Signifyin' and Black feminist rhetoric

 There was a part of this book that said that African Americans believe in the power of words. That's why most things are accompanied by words: music, dance, spells, rituals. The magic is contained in the words. 

This idea was brought into sharper focus in chapter 4 of On African American Rhetoric which discusses new words being used by Black feminists. For example, misogynoir is a word referring to racist and sexist actions and abuses against women of color. 

As soon as you hear that word, you realize that we need a word for that. It can't just be sexism, because it is experienced so differently and at different rates by women of color. 

Another one I found fascinating is "wreck", which Gwendolyn Pough discusses as the

"ways the rhetorical practices of Black women participants in hope hop culture bring wreck -- that is, moments when Black women's discourses disrupt dominant masculine discourses, break into the public sphere, and in some way impact or influence the U.S. imaginary, even if that influence is fleeting."

I like the resonance between "wreck" and "rhetoric". We must realize that the voices of Black women in hiphop do often create massive epistemic breaks. This is true for me. Even last summer I thought most black women should just be sexualized as objects in hip hop, then Doja Cat sang, a hundred times in the kitchen where I worked, "Can you kiss me more?" 

What? Women can ask to be kissed more? Epistemic break. 

This chapter talks more broadly about the idea of "signifyin(g)", a rhetorical action whose traits I want to write down: 

1. indirect, circumlocution

2. metaphorical-imagistic (but images rooted in the everyday, real world)

3. Humorous, ironic

4. rhythmi fluency and sound

5. teachy but not prachy

6. direct at person or persons usually present in the situational context

7. punning, play on words

8. introduction of the semantically or logically unexpected

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

The example story (from a book by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) is
of two black men who are talking circles around a white authority figure who is asking them who started a riot. Bucking the stereotype that these common laborers wouldn't know much, they spin a web of sociological and historical truth around him to provide an appropriately complex answer to his question (the answer to who started the riot has to do with Lincoln, who freed the slaves without providing any political power for them, and white America generally, which, in the words of Isabel Wilkerson, acts as an insecure alpha.)

The ability to talk circles around someone -- that is one form of freedom that black people have, although they have often had to pay for using it, when White people have perceived that they are being bamboozled. 

Did you know that Sojourner Truth may very well have never said the phrase "Ain't I a woman?" That phrase was added to a transcript of what she said years later by a scribe. But it has become a cornerstone phrase of Black feminist rhetoric. I liked reading that Alice Walker sees her name as related to Sojourner Truth's, since Sojourner = Walker, and Alice comes from a Greek term for "truth". 

Rhetoric: Toward continuous reconciliation

Mind blowing moments abound. 

Last night at the first meeting about the plays Jane Eyre and Johnny Eyre (in which I have two minor roles) the director, Brian, talked about the pressure actors sometimes feel to become their character. 

"Don't worry about that!" he said. "You are fully you, and you are your character. Art is about asking the audience to see two things at once, asking them to hold that you are you AND you are your character."

This was mind blowing. Art is about asking the audience to see two things at once. A novel, asks us to see the real world, and the novel, at the same time. A character, at the same that that I see myself, or my mother, or my country. A painting asks me to see its image and also see reflections of my world, or my past. A song asks me to hear this story or emotion, and overlay my own story or emotion or idea or fantasy. 

Another mind blowing moment: 

Molefi Kete Asante

In On African American Rhetoric today, chapter 4 "Rhetorical Theory" the authors refer to Molefi Kete Asante, who they say offers the most comprehensive discussion of African rhetoric. Asante says "rhetoric must transcend ideologies, whether political or racial, in order to perform the task of continuous reconciliation."

Oh my gosh. Rhetoric in the pursuit of continuous reconciliation. Who has ever heard of such a thing? That is so different from the Aristotelian understanding of rhetoric, "an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion." ...and then to exploit them for my purposes. I feel like rhetoric has always been described in my education experience as something that helps me WIN. Defeat someone else's arguments, and I'm an accomplished rhetor. 

