Race, Rhetoric, and Technology

Searching for Higher Ground

Adam J. Banks

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135604813
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoria: Communication Studies

In this book Adam Banks uses the concept of the Digital Divide as a metonym for America's larger racial divide, in an attempt to figure out what meaningful access for African Americans to technologies and the larger American society can or should mean. He argues that African American rhetorical traditions--the traditions of struggle for justice and equitable participation in American society--exhibit complex and nuanced ways of understanding the difficulties inherent in the attempt to navigate through the seemingly impossible contradictions of gaining meaningful access to technological systems with the good they seem to make possible, and at the same time resisting the exploitative impulses that such systems always seem to present.Banks examines moments in these rhetorical traditions of appeals, warnings, demands, and debates to make explicit the connections between technological issues and African Americans' equal and just participation in American society. He shows that the big questions we must ask of our technologies are exactly the same questions leaders and lay people from Martin Luther King to Malcolm X to slave quilters to Critical Race Theorists to pseudonymous chatters across cyberspace have been asking all along. According to Banks the central ethical questions for the field of rhetoric and composition are technology access and the ability to address questions of race and racism. He uses this book to imagine what writing instruction, technology theory, literacy instruction, and rhetorical education can look like for all of us in a new century.Just as Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground is a call for a new orientation among those who study and profess African American rhetoric, it is also a call for those in the fields that make up mainstream English Studies to change their perspectives as well. This volume is intended for researchers, professionals, and students in Rhetoric and Composition, Technical Communication, the History of Science and Society, and African American Studies.

1

Introduction

LOOKING FOR UNITY IN THE MIDST OF MADNESS:

TRANSFORMATIVE ACCESS AS THE ONE IN AFRICAN AMERICAN RHETORIC AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES

In cyberspace, it is finally possible to completely and utterly disappear people of color. I have long suspected that the much vaunted “freedom” to shed the “limiting” markers of race and gender on the Internet is illusory, and that in fact it masks a more disturbing phenomenon—the whitinizing of cyberspace. The invisibility of people of color on the Net has allowed White-controlled and White-read publications like WIRED to simply elide questions of race. The irony of this invisibility is that African American critical theory provides very sophisticated tools for the analysis of cyberculture, since African American critics have been discussing the problem of multiple identities, fragmented personae, and liminality for over a hundred years. But WIRED readers and writers aren’t familiar with this rich body of critical theory … the struggle of African Americans is precisely the struggle to integrate identity and multiplicity, and the culture(s) of African Americans can surely be understood as perfect models of the “postmodern” condition, except that they predate postmodernism by hundreds of years, and thus contradict the notion that the absence of the (illusion of) a unitary self is anything new.

We don’t need a “whole new set of metaphors for thinking about the unconscious.” We need, as a culture, to pay attention to the theory and literature of those among us who have long been wrestling with multiplicity. There are many things about e-space which are not new. Yes, the Internet gives us more people writing, but I’m afraid that at the moment it gives us more of the same people writing. Let’s see some real difference.

—Kali Tal, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: African American Critical Theory and Cyberculture.” Wired Magazine, October 1996.

This project is an attempt to chart some of the ways African Americans have struggled to make real difference in a nation whose existence depends on rigorous commitments to technological advancement and exclusions based on race. African American rhetoric as read through a technological lens allows a thorough documentation of that struggle, and ways it can contribute to broader digital and rhetorical theory. It can also help us all—leaders, activists, scholars, and lay persons involved in dismantling the systemic supports for racism—reconfigure a sense of what that collective struggle might mean and how it can be taken up at such a difficult time in American history.

The overall argument I make is this: rather than answer either/or questions about whether technological advancement and dependence leads to utopia or dystopia, whether technologies overdetermine or have minimal effects on a society’s development, or whether people (especially those who have been systematically excluded from both the society and its technologies) should embrace or avoid those technologies, African American history as reflected through its rhetorical production shows a group of people who consistently refused to settle for the limiting parameters set by either/or binaries. Instead African Americans have always sought “third way” answers to systematically racist exclusions, demanding full access to and participation in American society and its technologies on their own terms, and working to transform both the society and its technologies, to ensure that not only Black people but all Americans can participate as full partners.

