I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric

4. Angels before Thee

4 a n g e l S B e F o r e t H e e Performative antiracism engages actors in forms of individual and individualized resistance—in work at the interior of one’s self and one’s affiliative relations with others. But performative antiracism demands more of us than this. Performative antiracism is labor that undoes the distinctions between personal and institutional, or systemic-change work. Antiracist actors work toward this undoing by uncovering and examining the living connective tissue between the ideas we hold—ideas that delineate the shape and quality of our relations—and ideas that delineate the deep or hidden racialized missions, structures, and practices of the systems, institutions, and social groups that enable and constrain our lives as raced subjects, as individuals, and as peoples. This practice of pursuing an idea, organizing concept, or belief both through its historical and intellectual genealogy, and through individual and collective memory and lived experience, is the practice of nuancing. Nuancing engages us in the work of recognizing and articulating critically the scope, dimensions, and impacts of existing relationships among and between the local and the global, the individual and the collective. But nuancing, as provisional and partial as the work must be, is also by design creative, critical, and generative. For nuancing, like decentering, contributes to the creation of new or transformed relationships among and between the local and the global, the individual and the collective. Like decentering, nuancing is always, of necessity, processual and partial. We cannot gather up the whole of a matter for Angels before Thee 87 examination, particularly as we are in that matter and of it as well. Instead, nuancing involves taking a thin slice of what we see as an idea, concept, or belief that underpins a moment of relationship or a claim within an argument as we experience or observe it. Nuancing engages us in critical inquiry, but it is also a reflective practice in which we examine individual and collective memory to discern the impact of an idea, concept, or belief on our lived experience of the world and on the stories we tell about that lived experience. This double quality, or thinking-critically-at-the-joint quality, of nuancing—working in and out of intellectual, spiritual, social, and political histories while simultaneously working in and out of individual and collective memory—distinguishes nuancing from more traditional academic research and writing. Rather than excluding the I, nuancing scratches, teases, tears at the binaries between self and other, personal and social, subjective and objective, individual and collective. Finally, we cannot practice nuancing well if we attempt it absent the ongoing work of decentering. Again, these practices are not stages we pass through, but ongoing and interconnected labors that attend one another. Decentering—the attempt at stillness, at postponement of judgment, at consciousness of bias, the reach not only toward empathy, but also and more so toward more just relations—is a necessary condition for the practice of nuancing. Decentering and nuancing are related practices in that both aim at undoing not the self qua self, but at undoing the idea of the self as distinct from the Other. They are not confessional practices aimed at achieving absolution, but practices of witness and testimony that connect ideas of the racialized self with histories and memories of that self’s construction. Nuancing intersects and in many ways coincides with the labor Krista Ratcliffe terms “rhetorical listening” and defines as “the performance of a person’s conscious choice to assume an open stance in relation to any person, text, or culture” (2006, 26). Like rhetorical listening, nuancing is animated by the intentionality of its practitioners. As with rhetorical listening, 88 I HOPE I JOIN THE BAND nuancing is a profoundly political practice. Nuancing also proceeds from a logic of accountability, “invit[ing] us to consider how all of us are, at present, culturally implicated in the effects of the past . . . and, thus, accountable for what we do about situations now, even if we are not responsible for their origins” (32). Finally, nuancing, like rhetorical listening, engages practitioners in the analysis of cultural logics (and historical forces) out of which our claims about ourselves and the world are forged (33). The differences between rhetorical listening and nuancing are largely rendered in the felt imperatives that drive them and the motivations that animate them as epistemological and rhetorical practices. Ratcliffe sees the...