But what is the point of winning the argument, if they don't acknowledge the legitimacy of my claims? If we are not any closer to reconciliation? 

The chapter also discusses call-and-response tactics again, and how prevalent they are in African-American church services and other gatherings. Even on rap albums, where rappers include the voices of people in conversation with them, because the response is integral. 

This quote made me think of the classroom: 

"In Afrocentric rhetoric, the speaker consciously operates under guidance from the audience, and effective performance cannot be ascertained apart from audience participation or, more precisely, audience demands relative to expressions, gestures and tone."

This is true of the classroom! I believe the class can only progress as it is condoned and visibly and audibly approved of by the students. I cannot progress with a lesson unless I have a clear sense that students are behind the direction of this work. And if they are not responding, it is a reflection of the rhetor (me) because the hearership is not interested. 

What does Mainstream mean?

 Oh jesus. There is enough to say every day to populate ten blog posts. 

In the afternoon we had our first class of Dis Doc, the shorthand that Dr. Breuggemann coined for her class "Narrative and Documentary in Disease, Disability and Illness." We watched the documentary "Vital Signs" in which people with disabilities respond to, among other questions, "what does mainsteamed mean?" 

One respondant says, "It's where all the abnormal people get together with the abnormal people. It's happened with race too - so who is normal? Who are the already mainstreamed people?"

This point came up again in the On African American Rhetoric book today. The authors point out that in African American rhetoric, there exist always the two strains, one advocating integration, the other advocating separatism. Which is not to say that they don't exist in the same people. The authors refer specifically to WEB Dubois, who seemed to oscillate between these standpoints, as implied in this paragraph from "Conservation of the Races," an 1897 essay:

WEB Du Bois

Here, then, is the dilemma, and it is a puzzling one, I admit. No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads; has failed to ask himself at some time: What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?

That last question especially seems key to me. Do Germans (or those with German heritage, like me) have a responsibility to wear their German identity visibly and proudly? Certainly not in practice. Do African Americans then? Well, yes, but who puts that expectation on them? 

The authors say, "Du Bois' fluctuations or multiple outlooks suggest, along with genuine existential grappling, varying degrees of optimism/pessimism regarding the prospect of social justice for Blacks within mainstream American society." 

I'm noticing one of the things that I guess I hope graduate school will provide: a larger framework for understanding the things I read and see today. Of course I'm aware that Black people in America today don't agree on the degree or type of integration that would be best for the Black community (and as Eddie Glaude points out, the idea of a monolithic "Black community" is misleading and flawed.) But reading about this history, and tracing the strains of opinion from Sutton Griggs' Imperio and Imperium published in 1899, to Douglass, to Du Bois, to Garvey, to King, to Malcolm X, to Michelle Alexander... is helpful for me to understand the persistence of this grappling. And it is so much more nuanced than just "join 'em" or "ditch 'em". 

Sutton Griggs

The authors are using the jeremiad term to follow the arguments of African American rhetors. 

The term jeremiad comes from the book of Jeremiah in the old testament, in which the prophet refers to the promise the people have made with God, then describes the nature of their declension on this promise, then prophesies the doom that will result from continued failure to fulfill the promise. Black writers and orators have relied on this structure to warn America of the stakes of their failure to live up to their moral ideals as stated in their founding documents. 

Interestingly, Malcolm X departs from the typical jeremiad form of his forebears David Walker and Frederick Douglass when he discounts any supposed morality among White Americans. In 1965, he wrote in "The Bullet or the Ballot": 

So I say, in spreading a gospel such as black nationalism, it is not designed to make the black man re-evaluate the white man–you know him already–but to make the black man re-evaluate himself. Don’t change the white man’s mind — you can’t change his mind, and that whole thing about appealing to the moral conscience of America–America’s conscience is bankrupt. She lost all conscience a long time ago. Uncle Sam has no conscience.

