated and multifaceted campaign waged by the black community to change the name in which all the available means of persuasion were used as the advocates adapted to different rhetorical situations and audiences. As a result of the name change, Prier argues that the community and the school were strengthened.

A rhetoric of adaptive antiracism would make use of Heifetz’s theory of adaptive leadership, draw from a rhetoric that has awakened from the dogmatic slumber of colorblindness, and call for a resigning of what Charles Mills labels the Racial Contract. This contract favors whites over people of color and needs to be renegotiated on the basis of racial equity. Mills outlines how these negotiations should proceed: “Our plan should be to combine the struggle for racial justice with (not subsume it under) the fight for social democracy and class equality, making clear how their fates are bound up with one another” (Mills, “Breaking” 44). In coupling racial and class equality, Mills recognized an economic reality that partially explains the rise of Donald Trump: “Today it is the Gilded Age that rules, from which even most white Americans are excluded” (Mills, “Breaking” 44).

Mills advocates “a national educational campaign to dispel” the belief that whites are the major victims of racial discrimination and that

[a] transracial alliance of the economically disadvantaged will [not only] need to overcome traditional racism, [… but also] defeat Republican anti-statist propaganda, and make the case for greater economic benefits for all from a more egalitarian capitalism. (45)

The existing racial contract can be challenged and then rewritten if, through a transracial alliance, Blacks and whites can see themselves, as Lacan stipulates, as in relationship and not in immutable conflict. Mill’s vision of a transracial alliance that bridges race and class would offer poor whites an alternative to Trump, Blacks an opportunity to highlight the independent and potent role race plays in economic opportunity, and a vision for a new racial contract based on racial and class equity.

Finally, a rhetoric of adaptive antiracism should adopt the distinguished rhetorical scholar and psychologist Aaron David Gresson’s attitude of compassion as the U.S. continues to work through its American apartheid. Gresson’s trenchant analysis of racial pain, the efforts of whites to declare their innocence, and black suffering, reaches a crescendo in the conclusion of his American’s Atonement when he declares that “the pursuit of compassion is not the singular requirement of a critical social justice pedagogy, but it’s an essential element in confronting the powerfulness of racial pain” (232). With compassion, those seeking to combat the toxic powers of adaptive racism can use the insights offered by McPhail and other scholars on complicity and coherence, racial innocence and recovery, and atonement and reconciliation, to explain and then counter the mutations of racism.

Perhaps the most compelling contemporary example of efforts that reveal an adaptive anti-racism is Georgetown University’s attempts to address its complicity in the American slave trade. The Report of the Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation, commissioned by Georgetown University president John J. DeGioia, made several recommendations to the president, including the renaming of buildings, the issuing of a formal apology, engaging “the descendants of the enslaved whose labor and value benefitted the university,” memorialization, the creation of an institute for the study of slavery, investment in diversity, and university wide engagement in “the attempts to address slavery’s direct and indirect legacy” (Collins 40). In addition to the university’s formal efforts, a group of scholars and alumni have created The Georgetown Memory Project, “an independent group founded by friends, allies, and alumni of Georgetown University, aligned with Georgetown slaves and their living descendants.” The Washington Post describes Georgetown’s efforts as “one of the most aggressive responses to date among the universities trying to make amends for the horrors of slavery” (Anderson and Svrluga).

Although McPhail argues that the sincerity of racial apologies can be questionable in “A Question of Character: Re(-)Signing the Racial Contract,” I suggest that Georgetown’s efforts hold the mark of a genuine rhetoric of adaptive antiracism. The words of president DeGioia speak directly to the types of reflection and atonement called for by scholars of reconciliation:

When we asked Mr. DeGioia if he considers the descendants to be part of the Georgetown family, he said it would be arrogant of him to make assumptions about how the descendants view their relationship to the school; “that they would want to be considered means more to me than anything.” If they do, the university should be willing to extend to descendants interested in attending Georgetown the same legacy benefits that give a modest leg up to children of Georgetown faculty and alumni seeking admission. But that’s a small step. (Editorial Board)

Although arguably small, such steps within the context of a country in which “the power of white racial resentment has become impossible to deny” may offer a path toward genuine racial reconciliation (Chait). The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the U.S. does, however, raise the stakes in the game of race to a level not seen since the 1980s, and presages a recovery of racial privilege and power more frightening than that which led to rise of the de jure and de facto segregation of the twentieth-century.

Wrestling with Angels, Agency and Adaptive Racism: Rhetoric and the (Im)possibility of Adaptive Antiracism

The adaptive work being done by President John J. DeGioia and Georgetown University stands in stark contrast to the adaptive racism that has created the reality of a Trump presidency. While Trump and his followers remain deeply invested in rhetorical denials, reversals, and refusals, DeGioia’s words and deeds offer a new sense of hope that racial progress will be, for Georgetown University, more than an abstract idea and embodied in a concrete set of practices that cohere with the enacted principles of genuine racial reconciliation. At a time when our nation seems, for both of us, at the onset of a season of despair, we find renewed hope in the possibility that a major educational institution is poised to sincerely acknowledge and atone for our nation’s most enduring legacy of moral incoherence and psychic imbalance. With the ascent of Trump, however, we are fearful that the dreams of King and Obama may continue to be deferred, and that the tripartite evils of racism, poverty, and militarism will be unleashed with a newfound set of justifications and rationalizations reminiscent of Reconstruction, yet aimed now not only at African Americans, but new groups of “others” who are seen as a threat to making America “great.”

It is clear that for Donald Trump and his supporters, making America “great” is synonymous with making it “white”: The myriad images of billboards, political signs, graffiti, apparel and other paraphernalia that followed Trump’s victory offer undeniable evidence of the adaptive impulses that have been lurking below the surface of an ostensibly “postracial” racial America (Bacon). They also signal the viability of an adaptive theory of racism, and the need for a practice of adaptive antiracism. The “crocodile trauma” of liberal and moderate whites, who will be largely unaffected by a Trump presidency, reveals quite clearly that the prevailing intentions and initiatives in which they have engaged have largely failed to address the underlying beliefs and assumptions of their fellow white citizens: Indeed, the intense reaction of those now feeling disenfranchised by Donald Trump’s victory speaks clearly to the pervasiveness of white denial and the ideology of innocence. Had those traumatized by Trump’s victory been as deeply invested in challenging racism in their own communities, among their friends and families, their politicians, priests, professors, and police—in all areas of American life where it continues to fester—then their surprise, shock, and horror may have been understandable.

From the perspective of an adaptive theory of racism, however, Trump’s victory and the reactions to it are both understandable and predictable. White Americans cannot, in the absence of a genuine recognition of, and atonement for, the nation’s original sin, play a redemptive role in racial reconciliation. An adaptive antiracism cannot compromise, equivocate, and engage in ambivalence when it comes to challenging and rooting out white supremacy, and that begins by overcoming the debilitating shame sustained by the denial that America is a fundamentally racist nation. Donald Trump’s victory is simply the most recent manifestation of that shame. As Toni Morrison explains:

On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. (Morrison)

Perhaps the resurgence of white supremacy signaled by the ascent of Donald Trump will awaken those white Americans genuinely committed to racial reconciliation from the dogmatic slumber of denial and innocence. Perhaps, now “with wrenched thigh,” they too will have the courage to wrestle with the fallen angel of American racism and engage in the adaptive leadership required for a truly transformative antiracist agenda (Warren).

As we have wrestled with the rhetorical problems and possibilities of the American dilemma of race, we have both separately and together called upon our colleagues in the discipline of rhetoric to assertively investigate and interrogate the discursive dimensions of racial difference and identity, and we reiterate that call here. For whatever differences have divided us in the past in our readings of the rhetoric of Barack Obama, we are like minded in our analysis of Donald Trump’s potential to do grave damage to the difficult work of racial reconciliation now that he has become President of the U.S. So we again ask as we did in 2005, that rhetorical scholars and teachers engage this moment in history as an opportunity for exploring racial reconciliation from both sides of the color line, and enact an intellectual militancy that might take us closer to a resigning of the Racial Contract. In the 2005 essay we concluded with the words of Robert Penn Warren, whose poetry provided us with a metaphor for our struggle to understand and comprehend the meanings and manifestation of races, perhaps the greatest myth of our own making.

Moving here from the metaphorical to the literal axis, we end with the words of Aaron David Gresson III, whose insights and wisdom on race, atonement, and reconciliation have informed, inspired, and invigorated our lives and works: “Human deception dwells within us all and permeates everyday social life and interaction. What is often neglected in daily interaction, including teaching, are the myriad injustices seen and absorbed by youth.” Although he is writing specifically about social justice pedagogy, we believe that the same questions he asks next are instructive for all individuals of conscience who have wrestled with racism, anti-racism, and the adaptive impulses that too often circumscribe and constrain our efforts: “What does the failure to change tell them and us? What does the belief in social justice and social change tell us and require of us? What actions are they pursuing in an attempt to engage their own dance of agency?” (231).

Dr. Mark L. McPhail is Professor of Communication at Indiana University Northwest. He is the author of Zen in the Art of Rhetoric: An Inquiry into Coherence and The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation. His scholarship has been published in The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, the Howard Journal of Communications, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Qualitative Inquiry, and Rhetoric Review. His creative work has appeared in Dark Horse Magazine and The American Literary Review, and his photography has been exhibited at the Afr-ican American Museum in Dallas, Texas, the Crossman Gallery, Roberta’s Gallery, and Cultural Arts Center in Whitewater, Wisconsin. He has received a number of research and teaching awards including the Albert J. Colton Memorial Research Fellowship, the University of Utah’s Tanner Humanities Fellowship, the National Communication Association’s Karl Wa-llace Memorial Award, and the Southern Methodist University’s Honoring our Professor’s Excellence (HOPE) Award.

David A. Frank has served as a professor at the University of Oregon since 1981 and as the founding dean of the Clark Honors College from 2008-2013. His research agenda incorporates rhetorical theory and history, with a focus on Chaïm Perelman’s new rhetoric project, argumentation, the rhetoric of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the rhetoric of racial reconciliation.

Decolonizing Place and Race:Racial Resentments, Local Histories, and Transrhetorical Analysis

Rachel C. Jackson

University of Oklahoma

On March 10th, 2015, fifty years after the historic March on Selma forced America to face the reality of racist hatred and violence via household television sets, I sat with my students in our first-year writing classroom at the University of Oklahoma where we collectively confronted racism “gone viral” on our own campus. Two days before, the by-then infamous video of Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) campus chapter members was leaked anonymously online and then reposted vigorously by a black student organization—OU Unheard. It brought what was otherwise latent, less visible race hatred on campus to the attention of white students and faculty, parents and supporters, the state of Oklahoma, and the entire country. In the video, a group of SAE members returning with their dates from a sponsored weekend outing enthusiastically performed a racist chant that declares lynching to be preferable to integrating the fraternity. A witness on the bus captured ten seconds of the incident by phone, and then made it available to OU Unheard. OU Unheard promptly made the video public that Sunday and quickly organized a gathering to occur early Monday morning at the campus administration building.

On the ground, the video rhetorically linked Oklahoma to racist police violence and increasing racial tension occurring throughout the country and dominating national media. In neighboring Missouri, Ferguson continued to be a battleground in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder by a white police officer. The shockwaves of reaction to the SAE video occurring online and in local and national media put racism on our campus front and center. Its sudden visibility provided an opportunity for students and faculty representing marginalized groups to press for needed campus reform. At the same time, it suddenly focused national attention on the University of Oklahoma in a moment of crisis. Students, faculty, and administration faced a volatile rhetorical situation that evoked deep, largely unacknowledged issues and enacted historical local tensions. The rhetorical moment the video provided also revealed an opportunity to truly engage the multiple racial and institutional perspectives in restorative dialogue once and for all. The resulting conversation exposed historical racial resentments unique to Oklahoma, particularly between African Americans and Native Americans, while also revealing shared local experiences of white racism.

As an Indigenous scholar working in the field of rhetoric, I understand local rhetorical inquiry as a decolonial research methodology—one that aligns with the decolonial imperative to return Indigenous lands to Indigenous peoples. Returning rhetorical inquiry to local landscapes provides one means of doing so. Even prior to Oklahoma statehood in 1907, these groups competed for secondary status in Indian and Oklahoma Territories as settler colonialism began dividing up lands and peoples after the Civil War. Increasing white hegemony imported via this agenda introduced racial concepts and categories that disrupted and replaced Indigenous rhetorics around race, marked by longstanding cross-cultural relationships and traditional intercultural practices. Though antiracist groups rightly frame white racism as a national issue and organize in solidarity across the U.S., returning inquiry around race to local rhetorical landscapes allows historically nuanced relationships between places and peoples to emerge. These nuances must necessarily guide and shape the reconciliation process by engaging key groups historically tied to particular locations, and by addressing local cultural memory and trauma related to race relations. Examinations in this symposium foreground “the place of voice and subject position” in rhetorical analysis of racial resentments emerging broadly across the U.S. In order to do so, my article explores the voice of place. I am particularly interested in the role location plays in racist rhetorics and antiracist tactics as they emerge via local examples, which means acknowledging both shared and distinct experiences of white racism as it transgresses located cultural/racial boundaries.

Within settler colonial settings, rhetorics of race that fuel white hegemony move across these boundaries as they exist in place. Charting the local manifestations and implications of these rhetorics requires attending to language and messaging, habits and behaviors, values and beliefs transmitted as they move across racialized spaces. Transrhetorical analysis, as I define it, enables this process (Jackson). I extend transrhetorical analysis from Krista Ratcliffe’s work with rhetorical listening. Ratcliffe sees rhetorical listening as a methodology for interrupting tropes of race and whiteness to instead enact “a code of cross-cultural conduct” (1–3). Borrowing from previous scholarship of Phelan, Lunsford, Royster, and Balliff among others, Ratcliffe defines rhetorical listening as “a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture,” “the purpose being to negotiate troubled identifications in order to facilitate cross-cultural communication about any topic” (17). The power of rhetorical listening as “a trope for interpretive invention” resides in its capacity “to cultivate conscious identifications […] that promote productive communication” (Ratcliffe 25). As Ratcliffe explains, such identifications reveal intersections within the self and between self and others that generate new understandings, particularly around issues related to race and gender, and/or to social justice issues generally. Rhetorical listening, then, becomes a tool for negotiation around these topics by making cultural perspectives, particularly marginalized cultural perspectives, apparent (Ratcliffe 27). Transrhetorical analysis examines the movements of ideas and meanings across situated boundaries and the perspectives placed across locations. It pays particular attention to the ways in which rhetorics change across locations—with rhetors adapting, co-opting, or otherwise modifying concepts, terms, and tactics as they move meaning in and out of rhetorically connected contexts shaped by historical experiences.

While racial resentments operate nationally across diverse and distinct locations, national media represents the conflicts that emerge from them as uniformly similar despite contextual differences. While similarities between them do exist, these situated conflicts arise most immediately in local settings that likewise shape the rhetorical means through which communities confront, resist, and resolve them. As the symposium editors make clear, the “new ‘racial formation’” post Obama’s election reinscribes “old legacies of ‘racial projects from the past.” Historic rhetorics of race haunt and thereby animate current sites of white racism and racial violence, creating discursive and behavioral patterns that remain less visible. Historically unresolved and largely unspoken cultural traumas and racial memories have the rhetorical capacity to confound justice and reconciliation efforts. The critical awareness required for social action, by which I mean positive social change enacted through public democratic means, demands close attention to political and cultural landscapes of local spaces where social action occurs. Douglas Reichert Powell and other scholars in rhetoric have recently asserted the term “critical regionalism” to indicate conscious connection-making between politics, cultures, and landscapes that aims at the intentional construction of new, revelatory models of understanding a particular place within the broader region and even larger global network. For Powell and other critical regionalists, such examinations impact both the righting of social wrongs and the writing of local histories. Cultural production, particularly writing about place, must occur within a critical awareness that such production inscribes long-lasting definitions that continue to impact places—and the people who live in them—across both time and space. Ignoring local exigencies only perpetuates them.

As U.S. racial/racist policies defined identities and limited the cultural influence and political power of Native Americans, African Natives, and African Americans living in Indian and Oklahoma territories during the Reconstruction Era, whiteness operated through such federal policies as allotment, assimilation, and the “one-drop rule” to inscribe and enforce social division through land-based, locally specific means. A little over one hundred years later, the legacies of these racial resentments surfaced on the OU campus in response to the video of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members singing a racist chant—even as campus activists sought to confront and dismantle racism. Contextualized within a local exploration of rhetorics of race, I analyze a campus town hall meeting on diversity, held three days after the video surfaced, as a site of antiracist rhetoric arising in response to the SAE incident. I observe how historical racial resentments between African Americans and Native Americans emerge transrhetorically as white racism moves across cultural and spatial/temporal boundaries enacting legacies that, unless understood and addressed, will continue to confound local antiracist alliances and projects.

The “Town Hall on Diversity,” recorded and available on the website of OU’s National Public Radio affiliate (KGOU), demonstrates how the local concepts of race and historic experiences of racism present themselves in public dialogue so as to reflect and inform a particular location as both a rhetorically situated and racialized space. Organized by OU Unheard and hosted by the Michael F. Price College of Business, the forum attracted over three-hundred students, faculty, staff, and members of the public (McCleland). In the course of two hours, speakers from the audience who represented a multiplicity of racial identities expressed their experiences with racism and other forms of bigotry on campus and in their communities. Rhetorics of race particular to Oklahoma history inhabit their comments and shape their concerns, signifying white racism in complex ways across cultural/racial categories. As a tool useful in local rhetorical inquiry, I apply transrhetorical analysis to track how white racism moves across the marginalized locations forum speakers represent. Through close rhetorical listening, I observe race and racism as tropes operating transrhetorically to enforce racial resentments that conscript multiple racialized subjectivites. Ultimately, the patterns arising from this local public dialogue on diversity suggest that rhetorical scholarship seeking to call out white racism and disrupt racist legacies nationally should attend closely to local contexts. Because local cultures and histories shape the nuances of racism as it arises in locations, the work of resisting racism and constructing antiracist alternatives for communities ultimately begins at home.

Decolonization, Local Rhetorics, and Transrhetorical Analysis

For Indigenous scholars, inquiry into local landscapes follows from cultural connections to land bases. Decolonial scholars argue that land is central to Native American identities and epistemologies in the same way that recognizing Indigenous land rights is central to decolonization. While the field of rhetoric increasingly acknowledges the role of Indigenous rhetorics in the Americas, it has also simultaneously increased attention to location as integral to rhetorical situations. Critical regionalists, for example, draw attention to how place shapes rhetor/s, audience/s, and message/s with uniquely situated historical realities and socio-cultural characteristics. This mirrors a critical argument emerging from decolonial theory, which links place-based inquiry to the decolonial imperative to return Indigenous lands to Indigenous peoples. In their introduction to Place in Research, decolonial theorists Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie claim the “renewed interest in ‘place’” aligns Indigenous research and methodologies with the “‘spatial’ and ‘material’ turns” (1). They urge researchers working with place to “engage meaningfully,” in order to “deepen […] considerations of place to grapple not only the physical and spatial aspects of place in relation to the social, but also more deeply with how places and our orientations to them are informed by, and determinants of, history, empire, and culture” (Tuck and McKenzie 1). While placed-based studies in rhetoric address spatial construction from critical ecological, political, and regional perspectives, rarely do they examine settler colonialism as an ongoing contributing factor. Examining Oklahoma or any space in the Americas as a racialized space necessitates addressing this gap. Engaging place for decolonial scholars means honoring historic Indigenous relationships to and experiences on the landscape. For transrhetorical analysis, this means including place-based, cultural/racial subjectivities, Indigenous and otherwise, particularly as scholarship seeks to address and resist settler colonial tactics that move between them and ultimately divide them.

