What Can You Say? America’s National Conversation on Race (review)

In July, 2009, police arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after a 9-1-1 caller reported a break-in. The arrest garnered national attention as an instance of racial profiling: Sergeant James Crowley, white, arrested Gates, African American. President Obama offered his thoughts on the “teachable moment,” generating more racial chatter. The incident culminated in a high-profile conversation over drinks in the Rose Garden. The media scrutiny on the arrest, the president’s remarks, and the concluding “Beer Summit” exemplify the “race stories” featured in What Can You Say? John Hartigan Jr. chronicles a year of race stories from January 2007 through January 2008, including Don Imus’s remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, DNA-founding scientist James Watson’s comments on black intelligence, and the racial undertones surrounding Barack Obama’s early path to the presidency. Such incidents, Hartigan explains, “reflect the inevitability of being racial, the relentless significance of race, and the insufficiency of our cultural conventions to ever fully contain that significance” (2).

What Can You Say? explores the stories elevated to the level of a “national conversation” on race. These discourses reveal the instability of social conventions about race and the rapidly shifting, “boisterous meaningfulness of race” (7). Hartigan notes, “[I]t is difficult to come up with a narrative that encompasses [these race stories] and still purports to say something sensible about the ways race matters in this country” (16). Nevertheless, these national conversations often “depict ‘racial’ incidents as fairly obvious and straightforward,” as exemplars from which we might gain the most clarity on race (5). This certainty troubles Hartigan.

Hartigan organizes his analysis around three features of these “national conversations on race” of interest to rhetorical scholars: racial remarks, narratives, and arguments. Racial remarks (chapter 2) include the words and comments that spark heated debate over what counts as racial and over the significance we should afford race in the public sphere. Such controversial remarks often lead to rituals such as scripted apologies that abruptly stop important discussions and falsely stabilize racial meaning. Racial narratives (chapter 3) emerge in response to complicated racial incidents. Their plot lines tend to standardize messy situations, link disparate events, and influence whether people will understand an incident as racial. Racial arguments (chapter 4) represent the deployment of race as a logical maneuver in public discourse. These arguments include accusations that a politician is “playing the race card,” disclaimers that “race doesn’t matter,” or justifications that “I have black friends,” for example.

In each instance, Hartigan is concerned with the ways people fall back on increasingly unreliable cultural conventions, or interpretive repertoires, as they make sense of the shifting expectations and meanings of race. The incidents that generate heated conversations on race feature “moments when certainties seem to be unsettled or overturned” (55). However, these national conversations often fail to account for the inescapable indeterminacy and confusing expectations of race. On the topic of racial remarks, for example, Hartigan argues, “[O]nce a consensus forms around a remark or incident being ‘racial,’ we quickly forget that it was ever ambiguous and subject to intense questioning” (183). The national conversation stalls on questions of racial decorum and falls into a ritualized focus on “breaches of etiquette” rather than pursuing a careful examination of “the social and intellectual logics that shape and generate racial thinking” (167).

Hartigan’s provocative discussion of the tensions in Jena, Louisiana, in September 2007, exemplifies his concern for limited, inflexible conventions used to evaluate race (chapter 3). Six black teenagers, the Jena 6, were charged with attempted murder for assaulting a white teen while white teens who had earlier attacked a black teen received only misdemeanor charges and probation. As the legal controversy unfolded, nooses appeared on a “whites-only” tree at the high school. Initial media reports framed Jena as evidence of the ongoing reality of Jim Crow and...