So what can the Jeremiad do if it doesn't rely on our sense of morality? Well, maybe the same thing the old testament did - rely on our fear of annihilation. Indeed, in the same text, Malcolm X points out that "They don't try to eliminate an evil because it's evil, or because it's immoral; they eliminate it only when it threatens their existence." 

This reminds me of a concept developed in critical race theory - the idea that White people will only adopt anti-racist measures when they directly benefit White people. 

Black Power

The last part of this chapter talks about the debate on the use of the term Black Power in the 60's. It was used first at SNCC speeches. It quickly gained currency and stirred controversy. Leaders like Malcolm X and King had to publicly denounce or embrace the slogan. 

Stokely Carmichael

 The book says that just two days after Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks used it at a SNCC event, King was "forced to discuss" the slogan with Carmichael as they walked "through the Mississippi Delta." 

Part of rhetorical power, then, seems to lie in what we are forced to discuss. The Occupy Wall Street movement forced us to discuss the 99%: who it was, why it was, and who was the 1%. 

In class Dr. Robinson said we should think of analyzing rhetorical power as going beyond literary analysis. Literary analysis is looking at the parts of a text and making meaning of them. Rhetorical analysis is adding a step to this: considering the work that a text does on the audience. How is the audience changed by the text? How do they walk away differently? 

Initially, I think the "work" or "effect" could be very hard to define, but very worth discussing in a class. We watched a video this morning in class and considered the "effect" it had on us. I could tell even from our preliminary comments (before class ended) that the woman of color in the class had been affected differently than I had (not surprising). Talking about the difference in the effect of rhetoric is the power of classroom space, and it's the space I want to open up with both White students and students of culture. 

This phrase White students and students of culture. It sounds harsh. But I think it gets at the ways that the idea of "Whiteness" harms White people. What is my culture if I am White? I don't know. I don't know. I have had to subsume my cultural identity (as German, British, and what else??) for the privilege of being "White". I sacrifice my individual identity, it's the price I pay for the White label. 

If I maintained my cultural identity, I'd have to reckon with the harm done to my people by White people. The idea that I belong to Whiteness in the same way that Eastern Europeans, Russians, British people, and others do, would be untenable. There would have to be a reckoning, a reconciliation, with the fact of class division within White communities. 

Whooeee, and as Resmaa Menakem pointed out, we do not want to do that!

A four-member class

 I am very excited to be taking Michelle Robinson's class Teaching African American Rhetorics at Bread Loaf this summer in Ripton, Vermont. 

Michelle Robinson

We just had the first class and I have reflections on our class size and on the first reading, which I have just begun and will use this blog to process. 

Why are there only four students in the class? We are three White women and one Black woman, and Professor Robinson is Black. (She teaches English and has various other projects/duties at Spelman college, the HBCU). 

I walked past other classrooms in the Barn, where many academic classes are held here on the Ripton campus. They were full. Like, 10-15 students in each. What were these classes on? I don't know - Chaucer, British literature of Revolution, the Odyssey. I was initially encouraged to see that there was demand at Bread Loaf for courses with such a clearly anti-racist teaching intent as TAAR. But apparently there actually isn't much. 

I'm grateful they didn't close the course because of low enrollment. The other anti-colonial class I wanted to take this summer, especially after my appointment to a position at Brac University in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was "Fiction of Empire and its Aftermath in South Asia." 

When I emailed about joining this class, the response was that the professor withdrew from teaching it, but I wonder if there just weren't enough interested students. 

Prof. Robinson said today that rhetorical texts are texts that do work. That attempt to make a change in the audience's mentality. This, to me, is basically any text ever, except all my notebooks full of stream of consciousness writing. Although, the attempted change there might be in my own mentality - does that count? Surely. 

In the introduction to On African American Rhetoric, the authors Keith Gilyard and Adam J. Banks say that WEB Dubois believed all art to be rhetorical. He wrote in "Criteria of Negro Art" that "despite the wailing of purists," he rejected the notion of art-for-art's sake and considered all art to be politically instrumental (p. 296). 

He added, "I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda" (296). 

