Inclement Weather: Antiblack Climate and Rhetoric (original) (raw)
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The Dark Black Dot: On Antiblackness and Rhetoric
Consider that the chora of whiteness is antiblack, meaning blackness being-sent, shipped, exiled creates the ontological ambience of whiteness, in Thomas Rickert’s terms. As a friendly amendment to Nakayama and Krizek’s pivotal diagnosis of whiteness as strategic rhetoric, what if an antiblack chora forms another nothingness, an ‘other’ nothingness, a something that does not matter, that is not-in-between being and nothingness? Given incessant, multi-focal, antiblack violence, Eric Watts says to ignore the radical claim of black noncommunicability is to commit more violence. We’re in a period, the long foul breath of the Middle Passage and its “still unfolding aftermaths.” So what if the unavoidable punctus were a dissevering figure of ‘world,’ when world is punctuated by unending “disavowal and damnation of blackness,” quoting Watts again?
The Idiomatic Violence of Black Rhetoric in an Anti Black World (2019)
This paper attempts to explicate an idiomatic praxis in early black thought that theorizes anti-black logics of signification. I call this meta linguistic theory and praxis Black Rhetoric, and argue that it is a paradigmatic form of idiomatic violence in modernity. Since the 1980s scholars of Black Study and Black Literary History have been interested in how Black writers maneuver Standard Written English for their critical and artistic purposes. For example, Barbara Christian argued that "people of color have always theorized-but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic...our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language" (52). Christian's emphasis on theorizing as a verb rather than a noun reflects a broader methodological emphasis among her contemporaries on the dynamism, movement, and play of Black discursive practice (verb) over produced knowledge (noun). This paper explores idiomatic violence through contemporary hip hop artist Joey Badass' "Paper Trails" and the 19th century orator, Adam Carmen.
Symposium - Rhetoric Review - Rhetoric, Race, and Resentment: Whiteness and the New Days of Rage
Alex McVey’s “Memeing the Black Presidency: Obama Memes and the Affective Ambivalence of Racialized Policing” takes a close-up view of how social media techniques promote racial discourse. He argues that anti-Obama memes shared by police and their supporters, and pro-Obama memes circulated following the death of Osama Bin Laden, illustrate how both critics and supporters of President Obama use visual rhetorics of blackness to mediate their relationship with institutions of racialized state violence. Reproduced in part through the spread of visual digital media containing tropes of both negrophobia—the fear or hatred of blackness—and negrophilia— the fetishistic love of blackness—McVey argues that these reflect America’s cross-cultural attach- ment to racialized police violence.
RR Rhetoric Race and Resentment Whiteness and the New Days of Rage Final
Rhetoric Review, 2017
While much scholarly inquiry has explored what goes into the construction of racial pathways of identity, little of that inquiry has considered the deliberate ways in which rhetoric has been used to foment racial hate and dissension. These expressions often reveal themselves not in the grand occasions of celebrated oratory, but in the familiar expressions surrounding us. The intent of this symposium is to examine the symbolic use of images, symbols, and texts as part of the rhetorical construction of racial resentments. And, as the presidential administration of the first African American U.S. president came to a close and the battle for his successor intensified, rhetorical scrutiny around shifts of power beg for incisive examinations, too. We dedicated this section to the late Theresa Jarnagin Enos, founding editor of Rhetoric Review.
