Rhetoric and Race

Course Description

"Almost as color defines vision itself, race shapes the cultural eye-what we do and do not notice, the reach of empathy and the alignment of response."

Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, 1988

This course proceeds from a single assertion: that race dominates American discourse. While we tend to see racism as a problem of the past that crops up occasionally in prejudiced individuals or in flawed social forms, this course will offer instead the view that American public speaking and writing is suffused with the reality of race, that its judgments are influenced by assumptions about race, and that it features some voices while hiding or discounting others. Using mostly primary sources, we will explore some of the competing and often contradictory ways in which "race" pervades our public understandings.

• James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare, Orbis Books, 1991.
• Bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, Henry Holt & Co., 1995.
• Packet of Selected Readings

Each student will write five short papers and make at least two class presentations. Grades will be based on the quality of papers, class presentations, and class discussion. Discussion will be a particularly important part of the class. This means that we all need to work to foster an open environment in which everyone is encouraged to contribute.

• Paper #1 will discuss the racial politics of representation in a movie of the student's choice.
• Paper #2 will discuss Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Paper #3 will discuss Malcolm X.
• Paper #4 will provide a commentary and application of bell hooks' book, Killing Rage: Ending Racism.
• Paper #5 will be a paper and presentation on a book about the contemporary dynamics of racial representations. You will be asked to choose from a variety of books on a variety of race-related topics including, among other things, the re/writing of history, counter-representations, environmental racism, books on Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans, and analyses of race in popular culture.

Week 1: Race and Rhetoric

Definitions

Toni Morrison on Bill Clinton

Stuart Hall, Race: The Floating Signifier

6 Days, 7 Nights

Week 2: Race and Representation

John Fiske, "Some television, some topics, and some terminology," Television Culture, 1987, 1-21

Stuart Hall, "The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media," in Gender, Race and Class in the Media, 18-22.

Toni Morrison, "Recitatif"

Stuart Hall, Representation and the Media

Week 3: Papers and Presentations

Paper #1 Due

Week 4: History and Representation-Black and White

Joel Williamson, "Black Images in Southern White Minds," Rage for Order, 1986, 70-116

Birth of a Nation

Ethnic Notions

Eyes on the Prize, Awakenings

Week 5: History and Representation-Native American, Hispanic, Asian-American

Howard Zinn, "As Long as the Grass Grows and the Water Runs," A People's History of the United States, 124-46

Howard Zinn, "We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God," 147-66

Week 6-7: Martin Luther King, Jr.: "I Have a Dream"

The Speech

Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream," Aug. 28, 1963

Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America, chs. 3 & 5

CBS, Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream

Eyes on the Prize, No Easy Walk

The Context

Martin Luther King and Grover C. Hall, "Alabama's Bus Boycott: What's It All About?" US News & World Report, Aug. 3, 1956, 82-5

"Public Statement by 8 Alabama Clergymen," April 12, 1963

David Lewis, Proposed speech to the March on Washington

Paper #2 Due

Week 8-9: Malcolm X: "I See a Nightmare"

Speeches and Writings

Malcolm X, "Message to the Grassroots," Detroit, MI, Nov. 9, 1963

Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet," April 3, 1964

Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America, chs. 4 & 7

Spike Lee, Malcolm X

Malcolm X: The Real Story

Responses

"Death and Transfiguration," Time March 5, 1965: 23-5

Angela Davis, "Meditations on the Legacy of Malcolm X" in Malcolm X in Our Own Image ed. by Joe Wood, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1992: 36-47

Shelby Steele, "Malcolm Little: The Deep Appeal of Malcolm X's Conservatism," New Republic, 21 December 1992: 27-31.

Paper #3 Due

Week 10: Modern Racism I

Robert Entman, "Blacks in the News: Television, Modern Racism and Cultural Change" 1990

Rodney King

Week 11: Modern Racism II

Benjamin DeMott, "Put on a Happy Face: Masking the Differences Between Blacks and Whites" Harper's September 1995: 31-8

Bell hooks, Killing Rage, "Teaching Resistance: The Racial Politics of Mass Media" 108-18

Herman Gray, "Television, Black Americans, and the American Dream," Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Dec. 1989: 376-86

Color Adjustment

Week 12: Metaphors of Race: "Color-Blind" and alternatives

Toni Morrison, "Home" in The House that Race Built, 3-12

Week 13: Bell hooks, Killing Rage

Paper #4 Due

Week 14: Metaphors of Race: "Borders"

Ramona Liera-Schwichtenberg, "Border Crossings and Defilement: The Politics of 'Othering' and Mexican Immigration", 1996

Lone Star

Week 15: Papers and Presentations

Week 16: Papers and Presentations

Paper #5 Due

• Vision and Identity

  Cornel West, Race Matters

  • 2: . . . most of us remain trapped in the narrow framework of the dominant liberal and conservative views of race in America, which with its worn-out vocabulary leaves us intellectually debilitated, morally disempowered, and personally depressed.
  • 25: After centuries of racist degradation, exploitation, and oppression in America, being black means being minimally subject to white supremacist abuse and being part of a rich culture and community that has struggled against such abuse.

  Andrew Hacker, Two Nations, 1992

  • vii: "Every one of us could write a book about race. The text is already imprinted in our minds and evokes our moral character. Dividing people into races started as convenient categories. However, those divisions have taken on a life of their own, dominating our culture and consciousness, coloring passions and opinions, contorting facts and fantasies."
  • 21: "What every black American knows, and whites should try to imagine, is how it feels to have an unfavorable--and unfair--identity imposed on you every waking day."

  Langston Hughes:
     O, let America be America again-
     The land that never has been yet-
     And yet must be-
     The land where every man is free.

  
  
  
• White and Black

  "The country's image of the Negro, which hasn't much to do with the Negro, has never failed to reflect with a kind of frightening accuracy the state of mind of the country."

  James Baldwin

  "This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal. . .
  What white Americans have never fully understood--and what the Negro can never forget--is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it."

  Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968

• Martin and Malcolm

  "The best way to gain reliable knowledge about Martin and Malcolm is through a careful examination of the life and thought of each figure in relation to the other and in the light of the two main resistance traditions in African-American history and culture--integrationism and nationalism. . . . <
  >Martin and Malcolm illuminate the two roads to freedom that meet in the African-Americans' search for identity in the land of their birth."

  James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America, 1991

  "Why was I drawn to the subject of Malcolm X? It was because I could never lose sight of the great cost that racial strife exacts from human dignity. If white people can only bring themselves to understand why Malcolm X was so angry at them and at the craven blacks he thought were their stooges, then maybe they will learn to respect the black people with whom they share this country."

  Archie Epps, Malcolm X: Speeches at Harvard