So, this seems to constitute all art, all writing, from an advertisement to a poem to a book jacket blurb. Maybe not the shopping list. Though I suppose if someone else were to see my shopping list I would make sure it represented the version of me I wanted to project (propaganda) to them. Broccoli, eggs, sweet potatoes, you know, not chips, muffins and frozen dinners ("I COOK.")

Toni Cade Bambara

The introduction dwells on the experience of Sylvia, the protagonist in Toni Cade Bambara's short story, "The Lesson." Sylvia goes to FAO Schwartz under the supervision of a teacher, Mrs. Moore, who is keen to demonstrate to her young charges the economic landscape of New York. They live in Harlem, and Sylvia is disgusted and angered by the price of the toy sailboat in the window. She angrily asks the teacher why they have come. 

Miss Moore, who is Black, seems aware that her job as educator of these young African American students is to facilitate and epistemic break. 

OK, epistemic break. The text talks about how for Michel Foucault (who was a 20th century French philosopher, though I would have guessed he was way older than that) epistemes are "concepts that counted as legitimate knowledge, and they were circulated and reproduced by means of related and regulated discursive practices." 

So, racism is made up of many epistemes that are reproduced and passed down -- until parents and teachers and friends and Black women help us break them! 

Anyway, growing up Black in America, Sylvia's self-understanding is dominated by the narrative that she "spurs and justifies" her ignorance. Think about what that means. She is growing up in a world that spurs - ie encourages, her to be ignorant of the disparities around her, of the machines and structures that ensure that she will likely (without the intervention of Miss Moore) ever see that sailboat downtown, let alone be able to purchase it. 

Her world also justifies her ignorance. What could this mean? That she understands that her ignorance is explained by the poverty of her neighborhood. She has no real expectations, no need for knowledge for she has no ambitions. This she sees when she looks around her neighborhood, which of course is not culturally bereft, but financially poor. 

So, Miss Moore's job is to take her and her classmates downtown to see how the other half lives, to start to be able to perceive at least the fruits of this racial capitalist machine, even if they don't understand how that machine works. 

The initial impact is to make Sylvia angry. And the outlet for that anger is Miss Moore. Sylvia says, "So we headed down the street and she's boring us silly about what things cost and what our parents make and how much goes for rent and how money ain't divided up right in this country."

Here's the key: But Miss Moore, in the manner of great educator Paulo Freire (1970), comprehends that the teacher-dominant, overly narrative approach is inefficient and relatively ineffective. The children need not another sermon from an adult. They need field experience. Sylvia, for example, whose name literally means "lost in the woods," her forest being not so much Harlem but her state of mind, has to be led physically to greater awareness."

This is not fun for the teacher - doesn't mean the teacher is the best friend of the students. This is the position that Ms. F, at my last school, took on. She was not the students' best friend, but served and escorted them to truths about their existence in America which would constitute epistemic breaks with the narratives they had been raised with in refugee camps. Or among families in this country of White bodies, or bodies of culture (terms borrowed from Resmaa Menakem). 

Today Dr. Robinson said that teaching should be uncomfortable. That as soon as teaching is not uncomfortable, you're probably not doing much for that community of learners. 

Two other ideas that struck me from the introduction: 

1. Bambara's revisions of dominant narratives. In one example, she retells the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears as "The Golden Bandit" "to remind people to scrutinize official versions and authorized tales". She reveals Goldilocks as a "burglar-chile-vandal-thief" who will not confess to her exploits or take responsibility for them, choosing instead to frame the bears.

Critically, the way Bambara engages an audience about this retelling is entirely through questions about it. Both about the story, and about the story's implications for navigating "official versions" and authorized texts in today's world of media and fake news.

Amiri Baraka

2. Amiri Baraka's idea of "changing same," which he uses to describe how rhetorical responses among the African American community change to match the changing forms of oppression -- what stays the same is the presence and reality of oppression. Blues music, he says, developed and adapts in response to the nature of oppression. Black Twitter, the editors of this book suggest, is a recent example of changing rhetorical responses to a changing landscape of oppression. 