Oklahoma—especially with regard to its racial history—can readily be understood as a settler colonial site. Prior to Oklahoma statehood, Indian and Oklahoma Territories contained lands previously assigned through distinct federal treaties to various Native American peoples. Beginning with the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole from the southeastern U.S., the federal government eventually forcibly removed or militarily contained thirty-nine tribal groups here. Through the allotment process, beginning with post-Civil War treaty negotiations, federal racial/racist policies grafted racial categories, identities, and distinctions onto Indigenous cultures and landscapes where interaction between Native Americans, European settlers, and African slaves had long existed. Prior to forced removal to Indian Territory, for instance, intermarriage with both European settlers and African slaves and their descendents was not uncommon in the tribes indigenous to the southeastern U.S. Wealthier tribal members adopted the settler colonial practice of slavery, thus creating a tri-racial context that generated unique power dynamics marked by both personal and political alliances and contestations across racial categories. Once removed to what would decades later become the state of Oklahoma, these complex, competing, and cooperating cultural dynamics fostered a racialized landscape that, in some cases, confounded white racism as it developed in Oklahoma between the Civil War and statehood. Race and land became deeply intertwined in settler colonial definitions of power and land ownership; both concepts aimed at changing Indigenous cultures and Indigenous landscapes.

The class I was teaching when the SAE video surfaced focused on local rhetorical inquiry. Using Oklahoma as a discrete rhetorical context marked by transrhetorical movement, local rhetorics and Oklahoma writers representing diverse cultural/racial perspectives predominated our course readings on various topics throughout the semester. Student writing analyzed local rhetorical sites and cultural issues. Not coincidentally, we had just begun a unit called “Race in a Red State.” Readings assigned for that day included historical, first-hand accounts of Native American cultural resistance and African American civil rights activism in Oklahoma. These readings also articulated the prevailing white racism in Oklahoma history that ignited these activists. The students were largely unaware of local history around social justice issues and marginalized groups, which included historic incidents of racism, racist agents, and the activists and organizations that confronted them.

That morning with my students, as we navigated the thick tension and heavy emotions hovering in the air, we managed to draw a meaningful, useful conclusion: Local master narratives that erase this history—these Oklahoma activists and their voices—as well as their resistance enable the silence within which racism persists on our campus and in our communities. We realized these local master narratives—and the rhetorics of race they impart—also create division and impede cross-cultural and interracial collaboration. This makes reconciliation efforts between Native Americans and African Americans difficult in Oklahoma, which keeps them from working together more effectively for local reform. History told through the lens of settler colonialism creates rhetorical barriers to change not just on the national level, but perhaps more insidiously on the local level where racial conflicts must be resolved while marginalized groups compete for power.

In order to disrupt such settler colonial inscriptions on the land, particularly at the intersections of place and race and especially after over a century of subsequent history, critical attention must be given to the local nuances settler colonialism obscures. Settler colonialism erases local distinctions, replacing historical experience and cultural practices with a broadly framed, white nationalist narrative. This nationalist frame operates even in the broad construction of antiracist rhetorics and movements and creates a “persistent social and political formation in which newcomers/colonizers/settlers come to a place, claim it as their own, and […] disappear the Indigenous peoples that are there” (Maile, Tuck, and Morrill 12). While colonialism “seeks to impose the will of one people on another and to use the resources of the imposed people for the benefit of the imposer” (Asante ix), settler colonialism’s supreme focus on the exploitation of colonized land exacts the removal and destruction of Indigenous peoples and the importation of forced labor “to work the land as chattel slaves to yield high profits for the landowners” (Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill 12). Whereas classical colonialism invades a location, enslaves the people living there, and uses their labor for resource extraction and exploitation, settler colonialism moves people out of and across locations for these purposes.

Transrhetorical analysis recognizes the movement inherent to settler colonialist oppression and therefore characterizes local spaces as inherently and even unexpectedly complex. In this way transrhetorical awareness resists dislocation by foregrounding location. Examining rhetorical exchange, contest, and collaboration in place identifies local conditions as contributing factors that inform nationally framed dialogues. Broad-based representations of racism many times obscure, erase, or replace contextual cultural dynamics present on the ground, thus reinscribing settler colonialism. Because it foregrounds located sites and borders across which meaning moves, transrhetorical analysis enables local cultural, historical, and political complexities to emerge for observation, analysis, and discussion. Such possibilities offer value to local activists organizing across difference to confront white racist power in place.

Transrhetorical inquiry suggests that while the rhetorical value of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon video includes the way in which it opens local campus and public dialogue around racism, it also reveals the real rhetorical dangers of a video gone viral. As it circulates, the video reinforces national constructions of Oklahoma as a fixed, white, racist space, a “red state” where racial reconciliation does not and cannot occur. Critical regionalist Jenny Rice argues that rhetorical scholarship ignores local spaces because they are so often understood as mundane or flat due to social constructions that render it familiar, normalized, and transparent, thereby discouraging critical inquiry (202). Focusing on local sites as discrete rhetorical locations within broader national frames disrupts such constructions, problematizes assumptions regarding the value of local inquiry, and enacts the decolonial imperative by returning the scholarly conversation about race to the Indigenous landscapes and settler colonial contexts within which white racism occurs.

“Real Sooners” and the Town Hall on Diversity

Originally scheduled during the week prior to the leak of the SAE video, the town hall forum on diversity was postponed one week due to late winter weather. By the time attendees arrived on the evening of March 11th to fill over capacity the two hundred and seventy-seat auditorium, the conversation had gained new local relevance and urgency. In the few days that had passed since the SAE video went viral, African American student activists and campus allies—led by OU Unheard—responded with a series of campus demonstrations. While attracting participants from Native American programs and organizations on campus, these clearly antiracist events had inadvertently but nonetheless provoked historical racial tensions between these two groups. On the morning of Monday, March 9th, students, faculty, staff, and administrators gathered in front of Evans Hall. OU President David Boren emerged from his office to address the crowd through a megaphone handed to him by one of the demonstrators. In a spirit of support for those gathered in protest, President Boren proclaimed, “Real Sooners are not bigots. Real Sooners are not racists” (Harkins). He repeated these assertions later that day in his official statement and added, “Real Sooners believe in equal opportunity. Real Sooners treat all people with respect. Real Sooners love each other and take care of each other like family members” (“President”). For Native student activists on campus, these statements in support of African American antiracist protesters marked an irony that suggested the pervasive anti-Native racism that informs campus culture, mainly by invoking the university mascot—the Sooner. Immediately, Native American students vocalized a demand that racism on campus be treated as not just a black-white issue, but as a red-black-white issue.

These same historic local tensions become evident within the first few minutes of the town hall forum, after College of Business administrators welcomed the audience and spoke to the forum’s goals. The moderator informs the audience, “Tonight’s dialogue, we hope that it can be respectful—a conversation that we all can listen to, learn from, be a part of, and move ourselves forward in the healing process” (McCleland). The Dean speaks next and reiterates President Boren’s position and “real Sooner” rhetoric. He states, “We have this grand opportunity and important obligation to shine a bright light on this issue and be a beacon, not just for OU, or for Oklahoma, but for our nation. We have a chance to set the standard in a way that only real Sooners can.” Leaders of the OU Unheard movement next introduce themselves, reiterating their desire to create a “safe space” where everyone’s voices can be heard. The last Unheard speaker hands the microphone to a group of Native student activists, clearly positioned beforehand to speak next. They cast the conversation in Indigenous terms using the language of decolonization, indicating that such a forum—even on diversity—needs to be decolonized.

The first speaker from this group of Native student activists, a young man identifying as Choctaw, proclaims: “Listen. I want to talk about real Sooners. Real Sooners don’t discriminate on the basis of race? Yes, they do. If we’re going to talk about real Sooners, let’s talk about real Sooners. Real Sooners were thieves. Real Sooners were colonizers” (McCleland). In his demand for attention to the racism inherent in the Sooner mascot (a representation of the settler colonists who claimed Indigenous lands via land runs), this student returns the dialogue to the historic landscape on which the university sits. “As Indian people, [Sooner] means something different to us. You’re on our land. […] Colonization is perpetuated through the reenactment of the land run every time I see a touchdown.” A Comanche student speaks next:

We’re trying to find unity on this campus. […] We see what our black brothers and sisters are doing with this movement and we want to be able to be included as well. We think there is a lack of unity on this campus between minority folks, our Hispanic brothers and sisters, our Asian brothers and sisters. […] I’m trying to express how we’re connected here … we have these three racial dynamics going on. We have a connection here—connection to this land, the history of this land, and our relationships to each other on this land. […] We gotta understand our history as people together. (McCleland)

Several other Native American students cite cultural and historical ignorance as both a local source of, and rhetorical tactic for, white racism. One young Native woman who claims Comanche, Otoe-Missouria, Pottawatomie, Sioux, and Puerto Rican heritage, urges people of color not to compete in arguments regarding which minority group “suffered worst” but instead to respect each others’ histories. The final speaker from this group insists, “cross-movement collaboration is really important because […] we’re all suffering from oppression because of white supremacy and colonization” (McCleland). Rather than perpetuating the divisions the settler colonial system imparts, these students argued from a land-based Indigenous perspective for cross-cultural and interracial cooperation.

Once the floor opens for general comments, attendees—mostly students—stand up and introduce themselves, consciously locating themselves in the cultural/racial matrix before speaking from their own perspectives. One young woman identifies as Pawnee and Otoe-Missouria and asks everyone to think about stereotypes used as jokes. She relays a joke she overheard between two presumably white female students in the library that made fun of the Kiowa language—one of several Native language courses offered on the OU campus. She offers advice to the audience that suggests a critical awareness that could be characterized as transrhetorical: “Before you say those things, really think about what you’re saying. This is a diverse college and you never know who is going to be hearing you, who is listening, who is behind you, who is next to you. Even the person you’re telling the joke to, they might have that heritage in them. They might be connected in some way” (McCleland). She challenges the assumptions of cultural homogeneity inherent in the white racist logic pervading the campus and instead urges the audience to think about how their words signify across locally situated, cultural/racial subjectivities.

As the town hall continues, a transrhetorical pattern around the visibility/invisibility of race and racial performances develops. An African American Iraq War veteran who grew up in Norman, and who returned to Oklahoma after being deployed twice, speaks to his experiences with racism since coming home—including being harassed by white police while in uniform. In his comments, he reveals a painful personal conflict between place and race: “I’m proud to be from this state. I come here and I get funny looks all the time. […] People look at my do-rag. They judge me on sight. I don’t get a chance anywhere I go. I’ve got PTSD from the war, and I also got PTSD from here” (McCleland). While he claims his visible appearance makes racist interactions unavoidable, a Native American speaker cites racial invisibility as a pervasive problem as well. This young woman identifies first as Cherokee and Osage, and then Irish and German. “You could say that I’m multiracial, right? But I don’t look it.” Her voice suggests a sense of cultural shame at claiming both Indigenous and white ancestry. She pairs being “unheard” with being “unseen”: “We have a lot of Native American organizations on campus that get very little recognition. […] A lot of these issues come from visibility. One thing about being visible is your race. Your race is visible, right? […] I constantly […] get questioned about my heritage because of my skin color.” An African American female student stood up later to speak out about being accused of “acting like a white girl.” She asserts through a voice strained with emotion, “the question is, how does one sound white? How does one act white?” Later, another young woman identifies herself as African Native, half black and half Chickasaw. She talks about racist comments made in her presence against African Americans by other Native Americans with whom she works who do not identify her as black. Throughout the forum, racial identity, like white racism, operates visibly and invisibly in the speakers comments, transrhetorically crossing and thereby bridging multiple cultural/racial subjectivities.

These distinctions between experiences with white racism, intoned by the cultural/racial locations of the speakers, provides a transrhetorical insight: Namely, that broad and generalizing constructions of racism, just like the racist generalizations it perpetuates, limit antiracist efforts for reform. Toward the end of the evening, a business college staff person who identifies as seventh-generation Mexican American calls people to “remember the nuance of each person’s experience,” after pointing out that her perspective differs vastly from immigrants or first-generation Mexican Americans. She implores the audience to ask and answer questions about race politely in order to foster learning. “We need a dialogue, not a diatribe. […] It’s the only way we are going to get out of this ugly, ugly hole” (McCleland). The cultural perspectives these speakers bring to bear on the topic of diversity reflect their located, lived experiences with racism on campus, in Oklahoma, and within the U.S. These experiences reflect the shared histories and spaces enacted on the local landscape as they uncover the overlapping and divergent understandings of race that move transrhetorically between and beyond them to other locations. A dialogue that engages the local multiplicity, as this final speaker reminds, allows for richer understanding via the disruption of hegemonic assumptions and stereotypes that white racism perpetuates among us all.

Racialized Space, Rhetorical Ownership, and Reconciliation

The positions and perspectives voiced by the speakers at the town hall forum suggest new ways of understanding local landscapes as racialized locations. While rhetorics of race—both racist and antiracist—resonate nationally, they still manifest through the local nuances reflected in local identities, voices, issues, and events. Geographical distinctions as they occur within and across locations matter in the effort to foster broad public dialogue around the issue of race. Racism, though it exists everywhere, will not be addressed in the same terms in all locations. For reconciliation to be effective, it must work against the dislocative rhetorics of settler colonialism and address local contexts. Because of its history, Oklahomans struggle with racism in ways unique from people in other locations. At the same time, this does not make Oklahoma unique; all locations are equally marked by distinct cultural and racial histories. Racial categories such as Native American, White, and African American operate rhetorically here to reflect the complex histories enacted by people who occupy various positions on this particular racial map. It is not uncommon for Oklahomans to identify as all three at once. Understanding racial subjectivities as located makes local racist phenomena more visible. David Chang, author of The Color of the Land, argues that while “land itself cannot have a race,” “racializing a land (marking it with a race) really means tying it to a particular people” (1). When racial ownership is contested, whether regarding land or experiences on that land and even within the antiracist movement, race becomes tied to power in real and symbolic ways. In settler colonialism, as Chang recounts, “land [is] a foundational form of wealth, a source of power, and an object of contention” (1). These local identifications with land continue transrhetorically to animate place-based concepts of race and racist practices as well as antiracist movements across history and cultural locations.

As the SAE video and the local aftermath demonstrates, part of resolving racial resentments means making race and racism visible on the landscape in a way that acknowledges its geographical complexity and disrupts notions of ownership imparted by settler colonialism. Reconciliation depends on understanding race and racism in transrhetorical terms that connect communities and bridge intricate, highly local racial formations and identities. In Oklahoma, federal policies collapsed Native Americans into the racial category of whiteness for the project of assimilation. Tribal Freedmen received land in the allotment process, but their Native descendency (or “blood quantum”) was not recorded—and therefore erased. As Native Americans became white and African Natives became black, segregation laws went into place as the first act of the Oklahoma state legislature. These laws made it impossible for them to work and live together, and imparted racial resentments that continue to impede collaboration. It rhetorically follows that while Oklahoma may be more frequently constructed as a Native American space in the present (though arguably superficially so), African Native and African American culture, history, and communities get largely ignored. Thus as Native American student activists and scholars call for attention to Indigenous experience, we must also honestly attend to the cultural and racial complexities of our own communities.

Reconciliation, like decolonization, requires us to attend to our own racialized home spaces and cultural/racial landscapes without claiming them solely as our own. Depending only upon national frameworks for exposing, understanding, and dismantling white racism serves to further the erasure of local identities and experiences, all of which must be engaged in the reconciliation process. John Hope Franklin, considered an intellectual framer of the field of African American history, is a heralded native son of Oklahoma and the child of Chickasaw and Muscogee Creek Freedmen, the former slaves of tribal members. He grew up as a small child in the all-black town of Rentiesville in what was formerly Muscogee Creek Territory, and later in the Greenwood District of Tulsa during the community’s recovery from the “Tulsa Race Riot.” John Hope’s father, B. C. Franklin, served as leading attorney in the effort to defend victims of the white racist riot from unscrupulous and equally racist insurance companies refusing to pay on home insurance policies that would enable community members to rebuild. This no doubt influenced his later work on understanding the writing of African American history as a sociopolitical act, particularly as it acts against the white racism that fuels rhetorical suppression and erasure of marginalized voices and the spaces they inhabit from master historical narratives.

Like the white racist violence enacted during the “Tulsa Race Riot,” these master historical narratives, in the context of settler colonialism, reinforce white racism by systematically silencing voices, sites, and movements that contradict its agenda and replaces local histories and cultures. The rhetorical suppression of local spaces found in broad-based rhetorical frameworks transrhetorically impacts audiences across racial categories. It perpetuates settler colonial tactics that replace local cultures and histories with hegemonic structures and systems of power. While we struggle to claim territory for ourselves in the dialogue around reform, we fail to listen to and understand each other. We avoid acknowledging (and instead perpetuate) our own roles in the settler colonial system, which ultimately keeps us from achieving reconciliation and reclaiming our own locations together. Observing transrhetorical consistencies between locations also allows us to honor critical differences and invent new rhetorical tactics and strategies. It enables us to share local histories, struggles, and spaces. While white hegemony frames race and racism broadly, we must look for local solutions. Nurturing our commitment to local experiences and perspectives on race provides the means by which we can build the grassroots, transrhetorical connections and movements to confront the coming hegemonic tide that seeks to whitewash us all. Focusing our efforts locally will help us resist conscription into systemic white racism and stop perpetuating violence—rhetorical and otherwise—against each other.

Rachel C. Jackson, citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma where she teaches as a Lecturer. Her research examines rhetorical strategies of local cultural activists in the context of historical sup-pression, particularly as activist rhetorics operate transrhetorically across indigenous cultures and communities. Her work has app-eared in Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition: Global Interrogations, Local Interventions (Southern Illinois UP, 2014), College Composition and Communication (December 2014), and in a forthcoming issue of College English. She is a Ford Foundation Fellow and a Newberry Consortium on American Indian Studies Research Fellow.

Memeing the Black Presidency:Obama Memes and the Affective Ambivalence of Racialized Policing

James Alexander McVey

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Policing Obama’s Blackness

Barack Obama’s presidency has been fraught with racial ambivalence; the blackness of America’s first black president has been both widely celebrated and crudely denigrated. The internet is one key locale for the visual negotiation of this racial ambivalence. As Lisa Nakamura notes, “the multilayered visual culture of the internet” is “a privileged and extremely rich site for the creation and distribution of hegemonic and counterhegemonic racialized bodies” (34, 13). In this essay, I look at two sets of digital visual media artifacts as an inroad into studying the ambivalent cultural reception of Obama’s blackness. The first are anti-Obama memes and videos circulated either by police officers themselves or in conservative, pro-police social media posts and blogs. The second are pro-Obama memes and videos circulated following the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Both sets of images traffic in stereotypical tropes of blackness, but differ in their rhetorical orientation to those tropes. Whereas the former disparage Obama’s blackness, the latter revel in it.

While one set of artifacts focuses on domestic policing in the U.S. and the other on global policing in the war on terror, I analyze the two together because, like Marc Neocleous, I see the war on terror as the “contemporary instantiation of the combination of war power and police power” (14). Not only does “the antiblack ‘racial formation’ of the prison” work across geographical scales from “the local to the regional, national, and global,” as Dylan Rodriguez reminds us, it also forms “the condition of possibility (if not the procedural blueprint) for the policing and targeted incarceration of other racially pathologized bodies/communities” (10). Despite their differing scenes, both sets of images demonstrate how seemingly disparate publics deploy ambivalent signifiers of blackness to mediate their relationship to institutions of racialized state violence.

