Listening: Its Application for Civil Civic Discourse

Introductory Bio

Professor and Department Chair of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Krista Ratcliffe contributes to the CCCC Conversations on Diversity her well-established and award-winning research on the cultural presence and/or absence of women’s voices and on the intersections of gender, race, and whiteness. In Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, which won the 2007 CCCC Outstanding Book Award, Ratcliffe troubles identifications of gender and whiteness to examine how whiteness functions as an “invisible” racial category. She examines the displacement and neglect of a literacy of listening and identifies the potential of rhetorical listening—a stance of openness—for inviting a more complicated notion of identification. She also co-edited Silence and Listening as Rhetorical Arts with Cheryl Glenn (2011). In addition to her writing and research, Ratcliffe became the President-Elect of the Rhetoric Society of America in January, 2010.

Blog Post

In 2007, I gave the keynote speech at the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference in Little Rock, Arkansas. At the time, I thought the talk was too conference-specific to develop beyond that occasion, but I’ve since changed my mind and am currently working on turning it into an article, tentatively titled the same as my speech: “Unwilling to Listen: How Do You Have a Civic Dialogue When Each Side Isn't Civil.”

I’m revisiting this speech because it addresses the following question that I often get about rhetorical listening: “What’s Next?” Sadly, given the Arizona shootings of January 2011, Sarah Palin’s call for radical individualism, President Obama’s subsequent call for more political civility, and the current political protests in Wisconsin, my talk also invokes the questions:

What happens in civic discourse when people are “unwilling to listen”? (hence my article title); and

How Do You Have a Civic Dialogue When Each Side Isn't Civil? (hence my article’s subtitle--and I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out here to the 2007 conference organizer Barb L’Eplattenier who posed these questions to me).

So, I begin by asking, How Do You Have a Civic Dialogue When Each Side Isn't Civil? The most obvious response is: “You can’t.” But if we (and every time we use “we,” we should remember Mary Daly’s pronouncement that pronouns are our most persistent problem when talking across differences) take “You can’t” as a first premise, then a cultural logic unpacks as follows: if we believe we can’t have a civic conversation because each side isn’t civil, then one effect is that we stop trying to talk to each other. A corollary effect is that we become unwilling to listen to each other and to ourselves. Of course, an unwillingness to listen is accompanied by the following rhetorical stances:

(1) Rigidification of Personal Beliefs, which results in a limited space for negotiation between and among people, communities, institutions, and countries.

(2) Personal and Cultural Defeatism.

(3) Personal and Cultural Nihilism.

(4) Personal and Cultural Despair.

(5) War.

I believe that the above cultural logic and its accompanying rhetorical stances dominate the discourse in our country today, driven by individuals’ feelings of isolation within a global economy, driven by the busy-ness of our everyday lives, driven by our fear about the economy, and driven by a politics of fear and power … power and fear. All of this is dysfunction in our discourse… and needs to change.

But let’s pause for a moment. . .

John Schilb has written a book, Rhetorical Refusals, which theorizes moments when we purposely choose not to listen. These moments are different for all of us, depending on our individual identifications. Sometimes these refusals are necessary, psychologically and/or culturally. For example, I’m not going to entertain an outrageous request from my child; nor do I feel compelled to listen to groups, such as the KKK, rehash age-old prejudices. But sometimes these rhetorical refusals are dysfunctional, as in my aforementioned discussion or our current politics of power and fear… and do need to change our rhetoric(s).

So back to the question of my article's subtitle—How Do You Have a Civic Dialogue When Each Side Isn't Civil? If the obvious answer is “you can’t,” then perhaps we should listen to that question differently—(a) redefining terms, (b) redefining cultural logics, and (c) redefining rhetorical stances.

One suggestion is that we could redefine terms by complicating them with feminist theory. For example, one phrase that has haunted civic dialogues is public sphere. That raises the question: what, exactly, is the public sphere? The most famous answer to that question is the Habermas-Lyotard debate, which pits Enlightenment ideals again postmodernism. Yet I believe that this debate may be productively complicated with feminist theories.

For example, Robin Goodman brings a feminist lens to this debate in her book on critical pedagogy entitled World, Class, Women: Global Literatures, Education and Feminism. The book explores how the “shrinking of the public sphere and the rise of globalization influence access to learning, definitions of knowledge, and possibilities of radical feminism.” She opens her book as follows:

In 1938, as Europe was about to lead the world in to a brutal conflagration, Virginia Woolf recognized the urgency for a fundamental educational change. This educational change would necessarily include economic transformation. As well, Woolf understood [in Three Guineas] that without this change, there would be an inevitable spiraling toward escalating militarism and widespread destruction. Today, … Virginia Woolf’s lesson remains unlearned.

In The Return of the Political, Chantal Mouffe identifies another unlearned lesson about the public sphere: the need for civic virtue and collective action. Mouffe claims:

the liberal illusion that harmony could be born from the free play of private interests, and that modern society no longer needs civic virtue, has finally shown itself to be dangerous; it puts in question the very existence of the democratic process . . . . It has generally been admitted that the “liberty of the moderns” consists in the peaceful enjoyment of private independence [; and that] this implies the renunciation of the “liberty of the ancients,” [which is] the active participation in collective power, because this leads to a subordination of the individual to the community.

Although we must be careful not to romanticize past civic spheres where feudalism, slavery, and gender inferiority were accepted, I think Mouffe’s point about contemporary individualism is well taken. In addition, in “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Catherine Squires reminds us that the public, or civic, sphere is not only collective but also multiple. She imagines this multiplicity … in ways that escape a naïve identity politics but that foreground power structures and power differentials.

So, if we contemplate the public sphere via Goodman’s education and economic reform, Mouffe’s civic virtue and collective action, and Squires’ multiplicity (and I’m interested in investigating more theories of public sphere that foreground race), THEN . . .

With such a feminist lens, we may be able to redefine cultural logics. When confronted with the question—“How Do You Have a Civic Dialogue When Each Side Isn't Civil?”—we might be able to imagine responses other a than: “You can’t.” Indeed, we might be able to imagine this alternative response: “You keep reframing your ideas in ways that help other sides hear you, and you share that burden because no one person or institution can do it 24/7.”

This response is not particularly new, nor does it ensure success. But it is worth reconsidering because it offers an alternative cultural logic, which unpacks as follows: If you keep alive the idea of reframing your ideas, then you also keep alive the possibility of success. One effect of this alternative cultural logic is that we keep trying to talk with others. A corollary effect is that we may remain willing to listen. An intentional willingness to listen rhetorically is important because hearers assume the possibility of success and a belief in agency and hope.

Belief … possibility … agency—these tropes are endemic to rhetoric. And hope—that trope is endemic to feminism. So just imagine the potential power that undergirds feminist rhetorics.

Linking the tropes of belief, possibility, agency, and hope has the potential to redefine the following rhetorical stances:

(1) Personal Rigidification can be reimagined not as the inevitable status quo but rather as a point on a continuum . . . with the another point being Personal Openness.

(2) Cultural Rigidification can be seen not as an inevitable status quo but rather as a point on a continuum . . . with another point being Cultural Openness.