White Supremacy and Antiblackness: Theory and Lived Experience
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 2021
Our goal in understanding white supremacy should be theory building, viewed as instrumental in providing explanation and prediction as a foundation for activism. As humanists and social scientists, and more particularly as anthropologists and linguistic anthropologists, we should take to heart not only anthropology's mandate to be holistic, comparative, and historical but also the tradition of anthropological theorizing. Lived experience is the substance of the, perhaps temporarily, ineffable structure of feeling, shaping, and structuring what we should desperately want theory to account for, including our pain, resentments, hatreds, longing, and joy-even the air we breathe and the rivers flowing among the United States, which are shaped by-fused with-white supremacy and antiblackness. White supremacy seeks to be totalitarian, even as it is contained by and/or co-constructed by not only ancillary systems such as gender-, class-, and sexuality-based ones but also larger systems such as capitalism, purposeful violence, and the state's quest for hegemony. In this writing's search for a deeper and broader comprehension of white supremacy, discussions are presented on underdiscussed themes in white supremacy, such as the "whitening" power of language, and additionally two key issues: (1) the change currently underway in the United States'white-supremacist racial system from a race-primary system toward a skin-color primary system, accompanying a likely change in the basic principle for defining whiteness and (2) the necessity to understand that white supremacy is a key element in the degradation and exploitation of, not only labor of color but also white labor-to a lesser extent, and the looming possibility going forward of the United States' decline domestically and internationally. [white supremacy, anti-blackness, racism, race theory, racial passing]
Virginia Law Review Online 124 , 2020
The resurgence of worldwide protests by activists of the Movement for Black Lives (BLM) has ushered a global reckoning with the meaning of this generation’s rallying cry – “Black Lives Matter.” As citizens emblazon their streets with this expression in massive artistic murals, the Trump administration has responded with the militarized policing of non-violent public demonstrations, revealing not merely a disregard for public safety, but far worse, a concerted dismantling of protestors’ First Amendment rights. Nevertheless, BLM protests have persisted. Accordingly, this Essay considers the implications of this generation’s acclamation of Black humanity amidst the social tensions exposed during the era of COVID-19. What does the Trump administration’s militarized response to BLM protests mean in a world mutilated by the scars of racial oppression, a wound laid bare by America’s racially biased, aggressive, and supervisory culture of policing? In response, much in the way Cheryl Harris revealed Whiteness as Property, this Essay suggests and defends Black identity itself, or Blackness – whether articulated by the pure speech of racial justice activists who affirm Black humanity, or embodied by the symbolic speech of Black bodies assembled in collective dissent in the public square – as “fighting words” in the consciousness of America, a type of public speech unprotected by the Constitution. The very utterance of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” tends to incite imminent violence and unbridled rage from police in city streets across America. Discussions of “Black Lives Matter” by pundits conjure images of subversion, disorder, and looting, the racialized narratives of social unrest commonly portrayed by the media. Yet, the words “Black Lives Matter” and the peaceful assembly of Black protestors also encapsulate the fire of righteous indignation burning in the hearts of minoritized citizens. This dynamic reflects unresolved tensions in the First Amendment’s treatment of race relations in America. Even more, it exposes the role of policing in smothering the Constitutional rights of Black and Brown citizens. This Essay provides three contributions to the ongoing discourse on policing in the United States. First, it reveals how unresolved racial tensions in the First Amendment – focusing specifically on ambiguities in the fighting words doctrine – perpetuate the racially biased, aggressive, and supervisory culture of American policing. Second, it analyzes how such unresolved racial tensions cast a dark shadow over the liberty of Black and Brown citizens who experience racism at the hands of police officers, yet avoid acts of protest for fear of bodily harm or arrest. Third, it illuminates the embeddedness of racism in American policing culture, more generally; a culture that not only constructs and reconstitutes the racial social order, but also degrades the dignity of Black and Brown citizens. Collectively, these insights lend support toward demands for police abolition from BLM activists. As this Essay concludes, until we as a nation wrestle with the unresolved racial subtext of modern policing – a racist culture woven into law that not only silences the legitimate protests of minoritized citizens in violation of their First Amendment rights, but also rationalizes callous violence at the hands of law enforcement – Black America will remain a peril to the veil of white supremacy that looms over the American constitutional order.
TABLE OF CONTENTS: Matthew Houdek - Introduction (292-299) *** Alexis McGee and J. David Cisneros - “Looking Back, Looking Forward: A Dialogue on ‘The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism’” (300-305) *** Michelle Colpean and Rebecca Dingo - “Beyond Drive-by Race Scholarship: The Importance of Engaging Geopolitical Contexts” (306-311) *** Shereen Yousuf and Bernadette Calafell - “The Imperative for Anti-Muslim Racism in Rhetorical Studies” (312-318) *** Karrieann Soto Vega and Karma Chávez - “Latinx Rhetoric and Intersectionality in Racial Rhetorical Criticism” (319-325) *** Martin Law and Lisa M. Corrigan - “On White-Speak and Gatekeeping: Or, What Good are the Greeks?” (326-330) *** Kristiana Baez and Ersula Ore - “The Moral Imperative of Race for Rhetorical Studies: On Civility and Walking-in-White in Academe” (331-336) *** Sara Baugh-Harris and Darrel Wanzer-Serrano - “Against Canon: Engaging the Imperative of Race in Rhetoric” (337-342) *** Scarlett L. Hester and Catherine R. Squires - “Who are we working for? Re-centering Black Feminism” (343-348) *** RESPONSE: Lisa A. Flores - “Towards An Insistent and Transformative Racial Rhetorical Criticism” (349-357). OVERVIEW: The essays in this special forum respond to Lisa A. Flores' 2016 essay, "Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism," https://bit.ly/2E2cXGa. The forum includes eight pairs of junior and senior scholars who each collaborated on an essay plus a response piece by Flores. The forum was guest curated by Houdek and invited by journal editors Greg Dickinson and the late Robert DeChaine, and it was originally delivered as a roundtable discussion at the 2018 Rhetoric Society of America Conference in Minneapolis, MN.