This article studies these visual rhetorics to shed light on the affective relay between negrophobia, the fear or hatred of blackness, and negrophilia, the fetishistic love of blackness (Wilderson and Williams). The dyad of negrophobia/negrophilia describes an ambivalent cultural relationship to blackness: Blackness is reviled, feared, and excluded, but it is also desired, consumed, and included. This essay probes how both critics and advocates of Obama use visual rhetoric to tap into the affective energy of blackness. I examine the role of negrophobia and negrophilia in constituting the “host of power relations and cultural practices” at work in the “visual order” of racial state violence (Vivian 481). I ask: How do diverse modes of affective investment in Obama’s blackness work to mediate state violence for different political publics? I find that America’s cross-cultural attachment to racialized police violence is subtended by a libidinal economy of antiblack racism, reproduced in part through the spread of visual digital media containing tropes of both negrophobia and negrophilia.

The argument proceeds in four parts. The first offers a rhetorical theory of negrophobia and negrophilia as a supplement to theories of racial neoliberalism in current rhetorical scholarship on Obama images. The second examines the use of negrophobic tropes in anti-Obama images circulated either by police officers or in right-leaning, pro-police blogs and social media posts. The third section turns to negrophilic pro-Obama images that celebrate the killing of Bin Laden and glorify the War on Terror. The conclusion argues that by tracking the rhetorical labor of negrophobia and negrophilia in discourses of policing, rhetorical scholars can offer a better account of the affective dynamics of racism in the contemporary era and the psychological barriers to dismantling antiblack racism.

Racial Neoliberalism and the Ambivalence of Antiblackness

Rhetorical scholars have situated online Obama images in the context of racial neoliberalism, which Darrel Enck-Wanzer describes as the perpetuation of racism and white supremacy within the supposedly colorblind structures of late capitalism. Under racial neoliberalism, the mere discussion of race is labeled archaic and racist. This rhetorically silences conversations about racism while simultaneously disavowing race’s ongoing importance in structuring the social order. Racial neoliberalism is evident in a number of online anti-Obama images that deploy racialized signifiers that “mark Obama as a threatening, uncivilized, racialized Other” while purporting to colorblindness by not “invoking the term ‘race’” and by “hiding behind the justification of ‘policy disagreements’” (Enck-Wanzer 26). Ralina L. Joseph describes the circulation of racialized images of Obama on the internet as moving between two poles: Explicitly racist images depicting Obama as a thug, animal, or terrorist, and supposedly “postracial, Black-transcendent images of Obama” which emphasize the “abandonment of [Obama’s] Blackness” (393). In current scholarship, Obama images are situated mostly between two discursive registers: Conservative, racist discourses that demonize Obama’s blackness, and liberal, colorblind discourses that erase Obama’s blackness entirely by championing him as “postracial” or transcendent of race.

However, little attention has been paid to Obama images that neither denigrate his blackness nor erase it entirely, but rather celebrate it openly and visibly. Joseph’s work on Obama images comes closest when she describes “fetishistic pro-Obama” images that deploy “icons of blackness” to “celebrate … Obama as the ultimate gangsta” (399, 398). Yet Joseph still describes the main affective labor of these images as race-denying rather than race-affirming. The celebration of Obama typically occurs, according to Joseph, insofar as there is “a metaphoric sloughing off of his Blackness” (400). What are rhetorical scholars to make of celebratory, pro-Obama images that traffic in tropes of blackness? Might these images constitute a progressive visual alternative to the racial animus of explicitly racist Obama images and the colorblindness involved in the erasure of Obama’s blackness? I remain skeptical. For, as Lisa Flores notes, “the faces of race seemingly change while the logics of racism remain firmly entrenched,” resulting in “alignments of racial and racist thought across seemingly incommensurable lines” (13-14). Tracking these mutations of antiblack racism in the contemporary era may require rhetorical scholars to move beyond the dialectics of colorblindness and racial hatred. The concept of ambivalent affective economies might be one way forward.

The ambivalence of affective attachment within symbolic or libidinal economies is an important psychoanalytic concept that has been taken up by both rhetorical scholars and afro-pessimist thinkers in black studies. Unlike emotion, which tends toward positive or negative valences such as happiness and joy, or anger and sadness, affect signals a subterraneous conduit of energies and attachments that lack a defined telos. Rhetorical scholar Christian O. Lundberg describes this conduit of affective attachment in the Lacanian vocabulary of “enjoyment.” “Enjoyment,” Lundberg writes, “organizes affect, representing … the subject’s ritual organization of its affective investments and the means of organizing these practices” (113). Similarly, afro-pessimist thinker Frank B. Wilderson III, uses the concept of “libidinal economy” to describe “the whole structure of psychic and emotional life,” and the “distribution and arrangement … of desire and identification” (6). The affective enjoyment which organizes the subject’s economy of libidinal investment does “not aim at the production of a specific end,” but instead is constituted through multiple, contradictory impulses simultaneously. Libidinal economy, Wilderson notes, structures desire and enjoyment ambivalently, “linked not only to forms of attraction, affection, and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction, and the violence of lethal consumption” (6). Political structures of antiblackness coexist alongside the cultural enjoyment of racial difference so easily, in part, because the celebration and exchange of blackness signifiers function as a habitual site of enjoyment within cultural projects of American violence.

Negrophobia and negrophilia constitute the Janus-faced manifestations of a libidinal economy of desire invested in the objectification of blackness. The violence of white supremacy has never been about merely hating black people, but rather in asserting ownership over “[t]he energizing capacity of blackness” itself (Wilderson and Williams 115). Racial neoliberalism’s discursive field does not merely move between white supremacist hatred of blackness and colorblind denial of blackness; it also works through progressive and multicultural forms of antiblackness (Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes). Blackness is commodified and appropriated for consumption by whites and nonblack people of color (Johnson). Rhetorically speaking, negrophilic antiblack discourse accentuates and reanimates negrophobic tropes positively rather than denying or erasing the affective charge of blackness. Black criminality is rearticulated as a sign of gangster cool; black sexuality is rearticulated as a site of sexual perversion. Negrophilia provides “a space for rebellion against social norms” (Archer-Straw 15), because, according to bell hooks, blackness is seen “as cool, hip, and transgressive,” functioning as a “backdrop of Otherness” within the “unconscious fantasies … embedded in the … deep structure of white supremacy” (380; 366). Negrophilia allows publics steeped in antiblack racism to participate in the ambiguous and ephemeral enjoyment of black culture while avoiding altogether the trenchant political critiques of American state and para-state violence that reverberate therein. The negrophobic and negrophilic consumption of visual signifiers of blackness is a habituated rhetorical practice through which Americans negotiate their relationship to state violence.

The visual culture of the internet is a key site for studying the ambivalent affective relationship between negrophobia and negrophilia for three reasons. First, memes and viral videos are digital media artifacts which proliferate through enjoyment and traffic in “circulating modes and affects” (Jenkins 457). Second, the viral energy of meme circulation relies on the slippery ambivalence of visual interpretation, as images provide space for multiple, contradictory arguments and affective investments (Hahner). Finally, the visually saturated digital culture of the internet is inherently racialized, insofar as online presentation is necessarily mediated by an economy of visual racial signifiers (Nakamura). In the following two sections, I turn to negrophobic visual rhetorics and negrophilic visual rhetorics respectively to examine these dynamics.

Anti-Obama Images and Negrophobia

The circulation of explicitly racist electronic media amongst police officers is widespread and well-documented (King). Officers across the country have been caught sending images that depict Obama as an ape, drawing on “the entrenched stereotype of people of African descent as monkeys” (Lohr; Joseph 394). One image, shared by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri depicts Ronald Reagan feeding a monkey through a baby-bottle with the tag, “Rare photo of Ronald Reagan babysitting Barack Obama in early 1962” (Spargo). The visual gag plays both on conservative nostalgia for Reagan and on racist stereotypes about blacks. For the officers who exchange these images, Obama becomes a racial icon for blackness writ large through his association with durable tropes of black inhumanity. The humor of the joke relies on a “routinized pattern within the field of signifying articulation” between blackness and animality (Lundberg 180). The “virtually automatic attachments to signifiers” of black inhumanity at work in these images is also mobilized in the text message of one former San Francisco police officer: “Keep [your gun] available in case the monkey returns to his roots. Its (sic) not against the law to put an animal down” (“7 San Francisco Officers”). The chain of symbolic associations that makes these jokes intelligible emerges out of and works to sustain the “modes of perception, visual practices … and forms of affect” that allow some officers to see black people as threatening and inhuman (Vivian 479).

In a number of images shared on pro-police social media, Obama stands in for the threat of black brutishness and criminality which demands the violent intervention of police. One such meme, captioned, “COP KILLER BARACK OBAMA—INCITING VIOLENCE TOWARD POLICE BY FABRICATING RACISM,” shows an angry, red-eyed Obama standing in front of the Capitol Building pointing a smoking revolver towards the viewer (azgary). His position in front of the Capitol Building magnifies the perceived racial threat by situating a criminal Obama in a position of power. It also links Obama to gangster rap culture by having him mimic the popular sideways gun pose often seen in rap music videos (Palmer). Obama’s pose in the image is reminiscent of the myriad pictures of young black men pointing guns at the camera used by officers in social media posts attempting to criminalize victims of police shootings, like the fake picture of Michael Brown used by a Kansas City, Missouri police officer (Walsh). The habitual digital production and online circulation of these “Obama-as-thug images” reinforces metonymic connections between Obama, police shooting victims, black criminality, and violence against the police (Joseph 398).

Another series of images depicts Obama as either hating cops or failing to honor police when they are killed, blaming Obama’s supposedly racially charged rhetoric for attacks on police officers. As Philip Bump of The Washington Post reports, “few theories of Obama’s hatred have been as sustained and as broadly accepted as the idea that he hates police officers.” This trope plays out in a series of memes that try to associate Obama with Jeffrey Williams, a black man accused of shooting two police officers during a protest in Ferguson. The memes feature pictures of Obama, Williams, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown doing supposedly thuggish looking things: smoking marijuana, drinking alcohol, taking selfies, and holding up their middle fingers. The blog post accompanying these memes traffics in the crudest of negrophobic stereotypes and openly celebrates the death of Brown and Martin, all while blaming Obama not only for the shooting of the Ferguson police officers, but also for the riots that erupted after Ferguson (Andresen). One tweet, circulated using the #BlueLivesMatter hashtag, shows a picture of Obama smiling wistfully overlaid on an image of a building in Ferguson burning to the ground, linking Obama with racist tropes about the violence and destructiveness of #BlackLivesMatter (@JosephMRyan1). A trope that recurred after nearly every police shooting during the Obama administration was that Obama “ha[d] blood on his hands” (Concha). One picture posted to the Facebook page I Support The Police, Not Criminals features Obama’s face photoshopped onto a silhouette of a dark body smearing bloody hands on the camera lens. Other memes criticize Obama for not honoring fallen police officers, contrasting images of Obama speaking out on the deaths of Brown, Martin, and Eric Garner with an empty podium in front of the White House (Cook). These memes constitute an erasure of Obama’s voice, ignoring his balanced rhetorical approach, and exclusively depicting his racially charged rhetoric as a threat to police. Whether explicitly racist, such as the Obama-as-thug images, or implicitly racist, such as the empty podium, images that depict Obama as a racial threat to police officers are pervasive throughout the digital sphere of police culture.

“The Hoods,” a crude YouTube video made and circulated by four (now-former) Ft. Lauderdale police officers, is exemplary of how Obama functions as an icon for the threat blackness poses to institutions of white sovereignty (Taylor; Downs). “The Hoods” laments the loss of a long gone era of “savage hunters,” “HOODS OF DEATH—THE N*****S CALLED THEM,” interspersing images of police cars, police dogs, and screen shots of plantation owners and runaway slaves. This peculiar arrangement of text and image celebrates contemporary police violence through a nostalgic appeal to “the historical presence of the surveillance technologies of organized slave patrols and bounty hunters for runaways” (Browne 66). This perverted scene of white supremacist reminiscence is visually and textually interrupted: “BUT ONE N****R WOULD CHANGE EVERYTHING,” cutting to a hyper-racialized, digitally manipulated image of Obama shown with a gold grill and gold chain necklace (see Figure 1). In response, the officers issue a call to action: “BUT WAIT MY FRIEND— THIS SUMMER—GET READY TO RIDE,” followed by a gruesome montage of images of black men being attacked by German Shepherds and slave hunters, a black man behind prison glass overlaid with a caption saying “Escaped Slave,” and pools of blood gathering on the floor.

“The Hoods” gives insight into how these officers rhetorically interpret the social role of contemporary policing as a continuation of historical practices of chattel slavery and Jim Crow racial terrorism. This affective continuity between contemporary policing and enslavement demonstrates the degree to which the “libidinal economy of antiblackness is pervasive, regardless of variance or permutation in its political economy” (Sexton, “People-of-Color-Blindness” 36-37). Tracking the rhetorical labor of this video registers an empirical record of how antiblack policing has historically allowed for the “reconfiguration of [slavery’s] operation … rather than its abolition” (Sexton, “People-of-color-blindness” 37). The visual icon of Obama precipitates scenes of white sovereignty in crisis, and coordinates sentiments of loss and nostalgia. By offering a visible signifier of blackness in a role of extreme power and sovereignty, the racial threat of Obama articulates cultural anxieties about federal government tyranny to right-wing, white supremacist fears of “an imaginary world of … ‘oppressive black power,’” (Matheson; Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes 53). Images of Obama secure a link between fears of black dereliction and paranoia about big government, figuring police as patriotic national heroes whose antiblack violence saves white victims from the tyranny of black oppression.

Pro-Obama Images and Negrophilia

The death of Osama Bin Laden was an event “saturated with social and political meaning” (Schrift 279). News of Bin Laden’s death was met in the U.S. with an orgiastic wave of patriotic jubilation. Following Bin Laden’s death, a plethora of pro-Obama memes and images proliferated on the internet, celebrating the killing of Bin Laden as a political victory for the Obama administration (Dickens). Many of the Obama memes surrounding the killing of Bin Laden involve various incarnations of the “black cool” trope. Perhaps the most frequently used image in these memes is a picture taken of Obama pointing at the camera, wearing sunglasses, smile beaming from ear-to-ear, tie flailing in the wind. Rebecca Walker describes this particular picture of Obama as the ultimate icon of black cool, a magnetic affective energy that resonates in and around Obama’s blackness: “[I]n this picture, Obama is indisputably cool. He is so, so cool I cannot turn away from the image. … The Cool in this photo is so palpable it sends a shiver up my spine. It is Black Cool” (xv). These memes remix this image with captions such as “Sorry it took so long to get you a copy of my birth certificate—I was too busy killing Osama Bin Laden,” or simply “U MAD.” This visual icon of black cool is appropriated by progressive audiences as a sign of an indisputable political victory, a stinging rebuke to Obama’s conservative haters. These memes, trading in the nonchalant swagger of Obama’s blackness, celebrate Obama’s ability to kill a terrorist with ease and to look good while he’s doing it.

Other memes decorate Obama with cultural references from gangster rap and black youth culture. One meme shows Obama brushing imaginary dirt off his shoulder, with the caption “99 Problems—BUT BIN LADEN AIN’T ONE,” both references to classic Jay-Z songs. Another depicts the now iconic image of Obama walking away from the podium where he announced Bin Laden’s death, with the caption “#SWAG,” a word that “conveys style, confidence, triumph and power” which gained enormous popularity following its appearance in a Soulja Boy song (Richards). Another image shows an official presidential portrait of Obama with the American flag in the background, with the caption, “GAVE THAT BITCH A DEAD TERRORIST—BITCHES LOVE DEAD TERRORISTS.” This is an example of the immensely popular “Bitches Love X” meme, a series of memes that all play on the line “I sent that bitch a smiley face, bitches love smiley faces,” from the unapologetically black cartoon show The Boondocks (Bitches Love Smiley Faces). These images invert the affective charge of negrophobic tropes of blackness, finding in the killing of Bin Laden evidence of Obama’s hip-hop ethos, his swag, and his gangster cool. Rap’s lyrical games of one-upmanship provide a discursive template for young liberals to articulate affects of accomplishment and pride in the political victory of Bin Laden’s death.

One viral video from Funny or Die parodies Obama’s 60 Minutes interview about the killing of Bin Laden (Davis). This mockumentary style video draws on stereotypical signifiers evocative of scenes from interviews with rap artists, showing a well-dressed, presidential-looking Obama surrounded by what appears to be his hip-hop posse, complete with a blunt roller and a guy drinking a forty-ounce malt beverage. James Davis, the video’s writer, director, and Obama impersonator, deploys a strikingly accurate impersonation of the president’s cadence and inflection, but adorns his speech with slang drawn from hip-hop’s aesthetic “playground for caricatures of black gangstas” (Rose 1). Obama offers the following retelling of the event of Bin Laden’s death:

I was at the White House, getting that money, when my military connect hit me with a direct message on Twitter letting me know that they had identified the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden. It was at that point that I gave out the executive order to LAY THAT MURDER GAME DOWN, B! Don’t even read him his rights, run through the door, start blastin’! No questions asked: Change! … At that point, I informed Michelle. She called the barber, had him come through for a fresh edge up, make sure my geometry was on point for the cameras, popped a couple bottles of rozay, talked to the people, gave a speech, let ‘em know how we do on the West Side of the Atlantic. Change!

When pressed about the whereabouts of Bin Laden’s body, Obama boasts about ordering his military connect to “Body that n***a, and then bring the body back,” so he can store it in the trunk of his presidential limousine. “You smell that?” Obama asks, “That’s not old spice. What you’re smelling is a new fragrance, called ‘Corpse—By Osama.’” To close out the interview, Obama warns, “Qaddafi, I’m coming for that ass,” and then plays the hook from his “new single” that goes: “I run the military, n***a, if you want that beef.”

This parody draws on hip-hop’s tendency to wed “the art of bragging … to the icon of the violent street hustler” (Rose 56). Turning the war on terror into a rap beef subsumes the racial violence of American targeted assassinations and extrajudicial killings within the playful discursive landscape of hip-hop. The desirability of rap’s violent imagery conjoins with the cultural affects of patriotic enjoyment that emerge in the public celebrations of Bin Laden’s death. When (real life) Obama was pressed on the whereabouts of Bin Laden’s body, he maintained, “We don’t trot this stuff out as trophies” (Dixit 346). Nevertheless, the repeated references to Bin Laden’s dead body in these images and videos rhetorically compensates for “the invisibilities of bin Laden’s body—and the meanings and identities it could expose” (Dixit 346). The signifiers of blackness that proliferate around and through Obama’s body give audiences the means to affectively reconcile their relationship to state violence against brown and black bodies in the war on terror.

These memes and videos use hypervisible signifiers of black masculinity to depict the presidency and its institutions of executive violence through tropes of black criminality. However, unlike negrophobic images that view blackness as a racial threat, these images treat Obama’s blackness as cool, humorous, exciting, and transgressive. Transgressive visual markers of Obama’s blackness articulate to institutional icons of the presidency and signifiers of sovereign violence. The negrophilic investment in Obama’s blackness on the part of young white audiences coordinates progressive attachments to institutions of state violence, surveillance, policing, and warfare. In a time where young people are increasingly skeptical of the War on Terror, the immense desire for blackness amongst white youth that has long fueled the mainstream popularity of gangster rap also functions as a conduit for cultivating cultural affinities to the Obama presidency’s institutions of war and policing (Motel; Rose 4).

Accounting for Ambivalence

America’s bipartisan and cross-cultural investment in institutions of racialized policing is mediated and sustained, in part, through affective investments in negrophobia and negrophilia that play out in the visual culture of the internet. For both his advocates and his critics, President Obama has become a visible icon for online discussions of racialized state violence. User-generated memes, images and videos depicting Obama’s blackness in both negrophobic and negrophilic ways have been at the heart of these cultural negotiations. Whether cast as an affirmation of blackness or a negation of blackness, the creation and circulation of racialized images figures in these discussions as a repetitive investment in the affective energy of blackness itself.