(3) Defeatism can give way to Hope.

(4) Nihilism can give way to Hope.

(5) Despair can give way to Hope.

(6) War, please God, can give way to Peace.

Such claims resonate naively in today’s world, don’t they? But perhaps, instead of succumbing to postmodern skepticism, we ought to embrace postmodern possibilities—specifically, the ways that people can redefine tropes, as well as change people’s minds, lives, and worlds.

In the article, I plan to demonstrate this claim by invoking case studies from around the world, where race and gender and nationality and class intersect in the performance of belief, possibility, agency and hope. These case studies serve several purposes: to broaden readers/listeners knowledge of the world, to broaden rhetorical theorists ideas of effective tactics related to rhetorical listening across differences, to demonstrate the importance of analyzing rhetorical tactics, such as rhetorical listening, within particular historical/cultural sites, etc.

But for this blog, I’ll simply conclude by saying that the work toward accomplishing the above rhetorical stances may be never-ending. That fact does not render the work useless. Rather, it makes the work even more imperative. It reminds us [remember Mary Daly’s pronoun pronouncement] of what it means to be human … that is, what it means to be human beings who are all both similar and different.

Where Real Indians Trade

Introductory Bio

Resa Crane Bizzaro is a member and Co-Chair of the CCCC Native American Caucus, and her research focuses on Native American identity. Bizzaro studies the rhetorics of unenrolled Native Americans in this country, focusing on exclusions determined by both U.S. and tribal governments. In particular, her work comments on the loss of rhetorical power and sovereignty indigenous nations in this country face by refusing membership to those people who cannot demonstrate an appropriate blood quantum. Among a variety of research interests, Bizzaro is currently at work on a project that looks at indigenous peoples and their treatment by the established medical profession, more specifically in the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy. In 2008, Bizzaro joined the faculty at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she is a member of the IUP Native American Awareness Council. Bizzaro is also one of the founders of "Blankets for the Elders," a non-profit organization that collects blankets, coats, warm clothing, and heaters for distribution at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Resa's work has appeared in College English, College Composition and Communication, and a number of edited collections.


Blog Entry

Just before we entered the station in central New Mexico, an old building appeared on my left. I moved to the train’s window to get a better look—block walls crumbling, iron bars rusting over empty windows, and letters fading but still decipherable:

Trading Station
Where REAL INDIANS Trade

Once white with red letters, the walls had collapsed on either side, making many of the letters near the margins illegible. I sat stunned at the scene outside my window. Too late, I reached for my camera, but the train slid past leaving the small station empty. I vowed to be ready on the return trip that afternoon.

As I think back on that experience, I am reminded of my own "real Indian" heritage. Although many people mistake me for a descendant of European immigrants, I am a real Indian (Cherokee and Meherrin, to be exact), and it’s unsettling to see reminders in New Mexico of the hardships and accommodations made by my family in Georgia and North Carolina. When I was about ten, I found out that my paternal great grandmother was Cherokee. What I didn’t find out until nearly thirty-five years later—while looking through the Dawes Roll—was that my paternal grandmother (the daughter-in-law) was Cherokee, as well. When I was in college, I was told by a researcher that my mother’s family was most likely Meherrin, a small indigenous nation that had initially been thought to have “washed out” into the dominant population of eastern North Carolina.

Over the years, this knowledge has explained many things to me about my life, and it has brought me closer to those who are more like me. Most often, I feel more comfortable with indigenous peoples, who tend to share the same values I was taught growing up. While my parents may have been ashamed of their ancestry, and made every effort to “pass” as part of the dominant culture, I am not. I claim my heritage because it is my birthright. I feel obligated to speak out for those who are unenrolled but feel tied to these communities whose ways we have learned, albeit unwittingly.

My commitment to my culture and my overt practice of its ways have influenced how I approach life, teaching, and interactions in my communities. I do not separate these areas, for one thing, and I find that my life is like a spiral which incorporates and accommodates all these areas. I share this notion not only with indigenous peoples but also with Rebecca Dingo, who discusses ways in which we are all interconnected.

Alma Villanueva says “diversity is a way of seeing and being in the world,” and it seems to me that I have followed such a path my entire life. My grandparents and parents impressed upon me that I should respect all people, since I can’t always understand what prompts their ways. I was also taught that there is more than one “correct” way to achieve the same end—a lesson that I try to impart to my students, particularly in our use of language.

In the classroom, I make an effort to talk about language use and its consequences. Although I see it as my responsibility to discuss Standard Written English (SWE), I support the use of World Englishes. I have recently signed my name to a call for perceiving English from a world perspective—with multiple appearances, uses, and functions and variable meanings. Since I teach in a program that includes many international students, I see the necessity of such an approach. If English is to colonize the world—as it inevitably will, as it becomes the lingua franca among nations—then we must be amenable to the changes that will inevitably appear in its usage. These changes will occur even if we restrict our use of English to native speakers.

But the consequences of non-standard usage are played out at many levels. In teaching at several universities, I have seen placement “tests” which marginalize speakers of non-standard forms or those whose first language is not English. Typically, at places I have taught, students who use non-standard dialects are placed into low-level, non-credit courses in which they must demonstrate their abilities to use edited American English prior to their release into mainstream writing classes. These students’ struggles remind me of my own experiences in high school, where a teacher predicted that I would “flunk out ... [of college] before the end of the first semester” due to my “poor language abilities.”

In reading other blog entries here, I find that I agree with Malea Powell (and others) who maintain that they do not “add” diversity to their classrooms. Honoring all cultures and communication approaches is something I strive to achieve in my classroom, no matter the student or text. I do, however, feel the necessity of pointing out what values the dominant culture places upon written communication—being careful to design assignments that accommodate personal, regional, and cultural dialects, alongside standard written English (SWE). The use of SWE is an area in which my students demand instruction, as they have seen the direct consequences of an inability to communicate using the language of the dominant culture.

My research adds to my understanding of the importance of an ability to use and understand this language. Like Victor Villanueva, I believe there are serious aesthetic, social, political, and rhetorical consequences for others when the language of the dominant culture marginalizes groups of citizens. My research demonstrates the effects of the historical and contemporary language that denies acknowledgement of unenrolled indigenous peoples in their respective nations. Not only does this lack of acceptance affect those who are unenrolled, it also affects indigenous nations whose rhetorical power would swell as their numbers increase if we are all counted.

While I could go on about how my research is impacted by language and issues of “diversity,” I think it’s more important to return to where my insights and actions have been most useful (to my way of thinking) and most directly beneficial. Based on research into language used to describe indigenous peoples, I began looking at living conditions on reservated lands—sovereign ground belonging to indigenous nations such as the pueblo where Kewa Station is located.

During a conversation with my Lakota-Cheyenne friend, Marji, in 2003, I discovered that Native Americans in South Dakota endured severe winter conditions with little protection; however, one blanket might keep a person from freezing to death. Together we established Blankets for the Elders, a non-profit group which collects blankets to ship to a distribution point in Pine Ridge. Although Blankets for the Elders has now fallen under the umbrella of a larger non-profit organization, our group's efforts have continued, despite my move to Pennsylvania in 2008. Currently, we're considering opening "Blankets North," so I can manage donations of warm clothing for children. I feel called to this work because of my interests in diversity and the need for my life to reflect that interest in helping people move out of poverty.