The story of African Americans’ pursuit of a transformative access can contribute much to rhetoric and technology theory by engaging both in a space beyond the narrow polemics of whether Technology is ultimately evil or wonderful, but rather develop and articulate models of the specific kinds of practices that can provide excluded members of society access to systems of power and grounds on which those systems can be challenged and ultimately changed in meaningful ways. This story can also provide a framework of African American rhetorical study that moves beyond the admiration of individual exemplars of rhetorical mastery or ideological debates about whether people or organizations were assimilationist or separatist, accomodationist or resistant, liberal or conservative, progressive, or radical. As important as the exemplary text or figure is, attention to the individual text, rhetor, or moment decoupled from the traditions and movements that make them possible leads to the assumption that the gifted Black rhetor is somehow an exception to, rather than the result of, “normal” speakers or writers. Such a different approach to African American rhetoric, I hope, can connect rhetoric with the “real” to provide bases for collective action while refusing to demand that people submit to a practical or ideological orthodoxy that, in the end, not only destroys individual identity but the possibility for collective action as well.

Making this kind of move calls up important definitional questions. For the purposes of this work, I define African American rhetoric as the set of traditions of discursive practices—verbal, visual, and electronic—used by individuals and groups of African Americans toward the ends of full participation in American society on their own terms. These traditions and practices have both public and private dimensions and embrace communicative efforts directed at African Americans and at other groups within the society: hence, directly persuasive public address and less overtly persuasive day to day performances that contribute to the creation of individual and group identities are all viable subjects of African American rhetorical study.

My understanding of African American rhetoric acknowledges and builds on the focus of the power of the spoken word and Black orators, but also attempts to open it up to all of the means employed throughout Black history—to value the uses to which rhetors have employed design, visual communication, electronic communication, and performance that are often appreciated but dealt with only tangentially.

The approach to technology that guides this project comes from a wide range of sources, but those sources come together in Martin Heidegger’s definition of technology as a combination of instruments and processes, artifacts, and activities:

[e]veryone knows the two statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is a human activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, and the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. (p. 5)

Heidegger’s consideration of processes and needs opens space for the examination of critique and design, in addition to the use of particular artifacts. Patricia Sullivan and Jeannie Dauterman put it a different way in “Issues of Written Literacy and Electronic Literacy in Workplace Settings:” “We contend that technology, especially when it networks writers to other writers, is more than a mere scribal tool. It offers—at the very least—a connection to new sources of information, a site for rethinking structures” (p. viii).

In spite of my obvious “Amen” to Kali Tal’s call that inspires my work, by embracing a shifting, yet thoroughly rooted African American self and arguing for what Deborah McDowell would call a “changing same” exigence for a collective, even unified group identity and struggle, I refuse to believe the postmodern hype that Black scholars and theorists have been forced into by the emergence of Theory as a canon trumping even that of Literature, which it worked to dislodge. Rather than look to the cyborg and perpetually fragmented selves and unyielding rupture and be resigned to either celebrate, lament, or endure them as simply the state of being we’ve all been reduced to in this moment, I choose to look for the ways Black people, through their rhetorical traditions, have worked to find their collective way home and heal what ranks among the greatest physical, material, and social ruptures experienced by any group in human history.

To put it differently, I choose Sixo of Toni Morrison’s Beloved stealing away at night and walking interminable distances under threat of punishment or death to meet what other slaves called the “30-mile woman,” the true partner who “is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order” (pp. 272, 273) over the endless wandering and exploration of the nomads in technology theory and novels. I choose James Baldwin’s tireless work as expatriate and both the ultimate insider and ultimate outsider of African American and American culture, in desperate attempt to save Black people and the nation over the cybertourist who feels free to “try on” any identity he/she/it pleases. I choose to celebrate the stories of radicals like Mama Freeman and Papa Freeman in my hometown Cleveland and many others that Robin D. G. Kelley (2002) tells in his book, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, stories of those free people who struggled for a short time and for a lifetime who dared imagine a new life, new society, new identity. I choose to honor people who labored under the constant threats of surveillance, suppression, poverty, ostracism, and death instead of those post-everything navel-gazers who remain content to point out the supposed theoretical shortcomings of people and movements; content to debate endless complexities never connected to a project to improve anything in the real or virtual worlds. Finally, again rolling with Robin D.G. and poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, I choose the Mothership and Uncle Jam over the cyborg—that Mothership and the Atomic Dog himself always making it a point to land and bring something back to the people, no matter what abstractions and fanciful flights throughout real and fantasy worlds George and PFunk might allow themselves. In these choices, I try to work through the truths African Americans have found and can build from, rather than submit to a theoretical orthodoxy that insists everything is a “social construction” and therefore not based in fact and therefore untrue: an orthodoxy that leaves little room to socially or physically construct anything outside of the current order of White, western, social, political, economic, and technological domination.