Accounting for the ambivalent rhetorical function of negrophobia and negrophilia can help explain how racist culture disavows its own rampant racism, and how antiblack racism continues to thrive in our “postracial” neoliberal milieu. “[T]he persistence of racism in a color-blind era” is due, in part to the way white subjects absorb positive affectations of racialized otherness, substituting this embrace of racial difference for a substantive interrogation of racial inequality (Kennedy et al. 367). Understanding the affective ambivalence of antiblackness may help us better interrogate the “alignments of racial and racist thought across seemingly incommensurable lines” (Flores 14). Racial neoliberalism does not simply omit references to race, but rather actively subsumes racialized otherness into its schemas of national identity while omitting or disavowing the critiques of white supremacy that emanate from those positions of racial otherness. The negrophobic mobilization of blackness in the service of projects of American violence magnifies the generalized devaluation of nonwhite life while gleefully trafficking in a simulacra of racial otherness.

Studying the visual rhetoric of anti-Obama images shared in right-wing, pro-police online publics gives insight into the “unjust imposition of negative meanings on black people and their communities” (Marback 82). These visual media artifacts draw on well-worn negrophobic visual tropes which arise out of an expansive history of antiblack surveillance and police terror. Their visual logic contributes to the erasure of black dissent in online police publics, as the mere consideration of the ethical recognition of black people as human subjects is deemed a racial threat to the social order of white supremacy. The blackness of the first black president animates nostalgic antiblack anxieties about the decline of (white) American sovereignty and its accompanying projects of racial violence.

It is insufficient, however, to exclusively blame right-wing racism and negrophobia for the resilience of racial inequality. Negrophilia allows Obama supporters to playfully consume signifiers of blackness without having to account for black demands for racial equality. Not only does this appropriation efface critiques of racism, it actively works in service of America’s racialized war machine. Obama’s blackness becomes a conduit through which “the office of the president, a powerful extension of the US state” can “appropriate black images to suppress autonomous black freedom struggles and to promote less threatening racial narratives” (Cobb 65). Digital visual rhetorics of America’s first black president give rhetorical scholars a unique opportunity to examine the contemporary appropriation of blackness in progressive cultural attachments to institutions of racialized violence.

Studying both negrophobic and negrophilic visual rhetorics allow us to better understand the psychodynamic barriers to dismantling racism. Vigilance against negrophilic antiblackness, however, need not deny the possibility that the circulation of visual signifiers of racial difference might cultivate antiracist social praxis. As hooks reminds us, “Acknowledging ways the desire for pleasure … informs our politics, our understanding of difference, we may know better how desire disrupts, subverts, and makes resistance possible. We cannot, however, accept these new images uncritically” (380). This essay has shown that through the rhetorical study of ambivalent images of racial enjoyment, we may contribute to this critical examination. By studying how blackness is appropriated in the service of racialized policing, we may begin to untangle the myriad ways racial neoliberalism both perpetuates racial hatred and accommodates the embrace of racial difference.

James Alexander McVey is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research is situated at the nexus of rhetoric and media studies, focusing on how visual media both constitutes and combats the rhetorical life of racial inequality. His current project, Policing the Post-Racial, looks at how changing dyn-amics of visual, digital, and surveillant media influence cultural negotiations over race and policing.

Obama the Grotesque: A Parade of Racial Horribles

Christopher J. Gilbert

Assumption College

Racism is ugly. In the decades before Barack Obama’s election to the U.S. presidency in 2008, it seemed that racism had gone underground. Yet as Mary L. Rucker notes, it has since “emerged from the underground […] in the form of strident, eliminationist, and racialized rhetoric” amongst some blocs of white culture (xiv, xv). This foul emergence was capped by the election of Donald J. Trump to the presidency in November 2016. Trump has heralded himself as the savior of America even as he has been consistently hailed as the chief executive of bigotry, impudence, and racism. One commentator called the rise of Trumpism a political tragedy, lamenting its dark realities of “vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness” (Remnick). Months before Trump’s presidential win, another commentator warned of a festering white racial hyper-awareness (Bouie). Indeed, the realization of a Trump presidency has inaugurated an awakening of ghastly rhetorics of race and resentment. For some, this means not only that racism is (again) the new normal, but also that racialization has been normalized in both political culture and cultural politics. Besides the normalization of racism, my concern is with its lionization.

Jewish philosopher and theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, once proclaimed that people should celebrate by presenting their objects of reverence to others. Of course, he also said that celebration is not simply a matter of “demonstrations, often public demonstrations, of joy and festivity, such as singing, shouting, speechmaking, feasting, and the like” (153). It is also a reflection of a certain mode of public selfhood. That members of the so-called “Alt-Right” were celebrating Trump’s victory in Washington, DC less than two weeks after the election is enough to suggest that some in the white nationalist coalition are “acting less like an underground organization and more like the establishment” (Goldstein). That they were doing so with Nazi salutes, references to the Lügenpresse (“lying press”), anti-Semitic tales of Jewish guile and azoic golems, proclamations of the U.S. as a fundamentally white country, and cries of “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” is simply dreadful. This sentimentalist expression of white pride and prejudice has disconcertingly comic precursors.

Numerous caricatures cropped up throughout President Obama’s time in office.¹ In 2008, a cartoonish cover of The New Yorker portrayed the president as a flag-burning Muslim. In a 2009 editorial cartoon in The New York Post, he was a rabid chimpanzee. That same year, three images were all the rage amongst campaigners against Obamacare, variously picturing the president as Hitler, Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), and an African witch doctor. In 2010, a carnival-style game called “Walkin’ Charlie” appeared on the Seaside Heights boardwalk in New Jersey, encouraging passersby to throw baseballs at President Obama’s monstrous likeness. In 2014, a cartoon in The Boston Herald showed the president brushing his teeth with watermelon-flavored toothpaste. The list goes on. Consistent across so many of these is an overwrought sense of political cum cultural comeuppance.² One problem with racism in the “Age of Obama” (and, now, the “Trump Era”), though, is its vile forms of retributive injustice. There is a history of awful caricatures of black culture (such as Tom, Coon, Sapphire, Mammy, and others). There is likewise a tradition of cultural resentment, or better ressentiment, that urges a brazen and remorseless revelry in racial travesties. If Obama’s presidency has galvanized rituals of gross caricature, it has also incited a nostalgic modality of rage that is wrapped in ribaldry. Worse than the ugly head of racism is the festal appeal of Obama the Grotesque. Such an appeal, while present from cartoons to street art, has been most glaringly displayed at fairs and festivals.

Festivals enable ordinary citizens to enter a “utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance” (Bakhtin 9). With their grotesque exhibitions, carnival atmospheres, and oftentimes-satirical overtones, festivals offer up a ritualized space for revelry. But festive occasions can also reveal the stygian side in the “utopian” doublings of the carnivalesque: Community based on disunion, freedom based on persecution, and equality based on separation. Two loathsome caricatures of President Obama stand out for special consideration here. The first was in August 2013 at the Missouri State Fair, wherein a popular rodeo clown mocked the president with a mix of political disparagement and insinuations of physical harm. The second was at a parade in Norfolk, Nebraska on the Fourth of July in 2014. There, a citizen participant drove a blue Ford pickup truck carrying a wooden outhouse, with a zombie-like mannequin of President Obama in the front, and signs on the sides indicating the Obama Presidential Library. Such caricatures suggest that Obama’s presidency was always already so much about race that images of postracialism were destined to drown in a wash of animosity. Even more disconcerting is how much racialization has animated cultural politics in a “rhetoric of celebration” (Newman 9). It is therefore instructive to engage “the conceit of whiteness” via its attendant fêtes (Seshadri-Crooks). Humor can encourage a principle of laughter that rejects racial folly (Timmerman, Gussman, and King). Then again, there is racial humor that, contra the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, exploits laughter to reinstate inveterate ways of seeing.

This essay takes seriously the prominence of racism in some of its most festive, if not comic, manifestations. The caricatures of President Obama are grotesque. Nevertheless, they laugh at the officialdom embodied in the Executive Office of the President, and at the president’s actual body. This is why I offer a careful examination of the ribald humor that underwrites the “free play” of racial jest (Bakhtin 207). Tellingly, caricatures that revel in racialized convictions frequently recollect ideologies of free expression to rebuff any outcries of those who take offense. I have argued elsewhere that the ugly and the laughable can offer topoi for rhetorical judgment (Gilbert, “Ridiculous”). I have also argued how humor sometimes disturbs the contradictory logics behind both racism and its recriminations (Gilbert and Rossing). However, in this case, the “ferocious theatricality and aggressive festivity” of grotesque racial caricatures cover over fantasies of white pride in their all too familiar, and res gestae, formulations of joyful prejudice (Lipsitz 242). One result is the revelation of wretched truths about cultural relations in otherwise festive occasions. Another is the realization that “presidential embodiment,” in Joseph Lowndes’s words, provokes rhetorical contests over American national character.

Of Race Rituals and Ribald Humor

Throughout U.S. history, festivity is coincident with a “racialized gaze” (Hum). Scholars such as Joseph R. Roach and Jason Stupp have detailed the spectacles of antebellum slave auctions.³ Dora Apel, Shawn Michelle Smith, Amy Louise Wood, and others have outlined the circulation of lynching photography in some early-twentieth-century white cultures.⁴ Phenomena like these betray an “entire apparatus” that converted “festive entertainments” into complicated racial displays (Conquergood 28). Sandra Gunning and Nancy Bentley—following early twentieth-century novelist and political activist Charles W. Chesnutt—call lynching “the ultimate extension of other forms of amusement” that are reliant on “race-based pleasure” (22). Tellingly, in places like Indiana, the Ku Klux Klan was once exceedingly visible, taking “out ads in local newspapers to promote upcoming Klan parades, picnics, and holiday celebrations” (Moore 16). To this day one can find festivities and carnival-like processions of racial terror in KKK and other white nationalist gatherings, reminding us that festive racialization culminates in grotesque caricatures at “best” and actual killings at worst. The point is that “rituals of race” constitute a “characteristic genre of American public life,” and one that thrives on a perverse public interest (Lorini 3).

These rituals are also present in popular entertainment. Here I’m thinking of the minstrelsy, which is almost perfunctorily condemned nowadays in spite of the fact that its “racist pleasures” were once—and, to some members of white culture, still are—all in good fun (Lott 146). Frederick Douglass described blackface actors as “the filthy scum of white society” who “pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens” (Lott 15). This was not to say that spaces like the minstrelsy simply catered to racist comedy, but rather to declare that such comic forms are comedies of race. There is a legacy of blackface humor that endures as a way of celebrating whiteness by ridiculing blackness. The minstrelsy entertained the racial order of things by reveling in a kind of comedy that “stressed the use of caricatures and stereotypes” in “sketches [that] overemphasized the importance of perceived and real racial differences” (Mahar 186). It is worth noting here that these entertainments were not always reinforcements of white racism; at times, they were satires and sendups of it. Thus, some like Andrew Silver have situated “southern humor” (with its minstrel motifs, folk prejudices, and racial typecasts) in contexts of cultural crisis, whereby (dark) humor serves as a core rhetorical resource for conserving, celebrating, and commemorating representations of racial violence.

Contemporary fairs and parades that have featured caricatures of President Obama summon southern humor, exaggerating “white Anglo-Saxon norms” and “racial proscription[s]” (Gross 10). However, in contrast to the Obama-esque ethic of “Yes We Can” is a deeply resistant carnival heritage of stasis (even nostalgia), not change. Lurking in this tradition is a politics of racism on parade, and a history of ribaldry in white rage that begins at Fourth of July festivities across the antebellum period (Kennedy). In the early twentieth century the American Legion celebrated the KKK for its cavalcade in an Independence Day parade in Miami, Florida. Almost immediately after Trump won the presidency, the KKK was planning its “Victory Klavalkade Klan Parade” in North Carolina, complete with an offer of “racial greetings.” The float of President Obama at the Independence Day parade in Norfolk should therefore give us pause. As Simon Weaver observes, “embodied racism” is so dynamic that it continues “to include new signs, practices, events and peoples” as reinventions of old cultural anxieties (74; see also Newman 8; Davis 3). One member of the parade committee affirmed the float’s popularity amongst “the majority of the community” (Reilly). The mayor, representatives from the Chamber of Commerce, and others reviled the float. But such revilement, in turn, amplified the extent to which black humor showcases the cultural politics in everyday life precisely when trivialities are made remarkable (Ball 235). The rodeo at the 2013 Missouri State Fair paralleled the parade in Norfolk, especially in light of “the hooting and hollering from the crowd” that erupted while the ringleader taunted a grotesque clown of Obama (Rucker, “Obama”). Many folks said the revelry reflected dissatisfaction with policymaking. All the same, countless commentators advertised the incident as proof of a longstanding color line that mitigates ideas about racial taunts being just in good fun, like them or not.

My titular reference to a “parade of horribles” is crucial here. Throughout the nineteenth century, such parades were popular on Independence Day, but also in the Ancient and Horribles Parade in Rhode Island, the infamous Philadelphia Mummers Parade, and recurring festivals in Salem, Massachusetts. What is more, a “parade of horribles” is a rhetorical device that implies the awful outcomes that will follow from certain courses of action. When news correspondents and legislative undersecretaries said that a “parade of horribles” might accompany the Supreme Court’s decision on Obamacare in 2012, they reiterated a rather hoary appeal to the possibility of negative effects. Perhaps unwittingly, they also alluded to a sense in which parades evoke “beliefs about the past as means to interpret the present,” like when festive occasions serve as sites of racial conflict (Browne 245; Rydell). Today, an extension of the horrible parades exists in the colloquialism, “basket of deplorables,” which is the phrase former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used to reference those Trump supporters who traffic in “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobia,” and other types of hateful rhetoric (Holan). It also stands as a descriptor for many of Trump’s Cabinet picks. So it is cold comfort to know that a parade is a “showing” but also a “stoppage,” processing even as it tarries with the entrenched conditions of cultural arrangements.

Most outstanding in these stoppages is the comicality of “racial resentment” (Kinder and Sanders 294). Inasmuch as what George Lipsitz dubs a “possessive investment in whiteness” is driven by nostalgia, it is more like the ressentiment that comes with “wounded attachments” to the negation of an other (Brown). This is not the ressentiment of a dominant white culture. It is, instead, “the dying embers of the same old racism that once rendered the best pickings of America the exclusive province of unblackness” (Coates). Following Kenneth Burke, resentful “humor” motivates a festive pillory without the so-called “comic proviso.” What follows are dark forms of revelry—true feasts of fools that re-enliven some disturbing grotesqueries of Black-American culture as well as White Americanism. They do not offer up a pièce de résistance. Instead, they reveal a pièce de ressentiment in a “new historic sense” of racialism that “keeps intact […] traditional contents” (Bakhtin 25). Such a revelation upsets any racial healing that might come from a grotesque image in good humor.

Of Fairs and Meddlings

Since the turn of the twentieth century, the Missouri State Fair has celebrated the state’s palace cars, livestock exhibitions, fine arts, and more—showcasing “the best of the best in the great Show-Me-State” (“History Summary”). Said White House spokesman and Missouri native Josh Earnest about the rodeo incident in August 2013: It was “not one of the finer moments in our state.”

The moment came when a rodeo clown dressed up like President Obama bore the brunt of the commentator’s insults, not to mention the jeers of an audience that cheered for the clownish figure to be run down by a bull in what fair organizers ultimately labeled an “unconscionable stunt” (Lopez and Payne). As the bull riders readied to compete, the clown positioned himself in the middle of the arena, wearing a grotesque mask of the president’s face, a dirtied suit jacket, oversized denim overalls, and tan work boots. Soon thereafter the announcer mockingly introduced the fair’s illustrious guest. Then came the voice of the clown, enacted by well known rodeo performer, Tuffy Gessling. “Hey, I know I’m a clown,” said Gessling in a high-pitched brogue. “He’s just running around acting like one, but doesn’t know he is one!” Gessling’s conflation of the clown with the “real” president was even clearer when he shrilled: “As soon as this bull comes out, Obama, don’t you move! He’s going to getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha” (Lopez and Payne). As the clown carried on, the crowd hailed each intimation that the president might be mauled by a bull. Adding insult to hints of physical injury, the Obama clown stood more like a lame duck than a bullfighter, with the handle of a broomstick protruding out of his pants as if it was lodged in his rear end.

The performance garnered a mixture of ire and vindication. Republican Lieutenant Governor of Missouri, Peter Kinder, called it utterly disrespectful (“Rodeo”). A white attendee likened it to a KKK rally (Rucker, “Obama”). Even Stephen Colbert chimed in, mocking cable news coverage with his assertion that “there is no higher honor than having a clown run around a dirt arena wearing a grotesque mask of your face while the announcer asks the cheering crowd, ‘Who wants to see this guy trampled?’” (“Obama Rodeo Clown”). Such criticisms begged questions about when, where, and by whom it is acceptable to ridicule the president, and about the boundaries of racial scorn. But for those who did not take offense, or who reveled in the performance, the real issue was criticism itself. According to reporter Dave Helling of the Kansas City Star, “[Gessling] was just having fun and exercising his right to free speech” (Lopez and Payne). Republican State Representative of Texas, Steve Stockman, accused thin-skinned audiences of being too racially sensitive (Rucker, “Obama”). Gessling himself proclaimed that “nothing racist was ever implied” (Memmott). As the Senior Public Relations Coordinator of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association attested, rodeo clowns are expected to read their audiences and “play politics a little bit. But,” he admitted, “when you’re suggesting that the president should be injured, it kind of gets to a level of hostility that is inappropriate” (“Missouri”). In short, it drew a too-obvious color line.

For my part, the ribald humor of the clown amplifies the “operational customs” that underlie Gessling’s “ritual performance” (Stoeltje, “Rodeo” 244). Consider that rodeos are festive reenactments of the Western frontier experience driven by fantastical performances of people (usually men) taming wildness (Lawrence 11). This is why the clown’s role is so vital to the rodeo: The clown “plays with cultural categories” much like jokesters, storytellers, and fools twist wit with practical wisdom in order to present “a motley image” of Otherness (Stoeltje, “Cowboys” 128). Notably, rodeo clowns crack jokes and create caricatures while protecting bull riders from beasts. But clownish acts can slip quite seamlessly from vainglorious displays into exercises in vulgarity (Towsen 4). Rodeo clowns, as such, can typify the black comedy of white cultures.

Put simply, grotesqueries are effluences of what Joe R. Feagin calls a “white racial frame.” One audience member and local livestock farmer proclaimed that, racist or not, the performance punctuated a shared belief that “a true-blooded American” should be in the White House. Another fairgoer mourned the ostensive loss of freedom under the Obama administration, and pointed to the backlash against the clown as a case in point. Still another attendee claimed that the clown’s performance paled in comparison to condemnatory displays at less publicized events (Rucker, “Obama”). A whole cultural apparatus is at play in such judgments, underwritten by the Missouri Rodeo Cowboys Association and encircled by vendors selling “rebel pride” and Confederate flags, and radios blaring right-wing political talk. The rodeo typified a comic theater of racial inferiority, not unlike the minstrelsy, and punctuated the denigration of the first black U.S. president. First, the “demeaning humor” of the “blackface clown” turns “racial ridicule” into a crude mode of race baiting (Strausbaugh 69; Pickering; Nowatzki 77). Second, the clownish Obama actually defies the very raison d’être of the rodeo clown, which is to distract the bull and provide comic relief from the “tragedies” of wrecks and close calls. In this instance, the clown lures the bull, beckoning its wild aggression. Furthermore, “the black body is physically assumed, taken over, dispossessed, and thus virtually destroyed” (Lewis 98). The president is essentially gored in effigy, making Gessling’s caricature something of an endpoint to the crooked line from slavery through minstrelsies to lynchings. Third and finally, the bull doubles as the audience, both tamed by the performers and let loose on the stooge.