Three hours later, we approached the Kewa Station again. I had my camera in my hand, prepared to press the on button, when I heard the conductor over the loudspeaker: “Kewa Station; please gather your belongings and move to the lower levels of the train cars. And as a reminder, you are now on indigenous lands. You are not permitted to take pictures while the train passes through this area.” I was confused; no one earlier had announced our location or the prohibition on photography. Some people cared; some people didn't. But I understood that I could not capture a picture of a relic of what must surely be the long-gone past.

Re-membering White Privilege: Rhetorical Memory and Film

Introductory Bio

Tammie Kennedy is an assistant professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. She teaches graduate courses in rhetoric and composition studies, as well as undergraduate courses in film, writing, and rhetoric. Her scholarly interests focus on the intersections among rhetoric and composition pedagogies and critical race and gender studies, particularly how those who are marginalized manage to speak, write, and perform in ways that challenge dominant culture. She has regularly presented at CCCC, and has published her work in Rhetoric Review, JAC, and the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. Currently, she is working on several projects that demonstrate how the generative, critical, and embodied qualities of memory have not been sufficiently engaged in rhetoric and composition studies. In particular, she is writing about how rhetorical memory provides a critical tool for students to analyze, disrupt, and revise truth claims often represented in traditional bodies of knowledge.

Blog Entry

As someone committed to whiteness studies and anti-racist pedagogies, I am interested in understanding how memory might address some of the frustrations I’ve experienced when teaching diversity issues. Recently, I’ve been exploring how films might be used more productively in ways that disrupt the rhetoric of racism and white privilege and sustain ethical social action. Rhetorical memory—the products and processes of remembering and their effect, or “re-memory” to use Toni Morrison’s term—provides a critical tool to investigate how whiteness circulates (in)visibly in films and how those images resonate in our memories. Rhetorical memory provides a conceptual platform from which to stage a critique about how the ideology of racism/white privilege is rooted in memory—what is remembered, by whom, for what purposes, and with what effect—and how these memories are put into discourse in ways that that shape our notions of “reality,” as well as our perceptions of self(s) and others(s). I believe rhetorical memory can enrich and expand the productive use of film in whiteness pedagogies.

When talking about identity and difference in film, I ask students to examine the links between the politics of remembering and the ideology of representation. In this way, films function as a technology of rhetorical memory that empowers students to interpret and analyze how public and private memories are complicated by our differences. Analyzing films from this perspective moves students beyond a cognitive understanding of social inequities and injustices to create a more “memorable” experience that might last after the class ends. Films appeal to the emotions, revealing both the generative and destructive effects of their construction. Such constructions have profound results on both individual and public memory, which Robert Burgoyne explains this way: “Film, in effect, appears to invoke the emotional certitude we associate with memory. Like memory, film is associated with the body; it engages the viewer at the somatic level, immersing the spectator in experiences and impressions that, like memories, seem to be [what Nietzsche calls] ‘burned in.’” Understanding how these images get “burned in” our individual and collective memory is important because it helps viewers understand how white privilege and racism is sustained as a cultural norm that conceals power and resists exposure.

In order to study rhetorical memory as well as explore the intersections among diversity, memory, and movies, I created a 300-level course called Rhetoric, Memory, and Popular Film. Here is an excerpt from the course description:

The blurring of memory and media representations bring up new questions for us to consider: How do movies shape human memory? How are memories represented in film? In addition, how does film function as memory? How does memory affect the way we see the world and ourselves? How do movies make memory vulnerable to ideological forces at the same time that they invite contestation and revision? Throughout the course, we will ask how movie memories shape our identities as individuals, community members, and national and global citizens.

To demonstrate the pedagogical power found at the intersection among whiteness studies, rhetorical memory, and film, I’ll share a class example based on Forrest Gump (FG). This 1994 film earned significant commercial and critical success but was also adopted by political conservatives such as Newt Gingrich to articulate a traditional version of postwar American history. Because most students have seen the movie and consider it a harmless comedy, FG provides an ideal text to use to locate and interpret how white privilege is “re-membered.” For example, the class discussed the following issues after watching the movie:

• Is Forrest Gump, as Robyn Wiegman argues in “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity,” rendered “discursively black” through the analogy between disability and black social disenfranchisement? If so, do viewers remember him as anti-racist figure because he innocently participates in desegregation and has an interracial male friendship with Bubba?

• Does the film, as Thomas Byers asserts in “History Re-Membered: Forrest Gump, Postmodern Masculinity, and the Burial of Counterculture,” construct a concensus view of American history based upon the authority of the white father and the marginalization of the black, female, gay, and radical “other”?

• What does it mean that Forrest was named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the KKK? Even though Forrest views these men as part of a “club” that ran around in bed sheets, pretending to be “ghosts or spooks or something,” does the film provide a critique of white privilege, or does it take the easy way out by portraying the Klan as “silly,” not vicious?

Examining Forrest Gump as a figure of what John Fiske calls “circulation and contestation” inspires engaged classroom discussions, and students were willing to explore these various interpretations. However, the discussion also revealed the hegemonic power of whiteness in many student reactions. Ultimately, after 20-30 minutes of enthusiastic dialogue, much of the conversation stalled in some of the typical ways: First, a few students insisted that the movie was a just a comedy and academics were “reading too much into it.” While these same students granted that the movie was essentially “whitewashing” the roles of African Americans and women in our collective memory, they also maintained that was the nature of movies—a movie can’t cover everything. Second, since the movie is a fictional comedy, it doesn’t have to be true, so not all of these issues matter. Finally, some students introduced notions of intentionality. They maintained that the director “didn’t mean to be racist” even if, paradoxically, his choices created such representations.
Here we were again.

After such a productive discussion where students were able to locate whiteness, I was disappointed that we had ended up—once again—adrift within the various intonations of denial. While it wasn’t necessarily important to make a case that the director was “racist” in his intentions, it was essential to examine why many of the students felt compelled to defend the film with the argument “the filmmaker didn’t mean to be racist.” After all, whiteness sustains its power through one’s blind spots to racism and white privilege that reflect deeply held and often unconscious biases. Furthermore, the “s/he-didn’t-mean-to-be-racist” defense is less persuasive when we consider that “intentions” don’t necessarily matter when we consider how ideologies are written in discourses. In fact, this type of defense only makes sense in a world where white privilege is normal.

But then something different happened. Because we had been looking at films through the lens of rhetorical memory and noting how powerfully a film’s construction shaped our individual and collective memories, I was able to stage a different kind of critique that moved us beyond the usual impasse. I asked, “but what about memory?” How is this film shaping the way people remember important historical events and their relationship to the present? How are white ideologies more powerful in FG given the fact that mediated memory functions like what some psychologists calls “flashbulb memories”—intensely vivid and emotionally charged responses that enhance their resonance and read as “real” like a documentary?

