constructs "race" in binary terms

While Banks’s purpose is clearly to explore African American rhetorics as sites for understanding and transformation, as a way to see the idea of “access” to technologies as far more than a few boxes and wires in particular communities, this purpose constructs his discussion as one almost exclusively in Black and White terms. “Race” in the U.S. has never been this simple. While I’m positive that Banks is not seeing the national landscape of race as a simple binary, since he never attempts to suggest that his critique of access implicates any other group except African Americans, his title is misleading. A more apt one might be: African American Rhetorics and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. This is seemingly a small point, but when we consider access in Native American, Asian (a complex category itself that’s not uniform), and Latino/a communities (which might also be divided), Banks’s discussion becomes more and more limiting as a discussion of race and technology. As a discussion of African American access to technology and its implications to social transformation, it’s quite strong. As one that discusses how access is theorized from a comprehensive conception of race in the U.S., it’s very weak.

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• It tended to construct “race” in binary terms.
• Its discussions begged for a fuller treatment of various communities of color.
• Additional critical theory would have strengthened the book's arguments.