Following the controversy, Gessling was banned for life from performing at the Missouri State Fair. One commentator called this a form of “corporal punishment for free speech,” and an almost-comic license for “Obama-haters” to offend in retribution (Weigel). In Gessling’s opinion, “people have lost their ability to laugh” (Whitaker). Soon after the dust settled, Gessling vied for Missouri’s person of the year award. Black comedy, in both senses of the term, has long been “a mess of entertainment and politics, love and hate, attraction and repulsion, class and race consciousness, sincere imitation and cruel mockery” (Strausbaugh 92). In this case, it is not an unthinkable leap from the minstrel stage to the rodeo arena, let alone from a fair fool to a parade float.

Of Parades and Prejudices

Three days after the Fourth of July in 2014, deputy politics editor at The Huffington Post, Mollie Reilly, made an observation: “The presidential library outhouse comparison has become somewhat of a conservative meme in recent years.” For example, an Obama book-lending latrine appeared at the state Republican convention in Montana in 2012. Reportedly, it “was riddled with bullet holes and had a fake birth certificate attached” (Zezima). Much like the rodeo incident, the comparison drew a mix of populist jollity and official disapproval. The same was true after an Independence Day parade in Norfolk, Nebraska featured a ghastly sculpture of President Obama on a blue pickup truck that also carried the structure of his legacy: a bathroom library. A key distinction of this iteration is that it mocked the question, a la Frederick Douglass, “what to a black president is the Fourth of July?”

The float flaunted a grotesque caricature. With olive green skin, wide eyes, and arms protruding from blue overalls to reveal both hands on his face with mouth agape, President Obama’s likeness was more than a “zombie-like dummy”; it was a deathly travesty (“Parade”). Unlike the clown, though, the float truly was an effigy of a human fiend whose political work is compared to fecal matter. The Nebraska Democratic Party called it one of “the worst shows of racism and disrespect for the office of the presidency” (Woodall). However, many others either celebrated the float as a testament to the spirit of the day or lauded it as a majoritarian piece of political satire. The float’s creator, Dale Remmich, attested that the likeness was not President Obama at all. “It’s me,” he said. “I’ve got on my bibs. […] I’m turning green and some say I look like a zombie. But I am not a hatemonger and I’m not a racist.” Alternatively, one parade organizer, Rick Konopasek, said the outhouse was like a statuary editorial cartoon. He also noted its receipt of an “honorable mention” by a three-judge panel, and—contra Norfolk Mayor Sue Fuchtman—its encapsulation of sentiments in the anti-Obama faction (Richinick). “It’s obvious the majority of the community liked it,” Konopasek said to the Lincoln Journal Star. “So should we deny the 95 percent of those that liked it their rights, just for the 5 percent of people who are upset?” Here, laughter at grotesquery is not only a sign of approval but also a source of civic entitlements.

The promotion of prejudice underscores a central problem with the float: It expresses ordinary ideas about race and culture. Take the rhetorical implications of the setup. According to the National Archives and Records Administration, a presidential library should “promote understanding of the presidency and the American experience.” Such libraries honor political records and reputations (Zimmerman). President Obama’s legacy is portrayed as a depository of human waste. Moreover, the toilet imagery recollects olden bathroom politics that revolve around segregated lavatories and workplaces where blacks were forced to relieve themselves outdoors. Zombie references only exacerbate these recollections, implying that a blackened political system cannot be flushed clean if President Obama festers as if back from the dead.

One potentially positive takeway is that parades have also enabled persons of color to create new sociopolitical relations through renegotiations of public cultures. In the best of scenarios, even the most provocative performers “engaged in dialogic and democratic relations with audiences and spectators” (Lipsitz 63). Nonetheless, parades can also reify race relations (Ryan). No relation is simply an abstraction; it is, in situ, a way of life. So, whether on the face of a clown or in the guise of a statuary caricature, a mask can be “no mask at all.” It can be “the face of the permanently Other, always a not-from-here” (Taussig 88). This, in turn, can betray the tragedy of festivity.

Conclusion: On Festive Occasions

It is disturbing that in some caricature controversies around President Obama, old codes of racist discourses are recycled to celebrate the unmasking of racism as a public good unto itself. It is even more worrisome that this unmasking seems to mean that one can be both racist and democratic so long as one operates under the cover of the comic. My good friend and colleague, Jonathan P. Rossing, has demonstrated how troubling moments of racial provocation can foster more prudent judgments about rhetorical cultures of racism. Unfortunately, in Rossing’s terms, the “comic provocations” under study in this essay are not fashioned in a manner whereby a constructive claim to comic license is created to laugh at racialized humor. Rather, they typify racialized caricature that, once called out, is only partly curtailed by the rhetorical backpedal.

Or not. There have been more than a few tributes to the parade of potty humor. At a Rage Against Media Rally in Los Angeles in April 2014, a speaker smugly donned a mask of President Obama and a cowboy hat before pretending to be a bullfighter provoking a man dressed in a cow costume. The speaker touted his admiration for Tuffy, while a crowd member intoned, “we love rodeos!” In July 2016, during a Fourth of July parade in Sheridan, Indiana, a seventy-three-year-old man named Don Christy—dressed in orange prison garb and wearing a bushy blonde wig—drove a red golf cart adorned with a caricature of the president appearing waste deep in a white bucket. On the bucket were the words, “ROYAL FLUSH,” and posted below it like a license plate was the label, “LYING AFRICAN.” When he was lambasted for his racist presentation, Christy defended his “right to say things” and proclaimed, “I’m a patriot” (Bever). The man insisted that the display was “meant to be taken in jest.” How fitting (and frightening), then, is a more recent notion that Trump is “ushering in the Infinite Jest Apocalypse” (Michael). And why? Because of his racial antics. Because of his clownish profanity. Because of his unabashed Schadenfreude.

Many a truth is expressed in jest. Many a cultural truth is also performed in festive spaces, where members of a “folk” culture are empowered to enact the perspectives and positions of “the people.” But following Bakhtin, such enactments accommodate a plurality of interpretations, making the scatological, vulgar, and, yes, racist humor of the fairs and festivals examined herein a caricature of what W. E. B. Dubois once dubbed “the Culture of White Folk.” This is not to say that some dormant ressentiment has taken hold on white cultural politics. Racial ressentiment has enlivened almost all of U.S. American history, never mind political rhetoric—especially in matters of national character. The point is that racial caricature now occupies the epicenter of a newfangled travesty of the commons: that a horrible parade of racial grotesqueries can adopt a principle of laughter that exaggerates cultural anxieties in the full display of rhetorical violence. To borrow from Shakespeare, the racist is not a “dead court jester”; he is “a fellow of infinite jest.”

Christopher J. Gilbert is Assistant Professor of English at Assumption College. His work is published in leading journals like the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Philosophy & Rhetoric, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and more. Chris has a particular interest in the politics of comic performances as well as iterations of the peculiar, distorted, and grotesque in public culture. He is currently considering the roles of pleasure and pain in portrayals of war trauma, and also developing a book man-uscript, tentatively titled The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Of Caricature and National Character in U.S. War Cultures.

Reversal of Injury in the Obama Era:Shelby County vs. Holder, Ressentiment, Moral Authority,and the Discursive Construction of White Victimhood

Patricia G. Davis

Georgia State University

Contrary to the prognostications of some pundits that the historic election of President Obama in 2008 would herald an era of “postracialism,” one of the more intriguing developments that emerged from his presidency concerns the increasing salience of whiteness as a social identity. The ascendance of the nation’s first African American president, elected and reelected by a multiracial coalition, represented the culmination of a decades-long destabilization of hegemonic white male authority, and prompted reactions reasserting and re-centering whiteness as the default value for normative sociopolitical authority. Of particular concern is the nature and form of this authority and the identity it shapes: Whiteness as an aggrieved subjectivity. The notion of “reverse racism,” which posits that whites are the primary victims of racial discrimination, has provided the raw materials through which longstanding racial resentments over a perceived loss in status are exploited to construct a subjectivity centered on white grievance. Indeed, a 2015 poll revealed that forty-three percent of Americans, and sixty percent of white working class respondents, believe that discrimination against whites is as great a problem as discrimination against racial minorities (Jones et al. 42). These beliefs have persisted in spite of the fact that white Americans continue to fare better than any other group on most measures of social and economic wellbeing. While an interdisciplinary range of scholarship has explored the manifestations of assumptions of white victimhood at the individual or group levels, few studies have foregrounded the extent to which this belief has permeated some of our most influential political institutions (DiAngelo; Wilkins et al.). In fact, discourses of “reverse racism” have proliferated in a number of public spheres, most notably in profit-driven right-wing talk radio and cable news, and have helped construct victimhood as one of the more powerful cultural prisms through which white subjectivity and political behavior is being shaped.

During the Obama era, assumptions of white victimhood also shaped the rhetoric of a culturally authoritative institution: The Supreme Court. Though the Court is an ostensibly apolitical institution, legal scholars have acknowledged the political character of its decisions, including the rhetorical nature of its majority opinions. While discourses of white victimhood have occasionally informed Supreme Court decisions as part of “backlash rhetorics” during periods of racial progress, under Chief Justice John Roberts they have adopted a tenor increasingly consistent with “colorblindness” as an ideological formation. One particularly momentous case, Shelby County v. Holder (2013), in which a key section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA) was rendered ineffective, provides a compelling illustration of the Roberts Court’s legitimation of whiteness as an aggrieved subjectivity. As voting rights are grounded in idealized notions of citizenship and belonging to the national community, the promotion of the victimhood frame in the Shelby County case constitutes a rhetorically powerful reification of racial identity during an era in which the foundational assumptions of white supremacy have undergone significant challenge.

In this essay, I argue that contemporary whiteness has been constructed through discourses focused on a perceived “reversal of injury,” and that the Shelby County case demonstrates its increasing salience within Supreme Court rhetoric. I develop this argument in two sections. In the first, I describe the discursive contours of white victimhood with a focus on the role of ressentiment in its production. In the second, I look specifically at the operation of these discourses in the legal reasoning underlying the oral arguments and majority opinion in the Shelby County case.

Ressentiment, Moral Authority, and the Discursive Construction of White Victimhood

One of the accepted—and oft-repeated—truisms in contemporary political culture is that minority groups, particularly African Americans, are reliant upon an identity politics in which a sense of victimhood constitutes the foundation for collective consciousness. According to this line of thinking, this sense of injury springs from historical inequalities that no longer exist and forms the basis for unfair demands for the redistribution of resources. This view may be seen in popular discourses—from dominant political rhetoric to internet chat rooms—suggesting the existence of a “victimology industry” wherein blacks “play the race card,” and desire to see themselves as victims in order to receive the perceived benefits that accrue from such a status (McWhorter; Steele). Implicit in this critique is the notion that the U.S. is now a “colorblind” society, and that it is the claims of racism, rather than racism itself, that infect dominant discourses and inflict injury upon those who are accused of racist behavior. The proliferation of this view tends to obscure—and discourage critical scrutiny of—the ways in which “colorblindness” has produced victimhood as a site of political identification for whites.

White grievance politics are consistent with the oppositional and reactive character of identity. Whiteness scholars have defined white identity in terms of its relational position to other racial groupings, theorizing it as a historically, socially, politically, and culturally produced arrangement of practices that serve to elevate those designated as white over people of color (DiAngelo; Fine; Dyer). At times, shifts in political rule may upset this racial order (or appear to do so), raising the expectation of a concomitant shift in its constitutive social relationships and enabling whites to view themselves as a racialized group.¹ As Norton and Sommers have suggested, many whites view gains among minority groups as a “zero-sum game,” in which decreases in perceived bias against African Americans over the past six decades are associated with increases in perceived bias against whites (215-17). Obama’s historic election represented the symbolic—though not material—increase in the status of blacks, thereby contributing significantly to whites’ perception of a loss in status. This shift produced the conditions for a politicized subjectivity structured by ressentiment, which, in turn, is deployed as a rhetorical means of maintaining the hegemonic assumptions of whiteness as a social identity. As a political identity, ressentiment encourages mobilization of the state in the preservation of racial hierarchies amid threats to their stability, while the more traditional social identity operates to reaffirm whites as the benevolent, normative citizen-subjects within a sociopolitical context characterized by implicit and explicit appeals to white resentment. The seemingly contradictory character of this identity underscores its complexities and reveals the inadequacy of a narrow focus on its oppositional nature.

The Nietzschean concept of ressentiment refers to a set of logics that establish suffering as the basis for social virtue wherein the powerless exact moral revenge on the powerful, “the triumph of the weak as weak” (Deleuze 109). In this configuration, injury functions not merely as a means of mobilizing guilt in order to extract resources from the state at the expense of the dominant group, but forms the very basis for subjectivity itself. Brown has taken up Nietzsche’s theory to argue that in modern postindustrial societies, identities constituted by a foundational sense of woundedness serve to legitimize the regulatory powers of state institutions and intensify the impulse to center perceived wrongs as the basis for political community and action. This subjectivity is problematic, she suggests, as its deep investment in its own exclusion and impotence leads to a generalized political paralysis that effectively produces a notion of freedom severely constrained by the forces of power it purportedly opposes (70-73).

While Brown acknowledges that all subjectivities are vulnerable to ressentiment’s enticements, her analytical focus is on marginalized groups. This raises important questions: Given ressentiment’s tendency to displace meaningful political action with a righteous sense of powerlessness, what are we to make of its usefulness by dominant groups attempting to sustain their power in the face of symbolic challenges to it? What frameworks are useful for analyzing a sociopolitical context wherein ressentiment serves as a reflection of—rather than a reaction to—hegemony? Whereas Brown’s analysis assumes a “will to revenge” based upon a perception of the immutability of power relations, dominant identities grounded in ressentiment adopt the opposite view, recognizing the capacity to act and exploiting a sense of victimhood in order to encourage political actions designed to further marginalize non-dominant groups (73). It is not actual suffering that forms the basis for this identity, but the “suffering” that comes about from a perceived loss of privilege.

This raises another question, one Brown poses and that addresses the rhetorical attachments of ressentiment in the production of white victimhood: “What are the implications of this identity’s desire for recognition—given what produced it, given what shapes and suffuses it, what does politicized identity want?” (62). This identity performs the work of marshaling the resources of state institutions as vehicles for preserving the hegemonic assumptions of whiteness, particularly its centeredness, benevolence, normativity and, of course, its socioeconomic dominance. As Omi and Winant have posited, racial formation processes cannot be separated from contemporary racial politics, with the state playing a substantial role in the enforcement of racial privilege (78). These actions have intensified hostility toward policies designed to provide redress for historical and structural racial inequities, including affirmative action initiatives, housing and employment discrimination laws, and school desegregation programs. In these cases, a set of “strategic rhetorics” guided by a discursive framework productive of whiteness as a dominant identity has operated to re-secure the center for whites (Nakayama and Krizek 93). To borrow an observation from Cole, the language we use to talk about victimhood has transformed American politics in ways that undermine fruitful discussions of suffering and collective responsibility. In situating whites as the “victims” of economic and social policies, this language advances a white racial frame within political and juridical discourse that positions civil rights laws not from the perspective of minorities, but from the assumed “harm” done to whites (Feagin 6). Whiteness thus occupies both sides—materially dominant and rhetorically victimized—and mobilizes the combined discursive powers of both conditions.

White grievance politics encourage political and social actions that—by intent or impact—further marginalize minorities and enable whites to maintain power while simultaneously leveraging the moral authority attached to victim status. The continuing dominance of whiteness as political and social identities is contingent upon the perception of its assumed value as morally superior to other groups, a belief that obscures the historical conditions that gave rise to whiteness as a dominant identity and denies their impact in the present. The production of the façade of whiteness as “innocent” reinforces this premise. Indeed, the rhetorical force of white innocence is so strong that even Obama had to fashion his speeches and other public statements in ways that adopted it as an unquestioned assumption, revealing its potency in shaping electoral politics. Its influence is further signified through debate on public policies, particularly those that are redistributive in nature and for which race serves as a prominent, if unspoken, subtext. As Ross has argued, the rhetoric of innocence is an important tool in discussions centered on race, positioning whiteness as perpetually blameless and drawing its power from the discursive construction of a polar opposite: The non-innocent, defiled “taker” who is the underserving beneficiary of these policies (28).

The notion of colorblindess performs this work, supplying ressentiment with the thin veneer of moral authority necessary to the production of white innocence. The “colorblind thesis,” as Turner has called it, refers to “the notion that race should not matter and that society and its laws are and can be colorblind” (102). Though the notion of colorblindness is a policy choice, it is perceived as a moral principle, and over the last few decades it has provided the analytical framework and legal norms for a multitude of public policies, including those forming the definition of permissible/impermissible discrimination (Turner 108). Rhetorically, colorblindness implies that structural inequities are confined to the past and have no bearing on contemporary conditions, performing the work of transforming racial status quo-preserving political agendas into “understandable” defensive measures meant to restore a sense of fairness. This, in turn, preserves the innocence of whiteness. As Goldstein has suggested, “white racial identity is now enacted through the claim that race no longer matters and the fervent insistence that racism exists only as an irrational vestige of a bygone era,” constituting the “reversal of injury” as a standard trope of both historical and contemporary whiteness (1077-78). This trope has been most useful during periods in which monumental shifts in the racial order presented threats to white identity. For example, during congressional debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1875, southern Democrats were careful to distinguish between the past and the present while arguing that newly-emancipated blacks “enjoyed privileges equal to, if not surpassing, those of whites” (Wilson 130). Similarly, during the final years of the civil rights movement, a Newsweek/Gallup poll revealed that whites viewed blacks as having equal or greater opportunities in education and employment (Wise 65). More recently, Obama’s election persuaded some whites that racism and discrimination has declined, increasing opposition to affirmative action and immigration (Valentino and Brader 201-02).

Voting rights is one of the primary sites through which rhetorics of victimhood operate, and through which the white racial frame and moral authority coalesce to situate whites as the ideal citizen-subjects. While voting is a civic duty crucial to democracy, the franchise itself has historically been a site of struggle, as questions over who should be able to exercise it have been fraught with controversy. Battles over political participation are fundamentally conflicts concerning citizenship and belonging to the national community, with inclusion and exclusion, like much else in the U.S., being defined in ethno-racial terms. The VRA, which has been described as “one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of the federal legislative power in our Nation’s history,” prohibited states from enacting procedures restricting voting rights on the basis of race. In expanding the definition of citizenship with respect to the franchise, the law undercut the primacy of whiteness as a signifier of Americanness (Ginsburg, J. dissenting., qtd. in Baldwin 252).

Nevertheless, recent years have seen the passage of restrictive voting laws. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, twenty states have passed new restrictions on voting since the 2010 midterm elections (para. 5). Though these measures have taken many forms, the most prevalent involves the requirement of government-issued photo identification. Much like the poll taxes and literacy tests of the past, voter identification laws are facially neutral, but in reality have a racially exclusionary impact. Studies have shown that strict photo identification laws have a negative effect on the turnout of racial minorities, and skew democracy in favor of whites, particularly those who identify as conservative (Hajnal et al. 4). It is here where claims of “voter fraud,” used to justify these laws, become most salient. The political rhetoric in support of voter identification measures constructs victimhood through an invocation of the defiled taker, situating those without the appropriate identification—primarily black, Hispanic, young, and/or poor—as marginal citizens or non-citizens whose “fraudulent” votes “cancel out” those of “legitimate” (read: white) voters (Eveld para. 15, Wilkie para 3). This framing draws upon a set of powerful cultural cues that situate certain groups as societal “problems” whose very presence serves as a “contamination” of an idealized body politic. Indeed, one study demonstrated that white respondents were more supportive of voter identification laws when shown photographs of black voters and poll workers (Wilson et al. 365).²

When the Supreme Court issued its Shelby County decision weakening the VRA, it invoked white victimhood in a somewhat loftier manner, employing the discourse of colorblindness in place of that of the “defiled taker.” This discretion is central to the Court’s cultural authority, enabling it to maintain its reputation as an objective interpreter of Constitutional law while rendering decisions that reflect dominant ideologies. Chemerinsky has noted the significance of rhetorical strategies to the Court’s opinions, suggesting that these strategies are necessary in establishing the validity of its rulings to the various publics impacted by them, as well as the legitimacy of the Court itself (2008-09). In recent years, the Court has employed language consistent with a white racial frame in cases centered on racial discrimination. Thus, the colorblindness paradigm has operated within juridical discourse in ways similar to its function in political discourse: It deploys victimhood rhetorics to mask the insidious nature of rulings meant to dismantle critical civil rights legislation and preserve the racial hierarchies central to white identity. In the next section, I detail its use in Shelby County.