I'm eager to learn from these and more titans (this is the first time I've heard of Bambara) with my classmates and Dr. Robinson. 

White people talking to white people (WPTTWP)

Last night I was on Mount Olympus's Western face watching the sun gild the clouds above the Oquirrh Mountains in the most glorious pink. This morning I watched that same sun touch the highest peak of those same mountains. I saw it from the Park and Ride at 6570 South Wasatch boulevard, where a hiking meetup was taking off. 

I do not love these group hikes. But each time I am glad, after the fact, for the opportunity to talk with people who I would not otherwise have rubbed elbows with. Especially when we get to talk about White privilege and structural racism.

 In his book Democracy in Black Eddie Glaude Jr says if we are going to change the way we see Black people, "White people -- and only White people can do this -- will have to kill the idea of White people." 

It is never hard to connect a substantive conversation topic with race and power structures, since race pervades so much of our societal psyche. 

I have been encouraged by our anti-racism meetings at school to engage the topic of race when it comes up. Today the woman I was hiking near, a professor at Westminster College, said she didn't like working at her last college, Williams, because "I didn't get it about having wine and cheese parties, for students." The atmosphere of elitism was so intense that even she as an educated white person didn't feel comfortable. 

We then had a conversation about how institutions of higher ed make/fail to make attempts to create space for students of color and marginalized students who might easily feel that this school (and its bougie cocktail parties) is not for them. We mentioned some of the things Westminster does, and also how the curriculum and theoretical framework that is taught in classes makes a big difference. 

I told her what Ivy said about TikTok being a great place to find educators talking about how to be culturally responsive and anti-racist in the classroom. I also recommended and texted her the link to Zaretta Hammond's Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, which she seemed very keen on. 

Of course, this was a fairly easy conversation to have because she, like me, is a White educator who wants to do more for equity in her classroom. But any conversation we can have with those around us that normalizes talking about racism and how to be less racist, seems worth while. 

Isabel Wilkerson has a fascinating chapter of Caste: The Origins of our Discontents which illuminates how flimsy a term "white" is, and how recently its meaning has been debated. Just 120 years ago, in this country, when Italians immigrated they were not considered White. 

A Black man initially accused of miscegenation was released when the court found out the woman was Sicilian - it was no longer a marriage between White and Black. 

In 1894, 11 Italians were lynched in the South for Jim Crow-type offenses, facing the same punishment Black people would have faced. Different states at the time determined "Whiteness" by vastly different formulas.

Maybe "killing the idea of White people" is not as far off as I thought when I initially read Glaude's directive. He advocated, and I advocate, WPTTWP.

The F*ck it Diet

 Last night I was thinking that if someone asked me to list the most influential books of this year, I would have a hard time. I read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, the 1972 seminal work by Walter Rodney. That changed the way I saw whiteness and Europe's legacy in the world forever. 

I read The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, which changed the way I think of the environment and human impact on the globe forever. 

Now I'm reading The F*ck It Diet by Caroline Dooner, which is taking the wool out of every tenet of our diet culture, with massive implications. 

It seems to me that cultivating anti-diet thinking is as radical and as hard as cultivating anti-racist thinking. So deeply ingrained are diet beliefs (even if they are wildly contradictory, like some of our racist beliefs) that it must take consistent, deliberate and brave examination of them to change how we think and act. 

Dooner includes several writing prompts and action exercises in the book. I'm listening to the audiobook, but the prompts are available in a PDF. I was scrolling through them this morning. I've been writing responses to them in the order that they appear - I'm a very good student after all. Today I came across this one: 

And I scrolled right past it. Who needs a five minute rest. That little action revealed my own beliefs about silence and rest. Even as a Quaker I immediately dismissed this as something that people tell us to do but which is not actually important. Then I thought, hey, I have the time, I'm not meeting my friend for breakfast for two hours. Let me spend five minutes lying on the couch. 

