Race and Rhetoric

Last semester, I attended a diversity symposium that examined the music video for rapper Lupe Fiasco’s song “B***h Bad”. I found the video truly fascinating, partially because of the way that it implied femininity as socially constructed through music, but also how it raced femininity. The song connected present day rap and hip hop music to 19^th century minstrel shows. After doing some reading about the song and the artist, I discovered the hail storm of controversy that the video created. Fan support was enormous, but critics in the industry found the message so antagonistic, they attempted to silence it by blocking its release. While certainly only one example, this video provides a stunning illustration of how the rhetoric of race is a contemporary concern. 

Warning: Video contains some graphic images and language

Fiasco’s video is part of a long tradition of people of color using rhetoric to address issues of race. There are very few spaces a person can enter in this country where people are not talking about race in some way. Perhaps because of the election of Barack Obama or the increase in the number of representations of people of color in media, among a great number of other factors, people are using rhetoric to discuss race, and the conversations are passionate. 

But really, when you think about it, rhetoric seems to always be employed to discuss race. It was the rhetoric of the Catholic Church that helped to establish the concept of race in the first place, suggesting that God had made groups of people biologically inferior. Rhetoric helped to justify the enslavement of African people and the extermination of Native American people on American soil.But, speeches, photographs and written appeals were also used to support the abolitionist cause. Rhetoric has been use to establish arguments both for and against emancipation, suffrage, and equal access. 

Some of this country’s greatest addresses have been centered around a racialized discourse—Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman”; Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July”; and, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream”. All of these have historically demonstrated the connection between rhetoric and action. And, while all of these examples are historical and seem, perhaps, passé, these conversations still persist today. Technology has helped to advance the rhetoric of race, to provide social commentary about 21^st century concerns about the role of black people in America. 

Tarantino’s blockbuster slavery/ spaghetti western Django Unchained has advanced the conversation of race in recent days, making interesting commentary about the paradoxes of slavery, how race is socially constructed, and how such constructions impacted the subjectivity of black people in the rural south. Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln also discusses slavery, but in a much different way, portraying the historical implications of a discourse of race but having his slaves operate in the periphery. Television shows like New Girl, Modern Family, and Better Off Ted make some smart racial commentary connected to post-modern and post-race theory.

What I find most interesting, though, is the way that race and rhetoric tend to lead to action. Bizzell and Herzberg talk about one definition of rhetoric as being a study of the persuasive effects of language. It seems clear that at the juncture between race and rhetoric exists a space where well-informed, powerfully-compelling arguments help sway the tide of public opinion and advance activism in the field.