White Victimhood in Shelby County v. Holder

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the VRA into law on August 6, 1965. One of its most important provisions is referred to as Section 5, which required states and jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination in voting to obtain preclearance with the federal government before making any changes to their voting procedures. Section 4(b) of the Act provided the coverage formula used to determine which jurisdictions would be subject to this requirement. The Section 5 provisions, initially intended to be temporary, were renewed and, in some cases, expanded, in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006 (Toledano 391). Eventually, the law was amended to include “second-generation” restrictions such as racial gerrymandering and at-large elections, which focused not on minority access to the franchise but on the political effectiveness of that access. Shelby County, Alabama, was one of the covered jurisdictions (as was the entire state), and on April 27, 2010 brought a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against Attorney General Eric Holder. At issue was Congress’s 2006 reauthorization of Section 5, along with the coverage formula elaborated in Section 4(b), which had last been updated in 1975. The petitioner requested a judgment declaring both sections to be “facially unconstitutional” and sought a permanent injunction against their enforcement (Shelby County v. Holder, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia para. 2). After the District Court upheld both provisions, the plaintiff took its case to the U.S. Court of Appeals of the D.C. Circuit, which affirmed the lower court’s decision. The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, with oral arguments commencing on February 27, 2013. On June 25, 2013, the Court rendered its decision. In a 5-4 vote, it ruled that the formula elaborated in Section 4(b) was unconstitutional, and left it to Congress to update it to reflect current conditions. While the decision did not overturn the pre-clearance mechanism per se, in invalidating the formula used to establish the subject jurisdictions, the Court essentially rendered the law ineffective.³

The plaintiff’s argument, with which the Court ultimately agreed, was that the coverage formula was outdated because racial discrimination in voting was no longer an issue significant enough to warrant federal oversight. This claim represents the intervention of colorblindness into the case, supplying the premise for the lawsuit and the eventual public rationale for the decision. It thus provides the framework through which we may view it as exemplifying a set of rhetorical responses to contemporary assumptions of white victimhood as articulated through the lens of colorblindness. Powell has posited that, at the rhetorical level, the jurisprudence of colorblindness functions as “a myth focusing not on the victims of systemic racism and caste, but on a generalized class of ‘innocents’ who are being arbitrarily punished” (200). In Shelby County, this myth was constructed through three interlocking assumptions established through the oral arguments and majority opinion of the case, eventually leading to an explicit conclusion foregrounding white victimhood: First, that Shelby County (and, presumably, other covered jurisdictions) no longer engage in discriminatory voting practices; and second, that Section 5 oversight therefore situated the affected jurisdictions as the victims of unfair discrimination. The first two suppositions are necessary preconditions for the third: That federal protection of voting rights elevated racial minorities to a special class with entitlements from which white voters are excluded.

The plaintiffs asserted that Congress had exceeded its powers with the 2006 reauthorization of Section 5, and based this contention upon the purported absence of recent “direct” evidence of intentional voting discrimination. In fact, though it ultimately elected not to change the preclearance formula, Congress had relied on voluminous evidence of continued racial discrimination in the covered jurisdictions—including Shelby County—when it reauthorized the extension. The plaintiffs addressed this evidence by dismissing it as “anecdotal” and comprised of “isolated examples,” thereby arguing that racial restrictions on voting were confined to the past and that the law had outlived its usefulness (Shelby County v. Holder, U.S. District Court, D.C.).

The Court legitimated this argument in its majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts. While the decision contained a mild acknowledgment of the continued existence of voting discrimination, it emphasized throughout that the current level failed to justify the disparate treatment of the involved jurisdictions. The opinion begins with a description of the VRA as employing “extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem,” a claim it repeats throughout the majority and concurring opinions, variously using terms such as “exceptional,” “unique,” “uncommon,” and “unprecedented” (Shelby County v. Holder, U.S. Supreme Court, para.1). In employing language emphasizing the uniqueness of the conditions that made the law necessary, Roberts downplayed the lower courts’ findings of continuing direct and indirect disenfranchisement, and obscured the systemic forces that render voter suppression a significant aspect of the more general historical marginalization of nonwhites. Furthermore, the majority justices dismissed as “irrational” both the 4(b) coverage formula, as it relied on data based on “40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day,” and the pervasiveness of second-generation barriers (U.S. Supreme Court para. 48). In interpreting voting discrimination very narrowly, the majority justices legitimated the notion that it manifests itself only in discrete, intentional mechanisms associated with the past, like literacy tests and poll taxes. In situating these activities as aberrant and confined to history, they began constructing the rhetorical foundation for the eventual ruling that the law was no longer necessary.

With the coverage formula thus established as “irrational,” the majority justices could then craft a decision framing the relevant issues not in terms of the potential harm involved in withdrawing Section 5’s protections (as the lower courts had done), but rather in terms of the “harm” they posed to the affected jurisdictions. The plaintiff had argued that because pervasive racial discrimination no longer exists, the preclearance provision unfairly targeted certain southern states, thereby constituting a misapplication of federal power (Baldwin 253). This enabled the justices to invoke “equal sovereignty,” which refers to the principle that each state is “equal in power, dignity, and authority,” and suggest that their treatment according to this standard is “essential to the harmonious operation of the scheme upon which the Republic was organized” (U.S. Supreme Court para 25). In shifting the discursive frame away from the actual harm to voters onto the “injury” imposed on the covered jurisdictions, the emphasis on sovereignty obscures the pervasiveness of contemporary disenfranchisement mechanisms. In addition to relegating these schemes to the past and activating the rhetorical myth of innocent, “colorblind” jurisdictions being treated unfairly, the discourse of “sovereignty” masks this agenda in principled language. This sanctions the plaintiff’s ability to occupy the moral high ground while preserving the Court’s moral authority.

The federalist discourse of state sovereignty operates in another important way: It invokes the rhetoric of state’s rights, a construction that has historically positioned federal intervention on behalf of civil rights as an unfair encroachment on state powers. “State’s rights” has historically served as code for the maintenance of racial hierarchies; the discourse of “sovereignty” performs similar rhetorical work in the contemporary era. Such language “sows the seed for the tendency of Americans to mask defenses of unchallenged white privilege in the guise of the ostensibly race-neutral language” (Samuels 10).

The consignment of structural racism to history and the subsequent positioning of Section 5 coverage as unfair to the covered jurisdictions set the stage for more explicit rhetorical positioning of Section 5 as an exemplar of the “unfair advantages” conferred to African Americans and other minority groups. Shelby County is not an isolated case in this regard. The Court has occasionally invoked victimhood during periods in which congressional legislation posed threats to the racial order, awarding aggrieved whiteness the imprimatur of rationality and legitimacy. For example, in an 1883 majority opinion in “The Civil Rights Cases”—a consolidation of five cases striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which barred racial discrimination in public spaces—Justice Joseph P. Bradley wrote that:

[W]hen a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected. (U.S. Supreme Court)

More recently, writing for the majority in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.1 (2006), Roberts declared that “the way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” (Epps). As these cases illustrate, the notion of white victimization has, during particular historical periods, led the Court to conclude that whites are a class worthy of heightened protection—what Powell refers to as “the new equal protection.” (195).

While white victimhood discourses were advanced throughout the majority and concurring opinions implicitly through the theory of colorblindness, it was more explicitly articulated in Justice Antonin Scalia’s statements during oral arguments. In response to Solicitor General Donald Verilli’s contention that Congress had properly determined the continuing necessity of Section 5 when it voted overwhelmingly (98-0 in the Senate, 390-33 in the House) for reauthorization, Scalia declared:

Now, I don’t think that’s attributable to the fact that it is so much clearer now that we need this. I think it is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomenon that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement … whenever a society adopts racial entitlements it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes. (Davidson)

In using the rhetorically loaded term “entitlement” with respect to federal enforcement of voting rights, Scalia suggested that the continuation of the 4(b) formula positioned blacks as a special class, shifting the focus to the purported harm done to whites as a class without such “privileges.” At a basic level, this thinking promotes the false assumption that whites have not benefited from the VRA’s protections. More importantly, it betrays a lack of critical reflection on the material impact of the past upon the present, which disallows any acknowledgment of the continuing disenfranchisement mechanisms aimed at minorities. All of these conditions are complicit in the production of white victimhood. Nevertheless, Scalia did not stop there. In contending that it was the Court’s—not Congress’s—responsibility to properly determine the necessity of the VRA, he continued:

I don’t think there is anything to be gained by any Senator to vote against continuation of this act. And I am fairly confident it will be reenacted in perpetuity unless—unless a court can say it does not comport with the Constitution … It’s—it’s a concern that this is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress. There are certain districts in the House that are black districts by law just about now. And even the Virginia Senators, they have no interest in voting against this. The State government is not their government, and they are going to lose—they are going to lose votes if they do not reenact the Voting Rights Act. (Davidson)

Here Scalia invokes another trope of white victimhood rhetoric, the assertion that (potential) accusations of racism inflict greater injury upon the accused than the targets. In this configuration, the existence of VRA-created “black districts” has produced the conditions wherein the democratic ideal of accountability to voters has been rendered an insidious encroachment upon the otherwise “colorblind” inclinations of elected officials. More generally, it is the southern states, along with their (white) citizens that are the victims of racial discrimination. In describing the work of racial entitlement discourse in Shelby County as resurrecting the doctrine of nullification, Samuels argues that it “allows the nullifiers to occupy the moral high ground by ‘correcting’ what they view to be an unjust legal status quo that creates Black winners and White victims” (201). In simpler terms, the decision allowed the Court to elevate white victimhood to constitutional principle.

Conclusion

Hours after the Court announced its decision, Texas, one of the covered states, passed one of the most restrictive voter identification laws in the country. In the intervening years, most of the formerly covered states have passed laws restricting access to the franchise. These restrictions have taken on a multitude of forms, including proof-of-citizenship registration requirements, closures of precincts, voter purges, and early voting reductions. Civil rights groups, along with the Justice Department, have sued some jurisdictions under Section 2, with mixed results. In some cases, the racial motivations underlying these changes have been made explicit: In striking down North Carolina’s voter identification law in July 2016, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals declared that its provisions targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision” (Ingraham). Congress has yet to develop a new coverage formula.

These mechanisms were made possible in a sociopolitical context characterized by ressentiment as the foundation of contemporary white identity, with its constituent discourse of white victimhood finding rhetorical expression in the theory of “colorblindness.” These rhetorics proliferate in a mass media environment expected to appeal to emotions and draw ratings, as well as in a political sphere designed to build and maintain constituencies and facilitate political mobilization. However, when they become institutionalized in the rarefied sphere of Supreme Court discourse, they assume an air of cultural authority more difficult to destabilize. This legitimation is particularly concerning, as white claims of victimhood trivialize the experiences of subjugated groups and diminish their histories. As Shelby County demonstrates, these rhetorics also threaten opportunities for reparative relief amid continuing racial discrimination. They thus represent one of the greatest ironies of contemporary whiteness: Its affirmation of political power through the rhetorical production of powerlessness.

As the Trump era begins, the U.S. is experiencing a dramatic acceleration of the centering of whiteness as an aggrieved subjectivity. The 2016 election, the first since the Jim Crow era to be held without the VRA’s protections, was notable for its positioning, both in terms of campaign rhetoric and polling results, as a “referendum on white victimhood” (Taibbi). If Obama had to “embrace white innocence,” Donald Trump, with his campaign promise to “Make American Great Again,” serves as its very embodiment (Coates). The Trump presidency may thus be viewed as the culmination of the normalization and mobilization of ressentiment into a sociopolitical identity, with observers noting the significant role of racial grievance in the formation of the electing coalition. For example, in contrasting the presumptions of racial innocence underlying the collective consciousness of Trump voters with that of the “silent majority” of the Nixon era, Thomason has suggested that:

For the Trump coalition, the dynamic is different: instead of the innocence of its privilege, it’s the innocence of its dispossession that supporters rally behind. The danger lies not only in their denial of the continued, empirically demonstrable benefits incurred by whiteness, but also in the implicit (and sometimes explicit) claim that their whiteness is being leveraged against them. This is how the racial innocence that has long characterized conservative thinking in the post-Civil Rights era evolves into a more dangerous phenomenon: racial vengeance.

The 2016 election further demonstrates the rhetorical power of white victimhood and foregrounds its increasing normative value—and strategic usefulness—in juridical discourse during the Trump era and beyond. Over the years, we have seen a proliferation of discourses enabling dominant groups to attain the perceived benefits of victimhood without the burdens associated with its realities. We have also seen the emergence of political speech situating “religious freedom” and “traditional marriage” as under attack from transformations in the statuses of other groups, particularly women, gays, and Muslims. While these “backlash rhetorics” may not explicitly privilege whiteness, they are nevertheless heavily invested in the notion that the “civilization” created by and for whites is diminishing in stature. Therefore, there is much more work to be done in examining victimhood as a significant aspect of twenty-first century white subjectivity.

Patricia G. Davis is an associate professor in the communication department at Georgia State University. Her work explores the intersection of race, gender, politics, memory, and representation in various communicative contexts. Her essays have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly and The Southern Communication Journal, as well as in edited books. Her book, Laying Claim: African American Cultural Memory and Southern Identity, was published by the University of Alabama Press in August 2016. Her next book, Raising the Hottentot Ghost, will explore the ways in which black women’s corporeality informed civil rights discourse during the twentieth century.

The (Unlikely) Prophet(s) of Rage: Bernie Sanders and Killer Mike

Lisa M. Corrigan

University of Arkansas

On November 25, 2015, Georgia rapper MC Killer Mike (Michael Render of Run the Jewels) gave a bold speech in Atlanta supporting the presidential candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Speaking about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy in the city and repudiating the historical memory of King, frozen in time as it is at the 1963 March on Washington, Killer Mike invoked: “Martin King present [at] the War on Poverty, Martin King against the War Machine that uses YOUR sons and YOUR nephews to go to other lands and murder. I’m talking about … a Revolutionary” (Marx). This rhetorical move to radicalize King’s memory in Atlanta, no less, helped Killer Mike segue into his introduction of the candidate. Praising Sanders’s support for single payer health care, free college education, the living wage, and restoration of the Voting Rights Act, the Georgia rapper provides a rhetorical appeal grounded in hip-hop ethos, saying:

[B]efore I was a rapper, I was a son of Atlanta.

Before I ever wrote one rhyming word on paper, before that, I was a Black man in America.

And … and before I ever learned how to dance a G, I gave a damn about American politics.

I gave a damn about the people of America, and I took to the streets and I advocated. (Bluestein)

Peppering his speech with hip-hop vernacular, Killer Mike reminds the audience that he often raps about his distrust of politicians but assures them that “after spending five hours with someone who has spent the last 50 years radically fighting for your Rights and mine? I can tell you that I am very proud tonight to announce the next President of the United States, Senator Bernie Sanders!” Asserting both his blackness and masculinity, Killer Mike identifies himself as a political activist. As a former candidate for the Georgia House of Representatives, an outspoken critic of the militarization of the police, a critic of the Ferguson police after the murder of Michael Brown, and a frequent guest on political talk shows, Killer Mike occupies a unique space in the public eye. From this speech and those that followed, it is understandable why Rolling Stone has called Killer Mike “Southern rap’s top political theorist,” especially after he released nine video interviews with Sanders for Rolling Stone before primary season began (“Mid-Year Report”).

Killer Mike’s Atlanta speech began a fruitful collaboration between the rapper and the politician, demonstrating the campaign’s interest in cultivating the urban black youth demographic. Beginning with his rallies with Killer Mike and continuing through his endorsements by Bun B., T.I., Scarface, Meshell Ndegeocello, Big Boi, and Lil B, hip-hop credibility functioned to position Sanders as a “blackened” candidate, much like Bill Clinton did after his now-famous appearance on the Arsenio Hall Show. Rolling Stone magazine even did a hip-hop supercut of Sanders’s stump speeches to tout his hip-hop credibility and Daily Kos argued that Sanders has “inspired a new generation of hip-hop activism” (“Bernie Sanders”).

This essay traces the uses of hip-hop as a language and affective ecology of what Jose Esteban Muñoz has called “disidentification” to understand how the Sanders camp positioned itself as racially sensitive with a politics distinct from white liberalism by harnessing hip-hop’s oppositional ethos. I suggest that Sanders cultivated young black voters (and disenfranchised white voters) by deploying a politics of rage, particularly after scrutiny following #BlackLivesMatter campaign event disruptions accentuated the absence of racial discourse in his campaign speeches. Articulating what he called a “political revolution,” Sanders harnessed black rage to disidentify with “the White liberal establishment” against whom he campaigned. Ultimately, this essay augments Muñoz’s work to chart the ironic rhetorical dimensions of disidentification when white speakers appropriate disidentificatory blackness for political gain, concluding that even as the Sanders campaign pushed the limits of identifying with white liberalism, it ultimately reified whiteness, which is captured in the “Bernie Bro” meme.

Disidentification as a Rhetorical and Performative Strategy

Disidentification describes a series of rhetorical practices enacted by the oppressed that disrupt citizenship norms to build new identity models. In his groundbreaking work on the identity performances of queers of color, José Esteban Muñoz writes about disidentification as a strategy motivating social collectivity, explaining: “[D]isidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship” (4). As a performative practice, disidentification exposes troubling racialized, gendered, and classed assumptions about embodied citizenship as a way of transforming relationships within the nation.

Disidentification often occurs when “damaged stereotypes” are “recycled … as powerful and seductive sites of self-creation,” explains Muñoz (4). While this process is exciting for the rhetor, the “experience of suburban spectatorship” also characterizes disidentification, producing both pleasure and terror, and making disidentification a powerful polysemic form propelled by emergent fear, revulsion, and ambivalence. As white people watch performative critiques marking normative citizenship as hostile, racist, sexist, and classist, minority rhetors expose the fault lines where citizenship may productively rupture. Disidentification “scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text” to “expose the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recruits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications” (Muñoz 31). Thus, the ruptures produced by disidentificatory practices provide opportunities for recombinatory moments that mash-up rhetorical objects for new identities and audiences.

In this case, disidentification is intrinsic to hip-hop culture (especially the gangsta pose) and is both received and circulated in ways that propel disidentification with both whiteness and modes of blackness that refuse a confrontational persona. The gangsta posture, in particular, disrupts assumptions about black docility and provides “an extremely irreverent embodiment of the distorted and tumultuous environment from which [the gangsta] came” (Utley 4). Beginning with N.W.A’s “Gangsta, Gangsta” in 1988, gangsta rap launched an entire musical genre whose commercial appeal was located in bravado, vulgarity, and confrontational politics, providing “an enduring identity that allows youth to imagine themselves as authoritative figures,” making it a prime space to reimagine stereotypes as a way of disidentifying with white America’s pathologizing of black masculinity (Utley 4). Essential to hip-hop culture’s historical embrace of the gangsta pose is the articulation of black rage, focused intently on structural oppression: police brutality, segregation, and political disenfranchisement. As Muñoz himself argues, “rage is sustained and pitched as a call to activism, a bid to take space in the social that has been colonized by the logics of White normativity” (xi). Rage functions as “active rebellion” in the rhetorical economy of hip-hop culture, where rappers mobilize this visceral affect to prompt new engagement with the politics of black solidarity (Muñoz x). But this kind of racialized rage can be a useful resource of disidentification, “directed toward ritualized fantasies” that build artistic resistance movements (Hostert 56). This resistance emerges through the highly rhetorical process of rejection or reformulation of political names, labels, definitions, and structures. Oppositional rhetors reimagine futures through analysis that reorients objects of cultural affection or repulsion; they disrupt space and rearrange bodies and produce hybrid or new discourses, objects, and texts. Using disidentification as a rhetorical strategy helps to “establish new possibilities while at the same time echoing the materially prescriptive cultural locus of any identification” (Muñoz 30).

