In Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground, Adam Banks explores African American rhetoric as an exemplary site of what he terms "transformative access." This kind of access has the potential, he argues, to transform people, society, and technologies, rearticulating the "digital divide" in more productively rhetorical ways. Banks frames the book's argument in the introduction:

[R]ather than answer either/or questions about whether technological advancement and dependence leads to utopia or dystopia, whether technologies overdetermine or have minimal effects on a society's development, or whether people (especially those who have been systemically excluded from both the society and its technologies) should embrace or avoid those technologies, African American history as reflected through its rhetorical production shows a group of people who consistently refused to settle for the limiting parameters set by either/or binaries. Instead African Americans have always sought "third way" answers to systematically racist exclusions . . . (2)

As his discussion's main metaphor, Banks uses "The One," taken from 1970s funk band Parliament/Funkadelic (PFunk), which conceptualizes a transformative unity to "the first beat of the measure" through rhetorical improvisation and freedom (5). To illustrate and explicate The One, he examines throughout the book various African American rhetorical practices in print, electronic, oral, and visual media, produces a taxonomy of access and a rhetoric of design, and ends with an agenda for African American rhetorical study.

Banks begins by examining the emergence, context, and rhetoric that constructed the concept of the "digital divide" in the U.S in the 1990s, concluding that African American history can be read as inherently rhetorical and technological, making it useful in redefining technological "access." He explicates the discourse and technological context of Malcolm X in the TV documentary "The Hate that Hate Produced" (aired in July 1959), the ethical and technological issues in a speech made by Martin Luther King, Jr. called "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" (delivered in March 1968), and the rhetorical elements and uses of technology that can be found on the Internet community BlackPlanet. Banks then proceeds to discuss the "Black Jeremiad," particularly in Derrick Bell's And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice. Here he attempts to show how Bell has constructed a "countertechnology" in American legal scholarship, which "provide[s] an example of how language itself can be technologized in genre" toward ends that attack racist power arrangements and exclusion that are often "encoded in rhetorical forms" (9). This leads to an "African American rhetoric of design" that draws on a discussion of African American architects and slave quilters, which shows these practices as more than simply "style" but derived from particular technological struggles and rhetorical strategies. Finally, Banks returns to "The One" as a way to understand and critique technological access and transformation, providing a few brief pedagogical suggestions for "making access real" and a "technological agenda for African American rhetoric."