The threat of #RhetoricNotSoWhite

Abstract

In the spirit of employing the “hashtag” as what Suey Park and Eunsong Kim describe as a “tool to advance conversation and disseminate tools for decolonial action,” I did a cursory search of Twitter to revisit the trajectory of the #RhetoricSoWhite since its initial utterance by our forum’s moderator, Darrel Wanzer-Serrano. #RhetoricSoWhite’s presence appears during our major academic conferences and critical junctures in the communication discipline. Notable details among these events are NCA President Ronald Jackson’s 2017 conference theme that attempted to reckon with “our legacy” and “our relevance;” the 2018 Public Address Conference’s theme of “Embodying Justice” with scholars like Kundai Chirindo’s foregrounding and calling into question rhetorical scholarship’s culpability, capability, and complicity in epistemic injustice – one that dismisses the knower and their knowledge from marginalized groups; and Martin Medhurst’s Rhetoric and Public Affairs editorial about NCA Distinguished Scholars in the summer of 2019 that posed the false binary of merit and diversity. Read within the context of the contemporary political, social, and cultural moment dealing with the continuing effects of racism and the colonial structures, #RhetoricSoWhite functions as a call for rhetorical scholars to examine and come to terms with the articulations of racial power that have permeated the field since its inception. Importantly, #RhetoricSoWhite’s Twitter presence shares the same space with Chakravarty et al.’s #CommunicationSoWhite as well as the selfidentifying hashtag for rhetoricians known as #TeamRhetoric. Thus, #RhetoricSoWhite functions as a marker of the time and space of academic knowledge production and as articulations with disciplinary exclusion and inclusion. Prior to #RhetoricSoWhite was Lisa A Flores’s 2016 article arguing for a racial rhetorical criticism by laying out the past, present, and possible future of #TeamRhetoric’s racialized knowledge production. Lisa Flores eloquently revisits rhetorical studies’ attention to matters of race, in ways that are both abundant and marginal. In a hopeful call to action for rhetorical studies to “do the difficult, consistent, and generative work of racial rhetorical criticism,” she concludes “I cannot imagine why we would not.” Flores’s questions is, indeed, an important one: “Why would we not?” What are the barriers? Why, given what we know about citational practices and the trends in rhetorical scholarship, are we not extending into an explicit end-goal of epistemic justice? Why is there still resistance to it? And what is our investment in it? Here, I draw upon a variety of other fields – mainly critical race theory – to consider a “why” and to push us towards seeing the