The Complicity of Racial and Rhetorical Pessimism: The Coherence and Promise of the Long Civil Rights Movement

The American experiment has not ended. A nation born in revolution will forever struggle against chaos. A nation founded on universal rights will wrestle against the forces of particularism. A nation that toppled a hierarchy of birth only to erect a hierarchy of wealth will never know tranquility. A nation of immigrants cannot close its borders. And a nation born in contradiction, liberty in a land of slavery, sovereignty in a land of conquest, will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history.

—Jill Lepore¹

From the beginning of the American experiment, African Americans have been depicted by whites as apes, monsters, and thugs. Henry Louis Gates writes that "Blacks were most commonly represented," during the age of Frederick Douglass, "as the lowest of the human races or as a cousin to the ape."² Mark Lawrence McPhail, in his groundbreaking The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation? notes that as whites cast blacks as animals, they become the essential "other," creating the conditions for dehumanization, slavery, and Jim Crow.³ Robert Lee Scott and Wayne Brockriede, in one of the first modern rhetorical investigations of race, write: "One meaning and one image thoroughly has engulfed the public mind and has dominated the attitudes of most white liberals: Black Power is violent racism in reverse, and Stokely Carmichael is a monster."⁴ Patrick Johnson and David Philoxene quote a young black man's internalization of white media storylines: when somebody sees "I'm Black and they'll walk or push they kids on the other side of them … it makes me feel like I'ma monster or something."⁵ The internalization of the monstrous has external sources, as Calvin John Smiley and David Fakunle have documented: the dominant media too often depicts black males as thugs.⁶

Given this history, the temptation to reverse the frame and depict whites as monsters is understandable. The election of Donald Trump provides a powerful contemporary warrant for this reversal in contemporary rhetorical criticism, producing a deep sense of racial and rhetorical pessimism, creating a shared feeling of gloom that the United States will never escape what W. E. B. Du Bois called the "problem of the color-line."⁷ Jordan Peele's 2017 Academy Award-winning horror film Get Out, writes the New Yorker film critic Brandon Harris, "is a work in keeping with the profound racial pessimism of the age," putting on display a racial frame reversal.⁸ The film portrays white liberals as racist monsters veiling their essential evil. "By the way," declares the white father to the African-American protagonist early in the film, "I would have voted for Obama a third time if I could."⁹ As the film unfolds from this declaration, the white father reveals his monstrosity. Peele, drawing from classic horror films, has the white father oversee the removal of African-American brains with surgeries hosted in a laboratory. The white father in Get Out, depicted as the classic horror monster that is essentially evil, beyond the pale of change, reason, and rhetoric, is the cinematic metaphor anchoring the racial pessimism of our age.

The white progressive academic serves a similar role as a classic horror monster in one line of rhetorical scholarship, most recently on exhibition in a special issue of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies on racial rhetorical criticism.¹⁰ Matthew Houdek, in the lead article, cites the following claim from Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility: "white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color" (emphasis in original).¹¹ Progressive whites, in the academy and in rhetorical studies, Houdek and colleagues claim, render invisible and commit symbolic violence against scholars of color. "The whiteness of rhetorical studies is outrageous," Houdek argues, and the "silence around race" in rhetorical studies is "palpable."¹² White critics fail, Martin Law and Lisa M. Corrigan argue in the special issue, "to recognize the contributions of scholars of color in terms of citationality much less intellectual traditions."¹³ Rhetorical studies journals "are the worst for perpetuating [racial...