To talk about African American rhetoric, in this moment, however, by offering any unifying narratives about how that rhetorical production takes place is to invite challenges—some thoughtful, some not—about whether doing so is to essentialize Black experience. Some would argue that there are so many elements in individual Black people’s experiences, that it is an obvious fiction to talk about a Black anything. There’s gender; there’s class; there is a large population of Black people in the United States who are not of U.S. ancestry since changes in the country’s immigration laws in 1966 permitted African and Caribbean Blacks to come here. Although it is clearly important to examine Black experience in complex ways, and to account for all of the many other issues that intersect in the creation of Black identities, for those studying African American culture and documenting African American struggle to take up postmodernism’s theoretical excesses and dismiss any construction of group identity as essentialist is not only suicidal, as Molefi Asante (1998) would note. It amounts to tearing down painstakingly constructed buildings and being content to stand forever in the rubble. Part of the difficulty with these excesses is that they seem to be applied more stringently to the very groups that have pressed for inclusion in the academy, in technology, in the nation. For example, America’s heterogeneity and its difficulties constructing a sense of place for itself in a rapidly changing world leaves very few people to deny that there are themes and experiences that construct a framework for American identity that individuals and groups play into, with, and against.

African American rhetoric is particularly susceptible to charges of essentialism because its genesis as an area of study in the university is tied to the Black Power and Black Arts movements and the charges that those movements amounted to “Negro Thought Police” in an attempt to create a unity that could sustain political action. The problem with those charges is that they sometimes mistake the part for the whole. The so-called failures of the Black Arts and Black Power movements (and I believe these movements need far richer analysis before one moves to assess their so-called “failures”) do not mean that positing any kind of Black unity is automatically problematic. It means that the grounds for arguing that unity have to be reconsidered, not the possibility of unity itself. I believe that African American rhetorical history shows powerful unities of identity and purpose across centuries, classes, genders, and ideologies, once we realize that unities are not absolute.

To say that one must play fuller, richer chords, and leave individuals more room for improvisation both with and against those chords is not to say that there is no music that can reflect their collective energy and aspirations. To continue the music metaphor, I’m looking for the ONE in Black rhetoric. Funk music, and particularly that made by Parliament/Funkadelic in the 1970s, articulated “The One” as the concept that guided the genre. The concept, basically, is this: members in the huge bands that made up PFunk could do almost whatever they wanted in most of the measure, but they always had to come back on “The One,” or the first beat of the measure. That first beat was always heavily emphasized, in contrast to the two-four iambic pattern to much American music, and that first beat set the structure that members would respond to and against during widely varying solos, leads, and harmonies. African American rhetoric has embodied this concept to me because Black people and the rhetorical texts and forms they produced have always come together, one (figurative) nation within a nation, under a groove, in moments of urgency, of struggle toward that transformative access. Although there is no political or rhetorical utopia that allows all voices to be heard, African American rhetoric has, through a tradition of debate and dialectic, made sure many varying views received a hearing leading up to and following those moments of urgency. Its study now can honor those traditions and continue the struggle that has often been the source of its production.

The commitments with which I begin this project and the importance I attach to them make this work a strange calculus of polemic and observation. I work to chart traditions and examine them as much as I try to argue for the value of a particular lens for the rhetorical microscopes and telescopes used in that charting. To that end, I examine a range of texts—print, electronic, oral, visual—to show the ways specific African American rhetorical forms and practices contribute to the work of transforming America and its technologies, whether that transformation be achieved through critique, use, or design. Rather than attempt to be exhaustive, I hope this range (through its strengths and limitations) suggests all that is possible in African American rhetorical study, and that technologies indeed are not limited to artifacts alone. I also hope that the selection of texts and sites included here points to the importance of the endpoints and many places in between the continua that inform rhetorical scholarship: the public and the private, the serious and the recreational, the signal moment and the everyday performance.