The spirited conversation resumed. We started discussing our previous readings about how movies construct both individual and collective memory. Through rhetorical memory, we see how films like FG transform the past by eliminating contradictory or unwanted memories and prioritizing those more favorable or useful. Such a process describes the rhetoric of white privilege/racism. In addition, we discussed how “memories” are often the memory of a mediated experience in the first place, which makes it more difficult to determine “fact” from “fiction.” For example, we discussed how many of our memories of 9/11 are based on the media images and how those intersected with our personal memories, such as where we were when we first experienced the collapse of the Towers or if we knew people in NYC who were affected.

Then I offered the students this statistic from a TV Nation study quoted in Wang: "34% of Americans who voted Republican in the 1994 congressional elections thought that Gump was not a fictional version of ‘60s history, but a documentary.” The students went silent for a minute while they pondered that percentage. Many of them recognized that they had a similar experience the week before when we studied JFK and admitted that they had remembered it as a documentary film, not fiction-based. By the end of class, the students had resumed their critical conversation about how a film like FG maintains white privilege. In fact, they agreed that films like FG make white privilege even more invisible (and scary) for two reasons. First, because the film uses digital and mediated images that read like “real” memory, people forget it’s fictional. Second, because the film seems like a harmless comedy, viewers tend to overlook biases and ideological assumptions and implications

Most of the students agreed that while we can read and interpret the meaning of various choices made to construct white ideologies, questions of interpretation are more profound when we also consider how digital and mediated memory in films construct the ways we re-member a certain decade, event, or person. I am optimistic about the ways rhetorical memory can inform how we theorize and teach diversity issues. The focus on the rhetorical nature of memory has helped to augment classroom critiques and productively redirect discussions about white privilege and the power of ideology, even in the most seemingly innocent films. I would love to hear how other scholar-teachers use film and memory in their work on diversity issues.

The Ecology of Diversity

Introductory Bio

Jill Swiencicki, formerly associate professor of English at the California State University, Chico, is now Visiting Assistant Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. She is at work on a project on women’s dissent rhetoric after 9/11, which analyzes feminist responses to the U.S. government’s actions after 9/11. She is also at work, with Thia Wolf and Chris Fosen, on an analysis of The Town Hall Meeting, their large-scale, public sphere experiment with first-year student writers (http://www.csuchico.edu/engl/awp/townhall/index.shtml). Her third project explores the application of environmental sustainability methods to first-year writing pedagogy. Her writing has appeared in College English, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Rhetorical Education in America, Multiple Literacies for the 21st Century, Rhetoric and the Global Village, and The WPA as Advocate for Engagement.


Blog Entry

I approach the problem of diversity mindful of the first law of ecology: everything is interconnected. Having taught for a decade in northern California at a university internationally recognized for its approach to sustainability, and in a state suffering through a long-term drought, I have been steeped in the rhetoric and reality of climate change. It is through these experiences that I offer ideas to shape our thinking about diversity. . . . (editor’s note: for a longer version of this essay with an extended discussion on interconnected thinking, diversity, and ecology, please see the url at: http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Groups/CCCC/Committees/Ecology_Diversity.pdf.

We face dissonance and reconcile versions of competing realities by inquiring into the social systems we take for granted (Who handed you your morning coffee? Where were your shoes made? What happened to your water bottle when you threw it away? Why is it so hard to focus on our peers’ ideas in their writing, instead of their errors?). Some of the most interesting work in our field strives to help students to see their life as ecological—to make visible the structures and power relations embedded in their social system, to negotiate and experiment with what kinds of roles they want to more consciously play in the system and to use as many modes of communication as possible to do so.

A diverse ecology needs a sense of deep time—of how the past lives on in the present and has adapted to fit the changing aspects of the environment. Since the inauguration of President Obama, I have been asking my students at California State University at Chico the following series of questions: “What do you remember about the decisions of the U.S. government after 9/11? What have you heard from family, friends, and the media about the war on terror? How are you making sense of political events for yourself?” By-and-large, when faced with my questions, students don’t remember or know any specific details. Chico State is a liberal college campus in California, so there is a prevailing critical appraisal of the last administration, but when I pushed them to elaborate on their distaste or appreciation, they couldn’t offer many details. This situation is an easy reminder of the importance of replenishing our historical and intellectual habitat in times of transition, especially in times of political, economic, and environmental upheaval.

Karl Rove, former Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff to President Bush, is fully aware of the exigency of the situation. According to the news media and his own promotional website, Rove is busy on college campuses these days, creating the history of that period that many of my current students were too young to have engaged with critically. Pollsters, conducting exit interviews of the students who attend Rove’s lectures, have found that students leave the lecture hall, largely arguing that former President Bush protected our civil liberties in wartime, detained suspected terrorists appropriately, etc. In the battle for the signifier, history is written and rewritten. At this historical moment, which features the degradation of public education, infrastructure, the environment, social programs, and the arts, there exists what Annette Harris Powell’s terms the “noticeable gap between [diversity] discourse and students’ commitment, ability, and readiness to fully participate in this discourse.” The “gap” Powell sees is the problem and the possibility of the “and” that Condon registers in her blog.

The moment is ripe to restore to the record the rhetorical depth and breadth of recent political history. Asking students to become critical historians of the recent past, as Nancy Welch does in her compelling book Living Room, is less a battle for the signifier than what Gordon Wells calls “dialogic inquiry.” An interconnective approach hails writing students as inquirers that form questions they have a real stake in answering, researching and write that history with invested collaborators, each bringing a different set of experiences to the endeavor. Helping students become questioners is the fundamental restorative act for the learning system. This semester, while researching the phrase “corporate globalization,” Kelly, a student in my capstone course, argued in her end-of-the-semester reflection that it was important to form questions that “prod,” that are not “concrete,” and that engage her “conscience.” A great paradigm for structuring inquiry.

Because student inquiry requires an authentic purpose and audience, some of us in the field are sponsoring forums where students convene campus and community members to weigh in on the inquiries into power and difference that they are writing about. From 2004 until last semester, the writing program at Chico State collaborated with our First Year Experience program on a Town Hall Meeting, a place where first year writers—especially first-generation college students in EOP—lead conversations about their research on climate change, the Iraq war, and other issues of the day, with other writers from other composition classes, as well as campus and community members. We asked a simple question: what if we recommitted to restoring our campus habitat by starting with practices of respect for the youngest members of our campus community, those who are considered the least valuable to our ecological niche? This Town Hall Meeting contained significant elements of complete chaos every semester—dialogue turned pat, students spoke from their prejudices instead of their research, and adult experts sometimes forgot themselves and took over. But more often than those moments were ones that illustrated what civic interconnection feels like—moments where first year students say, “this helps me see what college is for,” “this makes me see how my writing matters,” “this makes me see what place I could have in the bigger picture.”

Last April I was asked to lead a workshop on white privilege for our campus’s on-going brown-bag lunch series, “Conversations on Diversity.” The room contained well over a hundred undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, staff, and administrators. Knowing how differences in status, age, and racial identification can influence such settings, I was excited at the prospect of engaged dialogue among these registers. An interesting trend emerged in our conversation that revealed who felt compelled to enter the dialogue and who felt exempt from the shared endeavor—a dynamic that was an unanticipated outcome of the way I designed the workshop. A premise of interconnective thinking is that our realities are prisms of meaning; no one exists in isolation, and even our experiences, while different, have connections that make it impossible for us to exempt ourselves from the facets of reality that make up the whole.