And I did. I thought about my body for a few minutes. Then I thought about other things. I crossed my ankles. I watched the baubles on the wall sway in the breath of the heater. Then the timer went off and I bounced back up, ready to resume the useful part of my day. 

Maybe I should do that every day. 

Curfew

I just made a list of all the things I hope to accomplish during this 36-hour curfew in Salt Lake City. Yesterday, protests against the lynching of George Floyd got out of hand when a police car, then another car, were overturned. I am a Quaker, but I cannot help feeling that these pieces of violence are understandable. 

 Lea Tsemel, an Israeli attorney who represents  Palestinians in Israeli courts, says that she never second-guesses the violent actions that her clients have done. Any action that is done in reaction to the Occupation is legitimate in her eyes, and she will take it on. 

I thought of this yesterday when I saw the images of the burning car on KSL. Any action taken in response to the systematic oppression of people of color in our country is legitimate and defensible. This seems extreme, and perhaps it is more than I mean. But systems of oppression do not change through people following rules. 

This list of things to accomplish during curfew is a-political. Vacuuming the floor and preparing for a work meeting are on it. One thing missing from my list is "deal with my private truth." 

I have been distressed about what kind of public action is responsible and right in the wake of George Floyd's death, but Baldwin says that "dealing with" the private side of things must come alongside public action. 

Here is the first paragraph of his essay: 

A GREAT WRITER operates as an unimpeachable witness to one's own experience; and one of the reasons that great writers are so rare (and their careers, in the main, so stormy) is that almost no one wishes to have his experience corroborated. I suppose that one of the reasons for this is that one's actual experience cannot but assault one's self-image, one's aspirations and one's safety. We all attempt to live on the surface, where we assume we will be less lonely, whereas experience is of the depths and is dictated by what we really fear and hate and love as distinguished from what we think we ought to fear and hate and love. One can imagine, for example, that a Shakespeare, writing of the recent bloody events in Texas, would give us a very different version of those events from that which we are presently evolving; by which I do not mean to say that Shakespeare's version would be literally the true one - the literal truth, anyway, is almost always astoundingly misleading. But Shakespeare's version would differ from ours in one important and disturbing way. We would rather believe that evil comes into the world by means of a single man, can be laid at the door of Another; but Shakespeare knew, and all artists know, that evil comes into the world by means of some vast, inexplicable and probably ineradicable human fault. That is to say: the evil is, in some sense, ours, and we help to feed it by failing so often in our private lives to deal with our private truth-our own experience. 

All artists know, Baldwin tells us, that evil is not contained in one man, or one police department, or one institution. It exists in all of us, and it is through examining ("dealing with") our private truth - our own experience, that we awaken to the complexity of racism. 

Let this day of curfew be a day of famine for that evil, during which we cease to "feed" it by taking time to examine, by ourselves and with trusted others, our private lives. 

A fellow Friend posted a list of things he thought a church "ought to be" in times like these. I am sad that I cannot pretend that I think the church is ready to respond helpfully to the current crisis. I can only think in terms of of communities, of human networks and relationships, because churches seem way too flawed and far gone to respond immediately to the spiritual needs of this moment, this week, this year. 

So, human community ought to provide a place where we can do the hard work of examining our experience. That means we need to create those spaces, because we are human community. We cannot leave the responsibility for organizing self-educational groups to pastors and other church officials. We must take ownership of our own spiritual formation, and insist that we partake, together, in the painful examination of our personal experience.

Schools ought to provide the space where students can process their experience, and we teachers ought to teach them how to create this space for themselves after they graduate. 

What is this space supposed to look like?

Impossible to predict - since people will create (and are creating) these spaces in a million iterations. As a literature teacher I am inclined to see a book club as the model, where literature is used to facilitate discussion. When we read a book together, we read about a character's experience. Then we can hold up our own experience alongside that example and feel emboldened to comment on it. 

With schools closed, the opportunity to examine and deal with our experience in community is suspended, and this is perhaps one of the gravest spiritual costs of the COVID shutdown of schools.