Disidentification and the Sanders Campaign

The campaign emerged in 2015 as a very traditional spoiler campaign where Sanders, a democratic socialist, campaigned against the Democratic Party’s establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton. As Edward-Isaac Dovere and Gabriel Debenedetii and other journalists discovered, Bernie Sanders himself was at “the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party,” thus his disidentification began with strategies that separated his candidacy from hers and by extension, contemporary liberalism (“Inside”). In The Jacobin, Matt Karp made the case that this primary match-up was the most direct ideological battle the Democratic Party has seen in a generation” because the candidates “embody clashing theories of politics” and “alternative visions of how to achieve progressive goals within the American political system.” While many leftist and liberal outlets made similar claims, Christopher H. Achen and Larry Bartels provide data and analysis of the campaigns and their voters and persuasively argue that “support for Sanders hinged less on ideology and issues, and more on social identities and group attachments” (“No, Sanders Supporters”). Their findings suggest that disidentitification is a strategy that appears beyond rhetorical performance and is empirically testable where those supporting Clinton, “a role model for many women and a longtime ally of African-Americans and other minority groups,” differ from those supporting Sanders, “a sort of anti-Clinton—a political maverick from lily-White Vermont whose main claim to fame has been his insistence on calling himself an independent, a socialist, anything but a Democrat” (Achen and Bartels, “Do Sanders Supporters”).

The white male rage coupled with an outsider campaign circulating class critiques contrasted with the establishment candidate as Sanders struggled to create new identifications. His campaign attempted this shift by focusing on what Sanders called “a political revolution,” “to revitalize American democracy, to end the collapse of the American middle class and to make certain that our children and grandchildren are able to enjoy a quality of life that brings them health, prosperity, security and joy” (Sanders).

Sanders’s commitment to centering class analysis was fairly predictable until August 2015 when #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) activists disrupted a campaign event in Seattle. Marissa Johnson and Mara Jacqueline Willaford used the event to mark the one year anniversary of the killing of eighteen-year old Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson. After the disruption, Johnson explained to MSNBC’s Tamron Hall that Sanders was “basically a class reductionist.” She continued: “[Sanders] never really had a strong analysis that there is racism and White supremacy that is separate than the economic things that everyone experiences” (Reed). Elsewhere, Johnson explained that pushing Sanders ever further left was critical, particularly in Seattle given its status as a bastion of white progressive political organizing. She said that:

[C]onfronting Sanders was the equivalent of confronting the large, White, liberal Democrat, leftist contingent that we have here in Seattle who not only have not supported BLM in measurable ways but is often very harmful and is also upholding the White supremacist society that we live in locally. (This Week in Blackness)

In “going after” Sanders, Johnson and other #BLM activists wanted to call out the whiteness of the campaign and its supporters by disrupting the carefully choreographed campaign event in Seattle. Johnson collapses the distinction between white liberals and white progressives to underscore how both groups regularly fail to advance policies that ameliorate suffering for Seattle’s black residents. Here, the disruption of the Sanders campaign events create space to interpolate blackness into the campaign cycle, particularly for the Left. Because disidentification creates turmoil where “a representational contract is broken” and the “social order receives a jolt that may reverberate loudly and widely, or in less dramatic, yet locally indispensible ways,” formal political events are prime locations to interrogate the limitations of citizenship (Muñoz 6).

While Sanders had previously commented briefly on the movement against police brutality, his comments drew intense criticism. In an NPR interview on June 25, 2015, he said, “[B]lack lives matter, [W]hite lives matter, Hispanic lives matter,” drawing criticism from Black Lives Matter activists for his use of false equivalency (Taylor). But the Seattle protestors highlighted just how out-of-touch the Sanders campaign was on race and, consequently, they catalyzed tremendous discussion about the wisdom, pragmatism, and symbolism of #BLM activism. In The Atlantic, Martha Tesema praised the disruption from her perspective as a black female Seattle resident, locating the strength of the action in its ability to disidentify with politics as usual. She explained that it “disrupted the status-quo and kick-started needed conversations that I was desperate to have with strangers, friends, and co-workers … [D]espite how liberal and progressive Seattle claims to be, it’s clear from the reactions to the protest that there’re still many who are blind to a variety of issues locally and nationally” (Friedersdorf).

By highlighting how #BLM activists exposed the racial politics of both Seattle as a city and the campaign as a disingenuous engagement with racial politics as a vector of class politics, Tesema demonstrates the power of this maneuver to disidentify the U.S. Left with the persistence of liberalism to pay lip service to racial equality, particularly at the level of the presidential campaign. Tesema comments on the rhetorical visibility of both Johnson and Willaford rushing the stage, saying, “Visually, it’s a very powerful thing to see two women of color upstage a White man” (Friedersdorf).

For Tesema, the rhetorical and visual politics of identification were part of what she admired about the Seattle action. Jamelle Bouie argued in Slate that

[d]isrupting Sanders gives you more bang for your buck: it keeps you in the news and puts indirect pressure on other campaigns that know they’ll have to answer to the movement’s questions. To that point, the New Hampshire demonstrators couldn’t crash the Clinton rally, but they still met with the candidate—quietly—and discussed their concerns. In all likelihood, the pressure on Sanders has forced Clinton—the likely nominee—to devote more time to Black Lives Matter, in a bid to protect her flank. And in turn, this brings their issues up the ladder, closer to the top of the party’s agenda.

Hence, as journalists argued that Sanders was a ripe target for #BLM activism, they conceded that there were pragmatic reasons for pressuring his campaign in particular and they acknowledged that there might be long-term gains from such a strategy. It seemed that black disidentification with liberalism and with white progressives was creating space for new conversations about the limits of white liberal commitments about ending racism and structural oppression. Accordingly, the Sanders campaign reoriented itself towards #BLM activism.

Disidentification and Whiteness

Enter Killer Mike. The Run the Jewels MC was hot off of critically acclaimed Run the Jewels (2013) and Run the Jewels 2 (2014), and he met Bernie Sanders in Atlanta in November 2015 just hours before he gave the speech that begins this essay. In Politico, Rebecca Burns describes that meeting thusly: “[T]he evening was a striking departure from typical Democratic campaign protocol—something Killer Mike was well aware of when he strode to the podium to introduce Sanders.” Standing in front of the crowd in Atlanta, Killer Mike and other rappers speaking with and for Sanders “are active participant spectators who can mutate and restructure stale patterns within dominant media” (Muñoz 29). Killer Mike articulates assertive support, transgressing expectations about the kinds of (generally white) surrogates that accompany white candidates on the campaign trail. Killer Mike occupies a unique space on the campaign trail for Sanders as a rapper and as black man since black people “unashamed of [their] rage, using it as a catalyst to develop critical consciousness, to come to full decolonized self-actualization, [have] no real place in the political structure” (hooks, Killing Rage 16). While this kind of symbolic presence is an important disruption of “business as usual” politics, Killer Mike’s speeches inflect black male rage into the Sanders campaign, recalibrating Sanders’s own anger about the class warfare undermining American health and prosperity. For Sanders, rearticulation of the southern civil rights movement, as Killer Mike did in that early speech in Atlanta was a crucial part of the process of disidentification. Radicalizing King’s memory was one strategic rhetorical move that helped to recirculate the civil rights movement as a generative space for a new (white) racial identity. And, since #BlackLivesMatter activists had been recirculating civil rights heroes, themes, and slogans, it made sense that the strategy of so-called white progressives would take a similar path.

While this strategy is targeted at the black youth vote, it has the added benefit of harnessing white suburban spectatorship among white youth. White fascination with hip-hop demonstrates how “[b]lackness becomes a metaphor for freedom, an end to boundaries” (hooks, Black Looks 37). Certainly popular culture is a space where “[d]isidentification permits the subjects of ideology to contest the interpellations of the dominant ideology,” particularly when white people appropriate hip-hop in the service of white anger (McCann 168). As Bryan McCann maintains, “the mobility of Blackness in general and Blackface in particular historically allows Whites to test the limits of their own identities and social statuses by appropriating the cultural practices of Others” (3). This is particularly true as white people use gangsta rap and hip-hop culture to destabilize whiteness through critiques that combine both racial and class analysis. While the strategy that the Sanders camp employs relies on disidentification to create rhetorical and political distinction between Sanders and the Democratic Party, it also interfaces what McCann has termed “proletarian Blackface” in describing how white suburban spectators appropriate and deploy black rage to expose the fault lines of citizenship norms. McCann argues that the 1999 film Office Space’s “predominantly White male characters and viewers” use “proletarian Blackface” to “traverse racialized, gendered, and classed subject positions in ways that enable critiques of capitalism, Whiteness, and masculinity, but also reify White supremacy” through the adoption of gangsta rap as an alternative vector of white suburban rage (2). Given the popularity of gangsta rap in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly for white male consumers, it makes sense that the performance of proletarian blackface became a widespread tactic for engaging critiques of neoliberalism during that period.

But with the tremendous state violence against unarmed black youth in the last three years, I want to suggest that performances of proletarian blackface have given way to perhaps a more thoughtful engagement with the politics of gangsta rap in the Sanders campaign that saw black rappers articulating their own perspectives on whiteness, class struggle, and masculinity. In this case, disidentification has augmented earlier white engagements with blackness that lionized black rappers while they were being publicly castigated by Tipper Gore, the Recording Industry Association of America, and conservative critics of rap music who saw rap’s influence as pathologically criminal and violent. In using black rage as the affective register of the campaign after criticisms by #BLM, Sanders opened up a space with the potential to build a competitive coalition of concerns where race and class were articulated together in striking ways, where critiques of capitalism and wealth inequality called forth several subjectivities at once. Judith Butler expresses some optimism about how the failure to identify with the dominant culture “is itself the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference” (219). Because rage was the affective register of disidentification, it connected young black voters with disenfranchised wealthy white leftists as both camps sought a different vision for American politics demonstrating how, at best, disidentification is an incomplete curative for harmful racial formations (Vats).

Still, one particularly important strategy of disidentification in this phase of the campaign saw Sanders and Killer Mike resuscitating a more radical history of civil rights as a direct response to pressure from #BLM. In using strategies of remembrance that marked King’s radicalism (particularly at campaign events in the South, where King preached, organized, and marched, like Atlanta), Killer Mike’s remarks attempted to depict Sanders as a radical white presence able to shift Whiteness around both class issues and around antiblack violence. Some journalists even asserted that Sanders himself is a modern incarnation of King and argued that his push for a living wage echoed King’s Poor People’s Campaign (Burdowsky). This rhetorical articulation projected Sanders (given his advanced age) back into the civil rights movement, amplifying his narrative about working with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and being at the 1963 March on Washington. While it’s true that Sanders attended the milestone civil rights rally, he dropped out of the civil rights movement shortly thereafter and he never interfaced with major icons of the movement (Murphy). Still, Killer Mike attempted to create proximity between Sanders and southern civil rights icons as a way of radicalizing Sanders on race (compared to Clinton) and as a way of connecting him to the movement’s emphasis on economic justice. Here, disidentification attempts to use blackness as a way of radicalizing Sanders’s whiteness but the whiteness itself is highlighted, rather than overcome, demonstrating how disidentification can only ever be a partial corrective to the white racial discourses during campaigns.

The “Bernie Bro” Phenomenon

Because the 2016 presidential campaign has been extremely aberrant, scholars might ask: Why was disidentification utilized as a rhetorical strategy by the Sanders campaign? The answer lies, at least in part, with the mobilization of white backlash as a result of the tremendous successes of both terms of the Obama administration. Like the backlash produced after the 1964 campaigns for the Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the backlash fomenting after Obama’s election propelled the Tea Party to political prominence where feelings of white fragility co-mingled with economic protectionism. Linda Alcoff writes about the processes by which white people resuscitate versions of white identities in response to calls for social redemption in the face of antiblack violence. In the 1960s, she describes the process as predictably taking on “a paternalistic form, retaining as much White supremacy as possible, while giving way, a bit” (15). For whites that saw the brutality of white supremacy embodied in Klan robes throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at black schoolchildren and into black churches, disidentification with whiteness was possible. This was particularly true for ethnic whites that had experienced racial chauvinism; “[F]or these disidentified whites, whiteness had to become something other than the violent maintenance of anti-Black social codes” (15). But as Alcoff documents, whiteness always shifts in response to social demands. She reminds us, “[w]e should not be too quick to assume that a person’s disidentification with supremacist ideas about Whiteness entails a disidentification with Whiteness itself” (113). We might, then, expect to find intense identifications with whiteness alongside rhetorical strategies that co-opt blackness as a way of creating space for white alterity, particular in a campaign season where race-talk is ever-present.

While there is much to be lauded about rhetorical strategies that destabilize whiteness and its control of capital, Sanders’s campaign also trafficked in the reification of whiteness. McCann argues that rhetorical strategies that appropriate black subjectivity, offer “an escape route for impoverished White subjectivities to transgress the boundaries of identity and social location while also holding the promise of return—or assimilation” (4). Here, the Sanders campaign is the epitome of return, since the strategies of disidentification that allow critical race-class analysis are being employed to help consolidate power for a pre-Boomer white man.

Since the election, Gil Troy has written eloquently in Time about Bernie supporters defining an “alt-left” in the Democratic Party that harnessed the kinds of white supremacist vitriol now circulating widely after Trump’s electoral college victory. Troy notes that the alt-right (the neo-Nazi supporters of the incoming Trump Administration) and the alt-left share many similar concerns despite mobilizing populist support through racialized and gendered bullying from opposite sides of the political spectrum:

They both obsess about Wall Street, the Big Banks, the Mainstream Media and what they see as the dysfunctional federal government. They refuse to learn from the Age of Clinton that bipartisan coalitions and centrist policies are possible and often beneficial. They ignore the real causes of middle-class distress including deindustrialization and the ease of importing now that it’s cheaper to transport things across the globe—the benefits of which they, as consumers, enjoy. (Troy)

The interest conversion between the self-styled “alt-right” and what Troy calls the “alt-left” mobilize anti-Jewish sentiments, misogynist discourses, and tremendously aggressive language to undermine faith in political institutions, particularly for Boomer white men (and some women). The similarities between the supporters of both candidates points to a fundamental backlash in American politics against the first black president (who symbolizes the institutionalization of power for black men) and the first female presidential nominee (who symbolizes the gains of white women, particularly after the implementation of affirmative action policies).

So although Sanders’s “political revolution” found its voice in some black men articulating oppositional consciousness about class politics, ultimately, Sanders himself provided far more discourse rooted in white rage and targeting white voters in ways that replicated the bitterness and viciousness of the Trump campaign, despite the fact that Sanders attempted to distance himself from these articulations by supporters. Dozens of journalists like Gerald Seib at The Wall Street Journal argued that “angry White voters” were propelling both the Sanders and Trump campaigns. Stephen Marche at The Guardian described the “White man pathology” of supporters of both Sanders and Trump. Noting that Trump and Sanders rallies were mirror images, Marche writes, “[t]he same specter of angry White people haunts Saunders’s rally, the same sense of longing for a country that was, the country that has been taken away.” Marche confirmed that while their longing and affective postures were similar, the Bernie supporters had more money, “the natural consequence of the American contradiction machinery: rich White people can afford to think about socialism, the poor can only afford their anger.” Marche’s analysis exposes how fantasies of identification can work: At best, socialist rhetoric can create space for cross-class coalitions of power and at worst, the overwhelming whiteness of the elites can serve to appropriate black and/or poor rage in the service of disingenuous collaboration.

Thus, the term “Bernie bro” was coined to describe the phenomenon of white male Sanders supporters enacting aggressive, hypermasculinity as they harassed and shouted down (often female) Clinton supporters online and in person. Robinson Meyer was the first to name the phenomenon in a tongue-in-cheek piece for The Atlantic:

The Berniebro is male, though. Very male.

The Berniebro is someone you may only have encountered if you’re somewhat similar to him: White; well-educated; middle-class (or, delicately, “upper middle-class”); and aware of NPR podcasts and jangly bearded bands.

Amanda Hess has described the Bernie bro as “an individual who is so obsessive about his candidate that he has lost all self-awareness.” Dozens of columns dismissed Clinton supporters as “vagina voters” who use “their reproductive organs (emotional) instead of their brain (logical) when voting,” and Bernie bros shared these pieces and made similar claims about Clinton voters (Lee). Killer Mike even caught flak for objectifying women this way and fragmenting them into body parts. In February 2016, while describing a conversation he allegedly had with activist Jane Elliott, Killer Mike alleged that “Jane said, ‘Michael, a uterus doesn’t qualify you to be president of the United States. You have to have policy that’s reflective of social justice’” (Howard). The idea that supporters were just voting for Clinton because she was a woman (or, a uterus) elided her experience and qualifications and reduced her supporters to walking wombs. In this way, Bernie bros (and even those close to Sanders, like Killer Mike) perpetuated the kind of hegemonic masculinity that clearly re-centered white men (embodied by Sanders) as the ultimate consumers and producers of American political life, particularly as it is replicated through white women’s wombs. Responding to critiques of the Sanders campaign and its return to whiteness, hip-hop artist The Ultimate Rage even cut two tracks, “Bernie Bros” and “Bernie or Bust” responding to the “Bernie bro” label. On his YouTube channel, The Ultimate Rage explains, ‘“Bernie Bro’ is a snide term meant to disparage supporters of Bernie Sanders as being sexist and misogynistic.” In this way, hip-hop artists insulated Sanders from white male liberal backlash and provided space for him to channel their performance of rage.

While hip-hop artists responded to the Bernie Bro epithet in an attempt to control the interpretation of Sanders’ disidentifications through the vector of black rage, the “Bernie Bro” meme highlights how masculinity and whiteness remained intrinsic parts of the Sanders campaign in ways that weren’t all that distinct from the kinds of toxic masculinity circulated by the Trump campaign. As a label, “Bernie Bro” acknowledged that disidentification was happening and that despite perhaps progressive intent, that disidentification continued to be problematic as it positioned Sanders towards disaffected white men. With the continued awareness of the tremendous harassment of women (especially of color) online, the fact that Sanders was the non-male challenger to the woman who eventually became the first female nominee for president matters. The campaign even acknowledged condescending comments about Clinton, blatant sexism, and the constant trolling by white male Sanders supporters online, highlighting how whiteness continued to operate even as surrogates like Killer Mike articulated black disidentification (Marcotte).

Fantasies of (Dis)identification

In conclusion, I want to suggest that the strategies of disidentification utilized by the Sanders campaign were amplified by both hip-hop interlocutors and politically marginalized white male “Bernie Bros,” demonstrating how political anxiety about race and gender connected both groups of supporters to disidentification to remake political classification. “Progressives” attempted to create space for new political characters but relied on the very un-progressive frame of political engagement that called forth white misogyny. The (especially white) fantasy of identifying with Sanders’s progressivism created a new identity that was more radical than supporters might actually have been. As Bernie Bros began talking about supporting Trump if a Sanders nomination from the Democratic Party was not forthcoming, more media attention highlighted how the assertion of blackness functioned in tandem with tremendous sexism. Calling this a “dangerous fantasy … that combines extreme pessimism and extreme optimism in an extremely confounding way,” Connor Fridersdorf (no Clinton supporter himself) notes that the anti-Clinton, anti-establishment “revolutionary” language is incompatible with support for Trump, given the man’s reckless politics. But the threat to support Trump is unsurprising since the disidentification with Clinton (as the epitome of the white liberal) leads to identification with both rage and white masculinity. So, despite the racial politics of Sanders’s hip-hop surrogates, beginning with Killer Mike but now extending through Sanders’s post-candidacy touring with Prophets of Rage, the Rage Against the Machine super group with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Tom Morrello, the Sanders phenomenon utilized and calcified identifications that connect it to the Trump campaign and highlight how whiteness is a stable political feature. Thus, I conclude that the Sanders’s disidentifications were ironic and absolutely reified the problematic constructions that the campaign tried explicitly to undermine because of white anxiety about blackness/black rage. So, #BLM critiques of Sanders that highlighted his inability to connect white supremacy to class domination actually were attempting to demonstrate that his racial rhetorical innovations ultimately succumbed to the static constructions of whiteness that continually characterize “progressive” identity politics.