I opened the workshop by defining white privilege, discussed the history of the term, and then moved to two rhetorics of revealing white privilege: the indexing or listing of privileges and the “awareness narrative.” I presented a short excerpt from Tim Wise’s viral essay “This is Your Nation on White Privilege” (http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/this-your-nation-white-privilege-updated), his controversial list of instances that help make visible the invisible, unearned social privileges that whiteness affords. Although index/lists are useful for discussions of diversity and identity because they keep things depersonalized, away from examinations of personal choices and experiences, the discussion we had also showed that they are limited in just that way: one can stand at a distance, remarking on these unfair privileges, while creating exemption/distancing narratives for themselves and others.

It was when we talked about another rhetoric of white privilege, the “awareness narrative,” that a split in participants emerged along racial lines. I asked participants to describe a time when they became aware of having a racial identity. A fascinating discussion emerged, as mostly undergraduates who were able to pass as white or Latino talked about being able to negotiate multiple communities, returning to their home community for safety, or questioning where that home community is anymore, especially on the campus. Students and faculty members talked in deeply specific, engaged ways about this kind of identity shifting. After a while, the director of Multicultural and Gender Studies observed aloud that no white people had spoken up in relation to the question. White privilege is often an exemption from the hard conversations about racial interconnection and power relations. These exemptions—“I didn’t cause climate change,” “My family are working-class whites, not privileged whites,” “I didn’t vote for him,”—are the very ones we need to construct pedagogies of interconnection around, ones that make a space (make a better space than I did in this workshop) for the emotional work/vulnerability such endeavors require. In this blog Morris Young argues that “there is a risk in reducing an understanding of diversity to fixed categories that mask more complex experiences.” His blog post, and the majority of posts, calls for us to “destabilize discourse” about identity, literacy, and diversity; starting with our multiple calls to examine our shifting, related identities—just as those students did in the workshop—rather than the supposedly fixed ones, has potential to capture the dynamic context of the ecosystem.

A Different Take on Diversity

Introductory Bio

Jenn Fishman is an assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where she teaches rhetoric and composition as well as eighteenth-century studies. Her abiding interests in performance and pedagogy inform both her historical scholarship and her contemporary writing research, including her contributions to the Stanford Study of Writing, the Embodied Literacies Project, and the Research Exchange, an online database for writing researchers. Her published work appears in College Forum, College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, and Stories of Mentoring as well as the forthcoming collection Pragmatics and Possibilities: Reflections on Contemporary Writing Research. Her current monograph project, entitled Staging Education, examines the contribution public theater made to the formation of modern rhetoric during the British long eighteenth century.

Blog Entry

Take 1. I am a graduate student when the school paper reports a historic shift in undergraduate demographics. In the writing program, we talk about what it means to teach rhetoric and composition in the most ethnically diverse place we and our students have ever been. I think about college dorm copia exercises and imagine dozens of new terms for pop, cola, soda.

Take 2. I am still in graduate school when a visiting scholar, an assistant professor elsewhere, tells a cautionary tale about the time she spent as a campus pariah after a male student accused her of discriminating against him. Lesbians hate men, he argued for local media on a campus with inadequate antidiscrimination policies and no ombudsperson.

Take 3. I am a new assistant professor, and my students are sharing illiteracy narratives. A young woman tells about the time she tried to help a busload of deaf tourists who came to Graceland without an interpreter. Still new at the Southern vowel shift and the post-coronal glide, I miss most of her story, and the episode headlines in my own Illiteracy Times.

Take 4. It is my second year on faculty. Because my new state failed to desegregate the university system after Brown v. Board, I am on a committee authorized to search for an African American scholar in my discipline.

Take 5. My students tell me the Princeton Review includes our university on their lists of top twenty "jock schools," "party schools," and schools where "alternative lifestyles [are] not an alternative."

Take 6. I have just finished teaching a drama course in New York, where The Little Dog Laughed was our last play. The ticket agent described the basic plot: closeted Hollywood actor wants out of the closet; manager says nix; ribald comedy ensues. She didn't mention frank representations of same-sex sex or more full-frontal nudity than Hair. My department head asks how the course went, and I ask what he's heard. Nothing, he says. It went well then.

Take 7. It must be harder for you here. A colleague and I are talking about race, the ongoing underrepresentation of people of color on campus, and the consequences—as well as the irony—of treating "color" as if it were synonymous with "black." I grew up in the South, he twangs, a first-generation American of Syriac Christian Asian Indian descent.

Take 8. I am at Cs when a researcher asks to interview me about writing studies. He says I'll help round out his project demographics because I represent the South.

Take 9. At the same Cs I am talking about revisionist history and my work on theater's contribution to rhetorical education in the British eighteenth century. What about women's experiences and feminist scholarship, someone asks me. I draw from the logics of both, I respond: Examining performance disrupts histories that exclude or fail to take seriously physical acts and material bodies, and as a result my work contributes to the conditions of possibility for ongoing feminist research. Listening to my answer, I think about what we need to believe in order to agree.

Taking Stock

Every year for the past several years at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, I have taught a course called English 495: Introduction to Rhetoric and Writing in History, Theory, and Practice, and though I like to rearrange the readings annually, the general arc of the course remains the same. This spring, for example, Victor Villanueva's retelling of rhetoric history in Bootstraps led us to James A. Herrick's History and Theory of Rhetoric, Todd Taylor's Take 20, and several essays from Rhetorical Education in America, edited by Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer. Together, these texts ask students to consider how rhetorical education both cultivates and challenges social inequalities. While we might say that what I've been doing is "teaching diversity," like others on this site I am reluctant to make that claim. Instead, I believe I have been developing a pedagogy of difference that engages students in responding critically to the kinds of issues we raise when we talk about diversity, and the distinction has become important to me.

At its best, diversity signals attempts to redress systemic prejudice by implementing measures of fairness. However, through over- and misuse, "diversity" often seems like an empty set, a blank idiom overwritten by the flawed logics of exclusion and erasure, institutionalized oppression, and homogenization that Damián Baca, Eric Darnell Pritchard, Vorris Nunley and others discuss below. As a result, the idea of teaching diversity seems both abstract and prohibitive to me, while teaching difference—and teaching through difference—offers a great deal of critical and pedagogical possibility. At least that is what I hope every time I out myself as a Yankee in English 495. Thinking about Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and The Epistemology of the Closet, I call attention to this "imbecilically self-evident" fact about myself in order to open discussion about how regional identity "works" and what we think it means (22). In a similar spirit, I also perform religious difference deliberately. Sometimes I try almost subtle: "Happy Holidays" in response to "Merry Christmas." Other times I talk about Hanukah with cocktail hotdogs, stuffed Chicago-style pizza, and Frango mints as though it were nothing out of the ordinary.