Obviously, the parabola I sketch in the following chapters after analyzing these texts from this perspective is only one way of organizing African American rhetorical traditions among many possible ones. It represents only one set of texts out of legions that could be selected. This is one of what could be several downbeats to be found in African American rhetorical traditions. The more texts one takes up, the more the integral reaches from zero to infinity, obviously, the smoother the resulting parabola; the more nuanced a look at its trajectory one’s attempt to chart it would provide. A different equation—or organizing story—could well produce a different-looking path even when the same moments, or texts, are examined. To switch the metaphor, this project is a quilt like those slaves and free Black people have been piecing together from the patchwork of our experiences, whatever materials could be begged, borrowed, bought, or stolen, and stitched together with the one aim of somehow pointing people to a freedom with technologies that ultimately transform those technologies, and the nation, and us. I proceed from what I believe to be the one constant that holds fixed regardless of the understandings of race, culture, or identity one might choose: that African Americans have always, since being brought to the American colonies and the United States as slaves, existed in a society that has rigorously enforced, and steadfastly refused to correct, a system of exclusions connected to race. The variables of how Black people see themselves, understand race, and want to participate in the nation and its technologies have been organized around the consistent struggle to both participate in and change them. This bidirectional look at both the systematic nature of the struggles we face and our own incredible agency and innovation in the midst of those struggles must be focus of any examination of African American life, activism, education, identity, celebration, culture in this moment.

In the second chapter, “Oakland, The Word, and The Divide: How We All Missed the Moment” I contextualize the emergence of the Digital Divide as a concept through a look at the debates and discussions about race that marked rhetoric and composition, technical communication, and African American rhetoric when the Digital Divide entered public conversation in the late 1990s. I then make the case for a technological reading of African American rhetorical history as Black people’s pursuit of transformative access to the technologies that construct and comprise American life. In making that argument I examine how the “digital divide” and the attendant discussions of technology access this concept sparked provide both an opportunity and a convenient metaphor for understanding the legacy of racism and African Americans’ responses to it. I contend in this chapter that the Digital Divide is a rhetorical problem at least as much as it is a “technological” one and examines Rhetoric and Composition’s history of exclusion of African Americans, especially as reflected in its turn to the technological (an exclusion that takes place even as the field has actively sought more progressive ways of dealing with the legacy of race). Although this turn to the technological takes place at the exact same time as the emergence and popularization of the Digital Divide as a concept in the national lexicon, African Americans’ relationships to learning and communication technologies and their contributions to Rhetoric and Composition scholarship are elided almost entirely, through a reduction of Black students and Black participation in the field to a debate over Ebonics. The irony of this elision is particularly compelling given this moment in the field’s history: two decades after the Ann Arbor trial, 30 years after the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s passing of the “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” language policy document, and 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education and the beginnings of linguistic scholarship showing the complexity and history of African American English.

I argue here that a useful understanding of African American rhetoric must account for both public and private kinds of persuasion, of communication by experts and lay users of a system, as well as non-users who attempt to use or participate in it. Finally, I present in this chapter a taxonomy of access that shows a meaningful access, a transformative access occurs simultaneously along the connected axes of critique, use, and design. One reason I argue for the necessity of such a multidimensional view of rhetoric and technology access is my belief that one cannot afford to be forced to choose between Rhetoric and Composition, between skills and critical thinking, between technological literacy and essayistic literacy, between being a technophile or a Luddite. These are all false choices. An extension of this argument guides the rest of this project: rhetorical and technological education must take up all three of these axes in theory, pedagogy, and practice with the focus on helping students employ each and all toward access and/or transformation of the spaces they occupy as they see fit.

In chapter three, “Malcolm, Martin, and a Black Digital Ethos,” I use these central figures in African American rhetorical study to demonstrate the pursuit of technological transformation at work in even the most traditional texts. This chapter presents King and Malcolm X not only as exemplars in the use of specific technologies (in this case television) toward rhetorical ends, but also as directly engaged in debate about the potentials and problems in individual technologies and our larger commitments to technological advancement. This chapter offers readings of Malcolm X’s argumentative skills at work under intensely constrained and biased conditions during the interviews that were included in the television documentary “The Hate that Hate Produced.” This chapter also shows the varied understandings of the electoral franchise as a technological system both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King exhibit in the classic speeches “The Ballot or the Bullet” and “Give Us the Ballot We Will Transform the South.” My readings of these speeches show King and X demonstrating awareness along the entire taxonomy of access I develop in chapter two, toward the goal of transforming both how the franchise works as a technological system and the nation as a whole. I move from this discussion of a particular tool and system to Martin Luther King, Jr’s grasp of our relationships with technologies more broadly defined as the ce...