book coverA Review of Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground

Teaching Points and Passages

From chapter 3 - Malcolm and Martin

While this entire chapter offers a rich discussion of the ways both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. use various technologies for rhetorical, social, and political ends, the discussion of King’s speech, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” (56-66), may arguably capture the most important issues that ground much of Banks’s larger discussion of transformative access and the search for “higher ground.” In particular, Banks explains two “myths” that King discusses, “the myth of time” as a cure for unequal access, inequality, and injustice, and the “bootstraps myth” that relies on the American ideals of independence, merit, and self-sufficiency (64). Banks also provides a table that compares a portion of King’s speech with a passage from Andrew Feenberg’s “Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Democracy” (65). This discussion is provocative for classroom activities that explore any number of U.S. figures in order to examine the ways in which each are constructed rhetorically and technologically. For instance, how do various technologies frame contemporary African American, Latino/a, Asian, or Native American figures and their rhetorics, like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Antonio Villaraigosa (L.A.’s newly elected Latino mayor), Condoleezza Rice, Yao Ming, Tiger Woods, Sherman Alexie, or Jiang Zemin? While Banks’s table reveals similarities in both arguments, it also illustrates the usefulness of King’s political theory of equality as an ethical articulation of a theory of technology, which Banks points out. This comparison suggests that discussions of technology might also be articulated as ones about ethics, structured whiteness in technologies, and social engineering.

Additionally, the long quotation by King concerning the bootstraps myth that Banks provides in this section shows a powerful critique of structural racism often forgotten when folks discuss King (65-6). Banks’s analysis of the bootstraps myth and the King passage could offer students (undergraduate and graduate) an interesting study of King’s rhetoric if looked at alongside similar passages from, say, “Letter from A Birmingham Jail,” in which King makes similar kinds of arguments but with less obvious structural critiques. While Banks stays away from the ways contemporary media uses the rhetoric and image of King, Banks’s comparison encourages questions along these lines: How do various media outlets use King’s rhetoric (typically reduced to popularly known sound/image bites), and how do particular technologies change, mask, or alter King’s message in unanticipated ways? A class might also compare Banks’s discussion with Victor Villanueva’s more extensive treatment of the myth in Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, particularly the last few chapters. Mostly, Banks’s chapter begs its readers to reconsider the intersection of rhetoric, technology, and racial formations in the U.S. Again, while Banks does not go in these directions per se, I found the chapter raising for me, among others, interesting questions concerning racism, rhetoric, and technology.

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