In these instances, my goal is not to transform myself into our primary course text, nor is it to advance particular conclusions about any one identity category. Instead, with even the most facetious performance my aim is to bring attention to difference. In our briefest exchanges, this may be the most important thing we can do. Alternatively, when teaching, scholarship, and service afford us more time, individual performances can help us interrogate Sedgwick's first axiom, "People are different from one another," and examine when, where, how, and why it matters.

Taking It to the Limit

When we take pedagogies of difference out of the classroom, difference itself becomes one of the tools we can use "to broaden our organization’s thinking, talking, and writing about diversity in our profession," "to trace the histories of difference, to examine the narratives of individualism and progress, and to develop antiracist pedagogies," "to make Universities safe and productive spaces for all folks who have not traditionally been advantaged by American academies," and to meet other goals we organize under the heading "diversity." In these various contexts, difference is not an abacus for counting beans or heads, nor is it a universal remote that will let us control the gates to educational access. Instead, difference is a praxis that combines our reflections on diversity, our strategies for diversity, and the many situations we negotiate as students, mentors, teachers, colleagues, administrators, and members of various communities. A powerful tool, if we can figure out how to use it, difference may be instrumental to achieving the "paradigm shift in our scholarship, teaching, and service" that Joyce Irene Middleton and the CCCC Committee on Diversity hope to facilitate.

How so? To begin, difference can help us identify the envelope we are pushing when we engage in new discourse on diversity, and as such difference operates terministically. After Kenneth Burke, we might say difference poses the question or set of questions that "selects a field of battle" for our new endeavors, and through the process of selection difference "forms the nature of the answers" we discover through conflict and victory or defeat (67). Alternately, if we are not sure we want to work toward diversity by troping on war, we might say difference selects a dynamics or field of activity and through the process of selection promotes inquiries into what animates discrimination, what motivates fairness, and so on. From this point of view, we can try to understand the nexus of historical relationships among sender, receiver, and text by focusing on the lines of activity that connect (or disconnect) them, the social forces that animate those connections, and the circumstances that tether relationships to specific cultural material contexts. A distinctly irenic praxis, difference in this sense invites us to recognize the kinds of complexities that Byron Hawk elaborates in his Counter-History of Composition, and in doing so difference centers diversity (perhaps precariously) on différance or "the 'active,' moving discord of forces" and the "differences of forces" that Jacques Derrida defines.

Embracing the openendedness of meaning and relationships, the praxis of difference can also help us recognize how our work toward diversity is grounded in both bodies of text and corporeal bodies. In this respect, the praxis of difference can bring attention to the growing range of alphabetic, aural, and imagistic texts that we can use for diversity pursuits, and difference can help us understand the complementary resources in our repertoires. As Diana Taylor explains, contrasting archive and repertoire, the latter "enacts embodied memory" through "performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge." While these activities follow patterns (e.g., cultural or artistic scripts), "the actions that are the repertoire do not stay the same" (20). Instead, they change over time, and they also change—and can be changed—from situation to situation. Within a praxis of difference, then, the repertoire is an inventory of available means that we can invent and reinvent in order to address the issues of diversity with the greatest exigence.

Give and Take

Back in the classroom, when I perform—or strategically hyper-perform—Yankee and Jew, I also (necessarily) perform a much greater range of differences, which can be catalogued according to race, class, age, ability, gender, sexuality, and so on. I single out region and religion because of the ways those particular points of reference are accessible and have salience where I teach. Emphasizing not pretense but play, these choices lack cunning, and my performances lack the sly politics and sophistication of critical pedagogies like Karen Kopelson's edgy and admirable "performance of neutrality." Our actions are part of the same repertoire, however, and they move us toward similar ends. Not only do they stage "students' more open encounters with the new and unfamiliar" (136); they also do fundamental diversity work by moving us toward a greater self-reflective and critical understanding of the ever-evolving social dimensions of difference.

Such activities are quintessentially disciplinary, at least to the degree they help us invent new models for making knowledge about not only diversity but also rhetoric, composition, and communication. In some ways, then, we find ourselves at a familiar crossroads. CCCC has historically defined itself through the articulation of policies and practices that support organization members' efforts to implement fairness across the profession and within overlapping communities. In other ways, our current activities, including this blog conversation, signal we have already entered new territory. As part of the praxis of difference, then, we will click the links, perhaps add a comment, and then we can take it from the top, where there will always be something new to read.

Literacies and Identities: Shifting the Discourse of Diversity

Introductory Bio

Morris Young is Director of English 100, associate professor of English, and faculty affiliate in Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was formerly a faculty member at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His research and teaching focus on composition and rhetoric, literacy studies, and Asian American literature and culture. His essays and reviews have appeared in College English, Journal of Basic Writing, Amerasia, Composition Forum, and he has contributed chapters to many edited collections including The Literacy Connection (1999), Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly Writing (2001), East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (2005), Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century (2007), and The Sage Handbook of Rhetoric (forthcoming). His book, Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship (2004) received the 2004 W. Ross Winterowd Award and the 2006 Outstanding Book Award from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. With LuMing Mao, he has edited Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric, forthcoming from Utah State University Press.

Editor's Note: Morris Young's new blog entry gives readers some great arguments to think about in the context of the election on 11/4/2008, when Barack Obama finally won a long, hard-fought, presidential election, anti-gay marriage bans passed in California and Florida, and one of the five planned anti-affirmative action bans, happily, failed in the state of Colorado.

Blog Entry

As I write this blog entry, I have just finished rereading Rural Literacies by Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen Schell for my graduate seminar on “Literacies and Identities.” Over the last several weeks we have read work by bell hooks, Elaine Richardson, Vershawn Ashanti Young, Daphne Desser, and selections from the collection, Women and Literacy: Local and Global Inquiries for a New Century, edited by Beth Daniell and Peter Mortensen. We’ll be finishing with Jonathan Alexander’s Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies and essays selected by seminar members to address some issue in the context of the course that they would like to explore further, including questions of social class, postcoloniality, English language learning, gender, multimodality, and indigeneity.

I list this work and have constructed the seminar not to suggest some representative sampling of what constitutes the relationship between literacy and identity, nor to suggest that literacy practices are fixed entirely and exclusively by identity, nor to view identity as indelibly shaped by some promise or premise of what literacy can or cannot deliver. Rather, we muddle our way through theoretical discussions about literacy and identity, read narrative, autoethnographic, and ethnographic accounts about the intersections of ostensible identity categories and literacy practices, and discuss the materiality of these experiences. We read these “little narratives” that provide multidimensional descriptions within and against the “grand narratives” of identity: race, gender, sexuality, social class, region, and literacy. And I hope that we have “troubled” what are often viewed uncritically as fixed or organic relationships between a perceived/performed sense of identity and the perceived/performed practice of literacy. That is, I hope that we have begun to shift toward a more nuanced and complex understanding of how lived experiences may shape literacy practices and how literacy may shape lived experiences. And in unpacking these experiences and expressions I hope that we have also begun to shift the discourse of diversity.