Dr. Lisa M. Corrigan is an Associate Professor of Communication, Director of the Gender Studies Program, and Affiliate Faculty in both African & African American Studies and Latin American Studies in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. Her first book is titled, Prison Power: How Prison Politics Influenced the Movement for Black Liberation. Additionally, Dr. Corrigan works as a political and media consultant for campaigns, caucuses, organizations, and legislators on issues ranging from reproductive justice to prison reform.

Pick Up the Stylus: Racing Whiteness inTwenty-First Century Advanced Written Composition

Kathleen E. Welch

University of Oklahoma

This paper addresses three of the issues that are central to racing whiteness in advanced composition studies in U.S. colleges and universities at the present time. This hot-topic issue, including conscious and unconscious white privilege (usually the twin of whiteness), tends to arise in advanced composition classes as much as it can arise in all writing classes. I work in the field of composition-rhetoric (all one word) as Robert Connors defines it in his book of that name, and so this paper grows out of that particular field. A premise of this essay is that the stylus is not neutral. It is a part of most (but not all) languages, none of which are neutral. In addition, the stylus has played a central role in the realities and myths of progress. Whiteness in advanced composition is an active ideology that is promoted or resisted. As we pick up our styli (for example, keyboards of computers, Bic pens, sticks on sandy beaches, index fingers, and so on), we need to interrogate the implications of whiteness in our advanced composition classes.¹

The three issues are:

1. Advanced composition, monolingualism, and whiteness;

2. Advanced composition, the mythos (or muthos) of progress, and whiteness; and

3. Advanced composition, classical rhetoric, and the racing of whiteness.

Advanced Composition, Monolingualism, and Whiteness

International language training is of central importance in composition-rhetoric studies in general, and in advanced composition pedagogy in particular, and so monolingualism presents significant obstacles. International language training, called foreign language training in many locations, including in universities, can combat racism in the U.S. Knowing other languages can open vistas of understanding and enable the learner to see other cultures more clearly. This rhetorical work is not being done adequately at this time. At the 2012 Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition, Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and other scholars presented strong descriptions and analyses of the current state of monolingualism in many composition-rhetoric programs; Horner, Lu, and their collaborators have published many pieces on this persistent and worsening challenge, and have led the way toward identifying it and then rectifying it in composition-rhetoric studies. Monolingualism is the state of knowing one language and, in our case in the U.S., that language continues to be English; it is the language of the academy in the U.S. and internationally. In previous eras in the west, the dominant academic language was German, and before that it was Latin. At one point it was Attic Greek in, for example, Aristotle’s fourth century BCE context after the strong establishment of ancient universities (or advanced schools) by Isocrates, Plato, and others who worked and competed for students at the same time. Many Ph.D. programs in English, including composition-rhetoric studies, have been decreasing international language requirements so that some places—for example, the University of Kansas creative writing program—require zero international languages. (I have historicized these strong and negative moves in an unpublished essay; the Great Recession had a lot to do with these moves, as did the anti-liberal-arts administrators of some universities, including the University of Albany, SUNY and the University of North Texas at Tyler, which are a few places where former administrators pressed to drop languages such as French).² The previous well-publicized case at Albany involved the plan to drop all international languages and had a lot of national press attention; the claim, according to press reports, was that English was the dominant language and so international language training was unnecessary. However, the move toward decreasing international languages had already begun in the 1970s when it gained traction throughout the U.S. English departments, where most composition-rhetoric studies are housed, and stand-alone composition-rhetoric departments have been decreasing foreign language requirements. Horner, Lu, and their collaborators explain at length why this situation damages composition-rhetoric studies. In addition, working against the movement toward monolingualism is very important in research and teaching. As Ferdinand de Saussure has written, translation is not a word-for-word substitution. This kind of approach to translation, the substitution model, can lead to racist behavior because it is very simplistic, inaccurate, and can lead to failures in understanding people whose first languages are not English.

Racism in dominant U.S. cultures is rather new in that whiteness as a category did not exist, say, in classical rhetoric.³ It began in the seventeenth century, as Martin Bernal has demonstrated. Sexism, the twin of racism, for women who are African American, for example, seems to have existed for millennia. Sharon Crowley’s essay on U.S. racism in the 2011 edited volume of papers from the Rhetoric Society of America demonstrates the reasons for the growth of racism in the U.S. We can add to her analysis an example of the importance of understanding the racist complexity of translating beyond one-for-one formulizing. This can be illustrated by the well-known classical rhetoric phrase by Quintilian, vir bonus dicendi peritus from Institutio Oratoria. The phrase has been interpreted as a self-evident assertion of how rhetoric applies to the well-educated man (the good man speaking well as a cultural ideal in first century CE Rome). However, a closer look at the phrase reveals that the word vir can apply only to a male. Further examination shows that it applies only to some categories of males. Females cannot be vires in this context, even though some translate the word as “person.” Looking beneath the text at a shallow subtext reveals that the word vir is sexist and, especially given Quintilian’s first century CE context, misogynistic.

Crowley’s argument does leave out almost all composition-rhetoric research on whiteness, and this is an issue with the essay; however, she does include important work on historicizing white supremacy and its development in the U.S. A central issue concerns the stigmatizing of African American people so that the ruling class (owners of enslaved African American people and of the land) could persuade some discourse communities of whites that African Americans were beneath them in class and by other measures as well. This otherness did not occur in all other nations, particularly in Latin America. Crowley and others argue that it operated in a unique way in the U.S. and that its effects continue to be felt. Anyone with the eyes to see the ongoing genocide of males who are African American cannot disagree with this issue. This genocide has taken place since the seventeenth century without a letup.

Horner, Lu, and others show how monolingualism and composition-rhetoric studies are greatly and negatively affected by working in the language of English without consideration of many other languages. In addition, if a composition-rhetoric scholar-teacher is going to study Creek writing as it has taken place in the Muskogee Band of the Creek nation in Oklahoma, then one needs to study the Creek language and the texts and contexts that arise from it. Craig Womack’s Red on Red is partly based on this point. An example of the hegemony of English in the U.S. comes from Barack Obama in an October 18, 2016 greeting to Matteo Renzi, then the Prime Minister of Italy. During a visit to the U.S., in a speech section on Italian-American immigrants, Obama refers to those Italian immigrants “who don’t speak the language.” The phrase “the language” does not have to be named as English, and that is the point. In a section of the speech showing Italian immigrants as excellent, Obama walks the line of showing positive immigration and negative immigration. Obama’s anonymous speechwriter may very well have been writing for the anti-immigration portion of the audience (as she or he appears to be doing with the dichotomy of good immigrants; these would include, for example, Italian immigrants and Italian Americans whose families emigrated in previous generations) and bad immigrants. This binary enables the President to win over some moderates in this debate. However, the concept of “the language” is itself xenophobic and monolinguistic. Language, in this case English, with the definite article “the” has a deep subtext of “English only.” That emotional phrase resonates with many discourse communities, not just with birther believers.

For many years in the academy, the only foreign languages allowed were Latin, ancient Greek (usually any dialect), French, and German. Spanish was excluded. All Native North American languages were excluded. Caribbean dialects were excluded. Most Subsaharan languages and dialects were excluded. A class system (a particular Burkean hierarchy) operated in these exclusions. But most departments (the seventy-eight or so that offer Ph.D.s in composition and rhetoric studies) now will accept, sometimes with a petition, the offering of, say, Creek as an acceptable foreign language.

Think also of N’gugi Wa Thiango’s important essays on African languages that are written in languages that do not have wide distribution, highlighting how imperial languages (examples other than English include French, Dutch, Portuguese, and so on) replicate imperialist behaviors and ideologies. See also Ngugi’s memorandum “On the Abolition of the English Department.” The now canonical text is written in the language of English. It is also written in, or evolves from, a genre, the memorandum, that all of us who teach technical writing are used to. Ngugi’s piece helps us in that course, technical writing, which remains central to the mission of composition-rhetoric studies. It goes beyond the scope of this essay to focus on international languages and technical writing, but it seems clear that working outside U.S. borders—with trade issues, for example—requires international languages to be effective and to have business success.

As important as these economic issues are, just as important or perhaps more important is the relationship between thought and language, a relationship that can be understood best by learning languages other than one’s own first language (or first and second for those people who are bilingual). Lev Vygotsky demonstrates, in Thought and Language, that the infant, then toddler, and then child acquires the mother tongue by close interactions, including physical interactions, with the primary caretakers, usually the parents. Since that process is not replicable, the acquiring of additional languages is central. There is, here and throughout the issue of international language training, the profundity of performing logos in the language other than that of Vygotsky’s version of the mother tongue.

A Digression on International Languages and Feminism

In this section, I want to emphasize the centrality of international language use for feminism and overcoming white supremacy. If feminists want to increase influence, then we have to talk to people from all over the world and from our own shores in their languages. To know only English is to be imprisoned intellectually. To form discourse communities, we need to be able to speak in more than one language.

So when we work on our foreign language requirements in Ph.D. and M.A. programs in composition-rhetoric, we need to see the inclusion as a feminist act. It is another reason to keep at least two foreign languages in the requirement as long as those requirements include African languages and dialects, African American English Vernacular, Native North American languages, and others. It is hoped that all feminists take international language training seriously so that we can communicate beyond borders.

Another way to view the enervating aspects of monolingualism is for everyone in the U.S. to know both English and the language of Spanish. We already have two dominant languages. Requiring training in both would help a lot of people. The example of French and Quebec (Quebec) is one example. The language in dominant use looks toward different traditions. And so some might say that the common core issues would be complicated.

An excellent example of the feminist deployment of the language of Spanish in composition-rhetoric studies is Jessica Enoch’s Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865–1911. Enoch worked in many archives to locate the warrants, or the evidence, that was needed for her project. Her book serves as a resource for how to further engage in this kind of research. Enoch’s book is based on an understanding of the very different categories of thought that derive from non-English composition-rhetoric research. Archival work is, of course, central to composition-rhetoric research.

Advanced Composition and the Muthos of Progress in Composition-Rhetoric Studies

The classical Greek keyword mythos, or muthos (the transliteration depends on the designation used for the Greek letter upsilon that we usually see transliterated as a “y” and then, by extension, used in the word “myth”; I’m obviously partly keying off Roland Barthes in his early Mythologies), means an important story, a narrative that helps a culture explain itself to itself and to other cultures. From several points of view, it is untranslatable, and so we turn to it as a keyword. If feminists and other scholar-teachers do not know other languages, then we cannot know any kind of muthos; we cannot really get into the culture. Muthos drives ideology. The concept of progress is an ideology that makes us, especially in the enlightenment nation of the U.S., regard every next thing as necessarily better than whatever preceded it. This frequently unconscious stance infiltrates everything we write about.

Here is an example: We see that Section Five of the 1965 Voting Rights Act has come up for discussion, even as we saw large numbers of documented cases of voting irregularities in the 2012 presidential election (six hours of waiting in some precincts in Florida, for example, and far worse cases in 2016). A number of the arguments used in cases before the Supreme Court (the dismantling of the 1965 Voting Rights Act) depend on the muthos of progress. “We are necessarily better than we were in 1965,” goes the reasoning. (Millions of women are in this category of voting exclusion, by the way, and most of them were African American and Latino. The more recent Supreme Court decisions overturning North Carolina’s classic voter suppression/racism is a band aid of the earlier, tragic ruling and the desire to overturn protections for voters who are people of color).

We see the same argument used against women’s rights: “Yes, there used to be discrimination against women; but now there isn’t.” And it’s worth noting that a lot of these speakers are themselves women, those who haven’t faced discrimination on the basis of gender and those who have but do not recognize it. (Gloria Steinem has written about this issue. She has said that frequently women do not encounter gender discrimination until their 30s, when workplace issues can lead to work environment issues or other kinds of discrimination).

So we want to think about the muthos of progress as we work toward racing whites and documenting histories of feminist activity.

Advanced Composition, Classical Composition-Rhetoric and the Racing of Whiteness

Historicizing composition-rhetoric studies is a central part of our field. Studying it reveals rapidly that classical western composition-rhetoric begins with Sappho’s school in the seventh and into the sixth century BCE, although most historicizing begins with Corax and Tisias in the fifth century BCE. The important move historically is not to start with Aristotle, who appears very late in Greek rhetoric and writing and, secondly and obviously to this audience, to see how Aspasia, Diotima, Sulpicia, and many other women are central to these histories. See Susan Jarratt’s essay in Learning from the Histories of Rhetoric: Essays in Honor of Winifred Bryan Horner, edited by Theresa Enos, for one place to get started on these issues. In my classical composition-rhetoric seminars, I teach historicizing by showing how we can begin in this crucial part of composition-rhetoric studies. It gives us an additional one-hundred and fifty years, too. Sappho was a teacher of writing and she had her own school, which are also compelling issues for composition-rhetoric studies.

Sappho was not white. No one in classical composition-rhetoric is white. This is because, as I mentioned above, the category whiteness did not exist for most of the history of composition-rhetoric. I presented some of these arguments in a 2005 Rhetoric Review article. The study of whiteness in a semester long writing course means that weekly or twice-weekly writing assignments will incorporate white privilege textually and subtextually. With deep rhetorics of the kind found in classical rhetoric, the means are available to locate this privilege, to investigate without threatening student writers, and to reveal deep redrafting possibilities. The deep revision that occurs in advanced composition courses means that students can have the option of looking at the material with realpolitik (to keep moving through the course) even if real grappling with the issue is delayed.

These issues offer ways to look more critically at white privilege as whites who do not experience it. In other words, the raising of consciousness for white people can occur in stages. Many writers would see these issues right away, and that has been my direct experience. But default whiteness, a concept I explored in Electric Rhetoric and in a paper at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, continues to blight the work.

Summary

To conclude, these three sections—advanced composition, monolingualism, and whiteness; advanced composition, the muthos of progress and whiteness; and advanced composition, classical rhetoric, and the racing of whiteness—show us some of the ways we can further the analysis of whiteness and one aspect of writing. An additional issue has to do with acknowledging whiteness as a category that is very dominant. Each discourse community is affected in different ways by the erasure of international language training. When composition-rhetoric studies take it up more seriously, it will affect the writing abilities of advanced students in particular.

If we all pick up a stylus and write, including in advanced composition courses, then many of the whiteness and racist issues in the U.S. can be resolved sooner rather than later.

Kathleen E. Welch is Presidential Professor of English and the founding director of the Institute for Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches writing. She has written four single-authored books (two have been published), forty-seven articles, and directed the Writing and Rhetoric Program (post-1000 level) for twelve years. She is a past president of the Rhetoric Society of America, the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, and the Association for the Teaching of Advanced Composition.

Notes

¹ Permission for lyrics received from Tom Robinson Management. Copyright Tom Robinson Management.

² See Online Etymology Dictionary, which links the earliest references of rage to war, insanity, and frenzy.

¹ In this study, I analyzed ten individual and ten organizational websites, five organizational discussion pages, and five individual blogs on April 10th, 2007 authored by and/or for women who identify themselves as “pro-white,” highlight the “white” race, or call for a focus on “nationalism.” Due to their content, popularity, and timing, these webspaces serve as representative examples of rhetoric by White Nationalist women at the height of White Nationalism online (Southern Poverty Law Center). Webspaces were chosen due to the high number of links from individual White Nationalist women and their organizations, and/or based on their authority determined by Technorati.com (credibility assigned to a particular website based on the number of incoming links from other websites). I determined that the authors were female if they chose a Western female name and/or had a female pictured as their avatar.

² I assessed Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric in 2015 and 2016 as well as included rhetoric by Donald Trump revisited during the campaign itself (such as his interviews on The View many years earlier).

³ The lack of recognition of one’s own bias may lead people to embody unwitting resistance, or resistance “not intended as resistance by the actor yet … recognized as threatening by targets and other observers,” concerning race politics (Hollander and Einwohner 545).

⁴ I use the term “genius” similar to how Burke defined it as the “essence” or personification of a quality.

⁵ I use the brackets to indicate the coded nature of the rhetoric used by Trump. Further, since the term has expanded to imply many groups including Irish, Jewish, and others when used in an American context, the term [white] is more of an ideological commitment to whiteness than a literal referent to skin color.

⁶ Although Trump uses the term “America,” he limits his boundaries claims to the U.S. as a nation rather than referring to the Americas or even North America. His boundaries on the term are most evident when considering his claims about building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.

¹ Apel, Dora. “Just Joking? Chimps, Obama and Racial Stereotype.” Journal of Visual Culture 8.2 (2009): 134–42.

² Gottschalk, Peter and Gabriel Greenberg. “From Muhammad to Obama: Caricatures, Cartoons, and Stereotypes of Muslims.” Islamophobia: The Challenge of Pluralism in the 21^st Century. Ed. John L. Esposito and Ibrahim Kalin. New York: Oxford UP, 2011. 191–210.

³ None of this is to mention the countless grotesque caricatures of Michelle Obama—or caricature-like commonplaces, such as the one tweeted by an employee of Clay County in West Virginia after Trump’s presidential victory: “I’m tired of seeing a (sic) Ape in heels,” she said.

⁴ Roach, Joseph R. “Slave Spectacles and Tragic Octoroons: A Cultural Genealogy of Antebellum Performance.” Exceptional Spaces: Essays in Performance and History. Ed. Della Pollock. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1998. 49–76. See also: Stupp, Jason. “Slavery and the Theatre of History: Ritual Performance on the Auction Block.” Theatre Journal 63.1 (2011): 61–84.

⁵ Apel, Dora. “Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib.” Art Journal 64.2 (2005): 88–100. See also: Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, Lynching Photographs. Berkeley: U of California P, 2008.

¹ Here I use King’s definition of a “racialized” group as one that suffers systemic discrimination. See: King, Mike. “The Knockout Game: Moral Panic and the Politics of White Victimhood.” Race and Class 56.4 (2015): 85-94.

² Notably, in a follow-up study, David C. Wilson and Paul R. Brewer found that framing the issue in terms that emphasize the harm it does to specific groups of eligible voters, especially blacks, reduces support for voter ID laws. See: Wilson David C., and Paul R. Brewer. “Do Frames Emphasizing Harm to Age and Racial-Ethnic Groups Reduce Support for Voter ID Laws?” Social Sciences Quarterly 97.2 (2016): 391-406.

³ It is important to note that Section 2—which is permanent—remains unaffected by the ruling. It provides a mechanism by which advocacy groups, pro bono lawyers, or governmental entities may sue jurisdictions over discriminatory practices after they have been enacted. However, because it requires long and costly litigation, it lacks the deterrent power implicit in Section 5’s pre-clearance provision.

¹ These issues apply to First Year Composition and other educational locations as well, but they go beyond the scope of this essay.

² The University at Albany, SUNY, website currently shows eight foreign languages offered in the Department of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures. There are ten professors listed. Presumably there are adjunct faculty and graduate students involved in teaching the languages as well. It is notable and important that these foreign languages continue to be taught.

³ See Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks and his Blacks in Antiquity: Ehtiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience.