Power & Control

I appreciated the pragmatic approach of Kuebrich’s piece. Much of what we’ve read so far on publics, counterpublics, discourse, and power has been theoretically-based, so reading something which outlined a community putting the theories into play was revealing.

Early in, Kuebrich writes, “Cops, historically, have been a problem for composition” (568). The line and idea reminded me of my initial blog-post assessment that “Public opinion... is the direct act of refusing to be governed.” Not quite the marching around waving flags singing “Red!” style of refusing to be governed, but a more subtle form of resistance that confirms and cements the people as worthy and able to formulate different opinions and courses of action from the ruling power.

The author also brought in the concept of the false consciousness: “many marginalized, working-class, or oppressed groups actively value the ideologies and narratives that “justify their own subordination” (572). In Classic Sociological Theory, my class has been discussing Fannon, a black Caribbean man who wrote on the racism stemming from French colonization. He wrote, “Every colonized people-- in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality-- finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country” (Black Skin, White Masks). American ideology of the hardworking citizen who raises himself/herself (usually himself) up the sociological ladder, achieving capitalist success is preached by Western culture. Goals of achieving white possession, power, and authority were (and are) glorified throughout civil right’s movements, to encourage African Americans to “pick themselves up by their bootstraps,” so to speak. But this message is rife with embedded value. For example, the American dream discounts the importance of family life and collectivist culture, idolizing individuality, professionalism, and acceptance of American culture as the greatest achievement. When someone like the Oakland School District said they wanted to integrate Ebonics into their curriculum, recognizing it as a legitimate dialect, educators went crazy. Our culture may say it values equality, and “black lives matter,” but what it really values is conforming people to white standards. Black is then valuable only as it achieves whiteness.

Kuebrich goes on, “Speaking truth to power requires either significant risk or a certain degree of privilege. For this reason, it is important for scholars who are outsiders to participate by taking direction from neighborhood residents, not pushing them with academic prescriptions or notions of popular outrage” (579). For a marginalized person or persons to speak out, risk is inherently involved. The scholar may think that doing x, y, and z, organizing this and saying that will solve racial injustice, but again the scholar usually speaks from a position of white privilege and power. While the white citizen may believe the black person “puts up” or “tolerates” such mistreatment from police officers, they often fail to recognize that such tolerance is learned survival to avoid handcuffs. He goes on, “‘People who are thought not to have power’ in society are mistreated because people in power ‘don’t have to suffer consequences when [they] mess with powerless people’” (587). The stakes are much higher when the power-disadvantaged mess with the power-enabled.

Finally, Kuebrich quotes Flower saying,

“Because they speak from a marginalized position, urban teenagers, neighborhood advocates, and the poor often resort to a rhetoric of complaint and blame—a vigorous rehearsal of the wrongs by others in a context they (the speakers) do not control. Standing out of power, the discourse of complaint and blame takes little responsibility for positive change; it finds its strength in pressure, exposure, disruption and advocacy (250)” (576).

One way a power-refused people can regain agency is by choosing routes of disruption and downward leveling norms. Tell inner-city black teenagers they are all predisposed to become criminals, and the gang-mentality becomes one they take on as their own. A group with no identity has no privilege; it seems that claiming even an identity with negative repercussions (like a gang member) affords some level of character norms and agency around which one can act. But, if “power...is about controlling public representation,” then this creates a negative-reinforcing cycle, where black teens may choose disruption because it offers agency and an anti-establishment standing, but only reinforces racial stereotypes (573).

Representation post-Katrina...

I do not have all the solutions, but I appreciated Eubrich’s note that “Rhetorical forms would be best judged on how well they lead to productive, collective action that might alter existing power dynamics and social structures, not how they align with prescriptive notions of civility and propriety” (576). We would do good to examine where in rhetorical theory, racial bias is implicit. Embedded in rhetorical expectations and commonly used styles are assumptions about power, identity, and culture. And I am sure if we looked, we would find them, and could work to change them and make power-challenging discourse more accepting of alternate forms.