As many of the contributors to this blog have noted, the use of “diversity” as a term is at the very least vexed and at worst meaningless or even damaging since for many it has become an empty signifier often employed to suggest progress on one hand or to invoke anxiety or outrage on the other. While many of us would recognize the “progress” that has been made through the Civil Rights movement, or different eras of Women’s rights (from suffrage through the historic political campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton), or the recognition of same-sex marriage in some states, we also recognize that such events can be used as wedge issues to reinforce divisions (for example, ballot initiatives banning Affirmative Action or same-sex marriage) or may just as likely foster indifference or complacency. A woman can be a candidate for President of the United States and be expected to win the nomination. An African American can be the presidential nominee of a major political party and be elected. Domestic partner benefits make good business sense. Why are we still talking about diversity concerns when there is growing evidence that we are making “progress” and that anyone can fulfill the promise of the American Dream?

In this sense the discourse of diversity has been strategic, to draw on the work of Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life and Paula Mathieu’s application in Tactics of Hope. Within a system of power, the identification and deployment of diversity has seemingly created stable social relations that allow for its relatively benign expression: a celebration of culture or an acknowledgement of suffering. Even in acknowledging suffering or social injustice, however, there is a risk in reducing an understanding of diversity to fixed categories that mask more complex experiences. For example, in the recent special issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education (26 September 2008) focusing on “Diversity in Academe,” the clear focus was in thinking about diversity in terms of race and ethnicity, or in its terms, “minorities.” Examining several diversity initiatives begun in the 1990s at a variety of institutions, The Chronicle updates the results of hiring plans for faculty and student recruitment, especially in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action in 2003, looks at globalization as the latest expression of diversity, and discusses the various ways diversity has been institutionalized on campus, from the creation of Chief Diversity Officer positions to rethinking the various categories of diversity and what impact this has on counting diversity. While this special issue does important work in continuing to cast attention on the numbers of minority students and faculty in higher education compared to whites, its focus on this one measure of diversity does not capture how our higher education institutions reflect diversity in several other dimensions or even within the categories of race and ethnicity that are inflected by generation, region, national origin, and other factors. As an Asian American born and raised in Hawai‘i who is trained in the humanities (not the sciences) and whose field of research and teaching is rhetoric and composition, I certainly do not fit the stereotype of the Asian American in the academy.

While my own work has focused on race and ethnicity more broadly and Asian Americans more specifically, I have taught in a variety of classrooms that have required me to think about diversity in more nuanced ways in order to serve all of my students. Again, building on de Certeau and Mathieu, my identification and deployment of diversity has been tactical and rhetorical, to understand and take advantage of the opportunities that arise in the classroom and to use the available means of persuasion to create a productive site for engaging diversity. In this sense, I have had to work against the discourse of diversity since my students may expect specific constructions of diversity as manifested by race, gender, class, or sexuality. Being tactical challenges the stability of social relations and systems of power that have defined diversity only as certain fixed categories of identity. If the discourse of diversity is destabilized, then discussions and critical understanding about the materiality of experience and the injury that may be faced by people of color, women, the poor, gays and lesbians, the disabled, and others often placed at the margins of dominant culture become possible because we cannot simply rely on a cultural script that defines relationships.
To be tactical and rhetorical, I use the following questions as a way to frame my thinking and teaching and to create the possibility for spaces of conversation and engagement:

1) How are our ideas, meanings, and uses of “diversity” shifting?
This may seem obvious but I think it serves us well to remind ourselves that our students’ experiences are different from our own. While we may be tempted to characterize students in particular ways to reflect either our identification or disidentification with them, one way to create critical conversation about diversity is to develop our own vocabulary, meanings, and application with them. If we rely on the discourse of diversity and fail to interrogate institutionalized versions of it then we risk reproducing static meanings that maintain dominant relations of power.

2) How are our classroom communities shifting?
Depending on the communities where we teach, we may still see limited improvement in the number of students of diverse racial backgrounds despite institutional efforts to recruit more racially and ethnically diverse students. However, again depending on the communities where we teach, we may see more awareness of students with disabilities, students comfortable with expressing their GLBT identities, non-traditional students, first-generation college students, or students of a wide variety of backgrounds that contribute to a “critical mass” of experiences that again disrupt the discourse of diversity by understanding these experiences within systems of power.

3) As we shift our locations, how are our ideas about and meanings of diversity also shifting?
This question has perhaps had the most resonance for me. I’ve moved from Honolulu, Hawai‘i to Ann Arbor, Michigan to Oxford, Ohio to Madison, Wisconsin. In each case I’ve been faced with recalibrating my sense of what constitutes diversity, moving from a predominantly Asian and Pacific Islander community to places where I was more likely to encounter African American or Latino/a or GLBT communities as the face of diversity. But perception and position also are critical in this shift. While my new institutional home, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has just a 12% “minority” student population there is also a sense of cosmopolitanism and engagement that creates opportunities for discussions (sometimes difficult and painful) that interrogate systems of power. While my former institution, Miami University, has a reputation for conservative and privileged students (to progressives) or for liberal professors (to conservatives), in my ten years of teaching there I never felt I could so easily define my students or colleagues. And in living away from Hawai‘i for 17 years now, I have become more aware of the complicated relationships between Native Hawaiians and the non-Native Hawaiian population, as well as among Hawai‘i’s various ethnic communities. These shifts in locations have required engagement with the local to understand how social relations are organized and what interventions may be made to facilitate conversation.

While my comments above have centered on understanding and engaging the array of experiences rather than focusing on certain classes or categories of experience, my primary intent is to interrogate systems of power that construct diversity and identity in specific ways that often disadvantage people of certain experiences. If we rely on a discourse of diversity that fixes identity rather than challenges systems of power all we do is reinforce those stereotypes that are deployed to create divisions. There are certainly still reasons for creating interventions and remedies to address a history and legacy of discrimination. But by shifting the discourse of diversity in order to create a more complex and nuanced concept and understanding of diversity, we have the opportunity to understand more fully how those identified as different have been subject to injury, have lived full and complex lives, and have contributed to our community and conversation.

Definition Matters: Teaching the Materiality of the Trope Race, Using Barack Obama's, "A More Perfect Union" Speech

Introductory Bio

Professor and Department Chair of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Krista Ratcliffe contributes to the CCCC Conversations on Diversity her well-established and award-winning research on the cultural presence and/or absence of women’s voices and on the intersections of gender, race, and whiteness. In Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, which won the 2007 CCCC Outstanding Book Award, Ratcliffe troubles identifications of gender and whiteness to examine how whiteness functions as an “invisible” racial category. She examines the displacement and neglect of a literacy of listening and identifies the potential of rhetorical listening—a stance of openness—for inviting a more complicated notion of identification. In addition to her contributions through research and teaching, Ratcliffe serves as past president of the Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, as a current member of MLA’s Division on Teaching Writing, and of CCCC’s Task Force on Databases.

Blog Entry

I. Race as a Trope
In philosophical and rhetorical studies, Plato tells us that definition matters. Definition is, after all, a crucial step in his dialectic. In critical race studies, Cornel West tells us that race matters. Race Matters is, after all, the title of one of his books. Two key phrases from the previous sentences—definition matters and race matters—each signify in different ways. The slippage (between matters signifying as a noun and verb, between definition and race signifying as adjectives and subjects) demonstrates the communicative facility of language (in all senses of the word facility). Whatever the author’s intent, the possibilities for audience receptions are always multiple. This possibility and dilemma is at the heart of rhetorical studies. Given this multiplicity, it is fair to say that all words function as tropes, i.e., signifying differently to different people in different times and in different places even as cultural logics do offer possibilities for common interpretations.

By that logic, race is a trope.
But that claim sets some people’s teeth on edge.
Why?

There is a fear that, if race is discussed as a trope, then the discussion of race will focus only on language and discourse; by extension, there is a fear that bodies and cultures will be erased, both metaphorically and literally.

Is that fear legitimate?
Yes … sometimes.
But not always.

Does discussing race as the trope race always succeed? Of course not. No rhetorical tactic always succeeds, and success is always measured in terms of degree. Yet given this caveat, I want to relay how I used the tactic of discussing race as race in an undergraduate rhetorical theory course this past spring when we studied Senator Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union.”

My purpose here is to invite a discussion of the pro’s and con’s of discussing how the study of tropes, particularly the study of race as race, may be used as an antiracist pedagogical project.

II. The Class and In-Class Activity
First, a bit of context. Last semester in my undergraduate rhetorical theory course, composed mostly of juniors and seniors, the students and I began our study of rhetoric by reading excerpts from Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, the purpose being to identify definitions and tactics of rhetoric. Then we studied five different units: political rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, literary rhetorics, visual rhetorics, and pedagogical rhetorics.[1] On the last day of class, I asked students to practice listening rhetorically to an excerpt from Senator Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech, which we first watched on the web and then read from a printed handout.

The in-class assignment was for students to get into pairs to discuss the first of the following questions:

(1) What are the assumed definitions of race in this speech?
(2) What importance is ascribed to race in this speech (for people/cultures)?
(3) How does whiteness function in this speech?
(4) How useful is this speech for spurring a conversation about race?

My plan was that we could then pull back together as a class to discuss the pairs’ findings on question one and then discuss the other three questions.

The excerpt from Senator Obama’s speech, which we watched and read, is as follows:

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign--to
continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just,
more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to
run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that
we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together –unless
we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we
hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from
the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction—towards a better
future for of children and our grandchildren. This belief comes from my
unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But
it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black
man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a
white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during
World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at
Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in
America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black
American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners—an
inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers,
sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue,
scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never
forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even
possible.

It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional
candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea
that this nation is more than the sum of its parts-- that out of many, we are
truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all
predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this
message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a
purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the
whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the
Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans
and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an
issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have
deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions
bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The
press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial
polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as
well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that
the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive
turn.

As sometimes happens in my teaching, my plan was scrapped because the students and I spent most of the time allotted to this activity discussing just one question: “What are the assumed definitions of race in this speech?” That fact got me to thinking again about the importance of definition.

III. The Class Discussion
Once the pairs had finished their work, I asked students, first, to share passages they had identified where definitions of race were stated or implied and, second, to share what they thought were the assumed definitions of those passages. Students were asked to avoid jumping to conclusions about whether or not they agreed with the definitions; they were simply to define and classify. Here are some of their—and my—responses.

In Senator Obama’s speech, definitions of race are either stated or implied in terms of:

(1) color (“black man,”“white woman” … family “of every race and hue”)
(2) geographic location (“Kenya,” “Kansas” … “three continents”)
(3) historical location (WWII … today)
(4) economic location (Depression, factory … fundraising presidential race)
(5) ancestry (African Americans descended from “slaves and slaveowners,” whites with
no acknowledged African ancestry …Americans of African and white ancestry)
(6) biology (“genetic makeup”)
(7) a story (“in no other country on Earth is my story even possible”)
(8) the only facet of identity (“too black” or “not black enough”)
(9) only one facet of identity (“Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a
purely racial lens”)
(10) inflections in national symbols (Confederate Flag)
(11) cultural tension (“the press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial
polarization” … “it has only been in the last couple of weeks the discussion of race in this
campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn”)
(12) more than a black/white binary opposition (“not just in terms of white and black,
but black and brown as well”)
(13) subordinate to idea-based coalitions (“we built a powerful coalition of African Americans
and white Americans”)
(14) hope (“I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve
them together”)

Once the students and I identified some of the above definitions, we discussed some implications. We concluded that if six paragraphs can generate so many different definitions of race, then that partly explained why it is so hard to talk about race in the U.S. For example, if Cornel West says “race matters,” assuming #13, and then reader person says, “yes,” assuming #11, then they have just honestly and unknowingly “agreed” on two different things. Disagreements can, likewise, cross definitions.

IV. Pedagogical Implications

This multiplicity of definitions evidences a U.S. racial discourse that (conveniently for the power structure of the status quo) obfuscates communication about race—about how it is inflected by history, economics, ancestry, biology, gender, etc.; about how it is a constructed category (a trope) originally perpetuated in the U.S. via myopic religion and false science to bolster a mostly non-white labor force as well as a mostly white ownership class; and about how it has subsequently had material consequences—both positive and negative—for the bodies and souls of real people, whether marked as “black,”“brown,”“yellow,”“red,”“white” or some combinations thereof. Throughout U.S. history, material bodies have been racially troped and, consequently, racial tropes have been embodied. In this way, tropes work not only so that they have material consequences for real people’s bodies but also so that, in the process of embodiment, they are made material (in common and different ways). And over time and place, this chicken-and-egg cycle continues.

So with this claim, I arrive back where I began. A discussion of race via the trope race begs a discussion not simply of language but of bodies and cultures as well as how all three are implicated in one another in particular ways in particular times and places. And extending this discussion of race to a discussion of whiteness-as-a-racial-category, then the trope of whiteness also begs a discussion not simply of language but of bodies and cultures as well as how all three are implicated in one another in particular ways in particular times and places. Whiteness is not the same thing as a body coded as white. Whiteness is a trope that signifies actions, attitudes, and (yes) certain bodies (that are coded as white). But bodies coded as white may or may not perpetuate actions and attitudes coded as white; likewise, bodies coded as non-white may or may not perpetuate actions and attitudes coded as white. Whiteness is a trope that may be performed by language, bodies, and cultures, either ignorantly or knowingly; and depending on the definitions associated with whiteness at a particular time or place, a performance of whiteness may be racist or anti-racist. The same is true of many other tropes.

Such discussions, I believe, serve pedagogical antiracist projects because they distance students from immediately jumping to personal claims/accusations of blame, guilt, denial, and/or defensiveness that often shut down discussions of race in the U.S. because we too often tend either to be silent or to argue past (not with) one another. Such distance, I believe, slows students down and asks them to listen to how race and whiteness signify structurally within the U.S. Once these structural significations are established as existing (the first level of stasis), then students can move to discussions of naming, valuing, and taking action (the second through fourth levels of stasis), only then coming (without the possibility of denial) to a reflection on race and whiteness in terms of how the structural affects the personal … and how the personal affects the structural.



[1] For a copy of my syllabus, cf. http://www.marquette.edu/english/faculty/ratcliffe.shtml.