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Review of Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground
Teaching Points and Passages
From chapter 7 - soul and pedagogy
In this final chapter, Banks offers the concept of “soul,” which “implies memory, agency, and hope in the face of despair” (133), and “is the continual, committed search for higher ground” (134). The concept is roughly equivalent to his original metaphor of “The One,” and it’s a metonym for the kinds of observations and analyses he’s compiled in the book that also stretches toward praxis. He explains:
Soul is the ability to recognize complexity and still pursue unity . . . Soul is knowing that not only is racial justice the question, but that its answer does not lie in some tired debate over personal responsibility versus government intervention, but about a larger job of transformation. Soul knows that the justice that is still denied so many is about organized systems of power, White privilege so programmed into our daily interactions and political interfaces that people swear it no longer exists, about histories of lies and misrepresentation, and about economic injustice that feeds the fire of old racist exclusions. (134)
He uses soul to push for a complication of access in the classroom, and offers several ways to complicate access, two of which I think are important to discuss: “Don’t be scared of recreational uses of technologies,” and “Don’t just produce customers” (140).
While again quite provocative and engaging, Banks’s final chapter is light on pedagogy, offering a just a few good suggestions. When considering how the book’s discussion might transform the composition classroom, it seems important to consider the implication of a philosophy like the one encapsulated in the above description of soul in a teacher's pedagogy. So how do teachers turn the technological access they provide for, or demand of, or critique with our students into a soulful journey of transformation, even if that transformation is accomplished in small ways, not the larger structural ones to which Banks refers? How will our white students, many of whom may not find Banks’s articulation of soul or The One at all compelling, also be encouraged to participate in transformative access in the classroom, or participate meaningfully in the rhetorics of design he explicates, or in discussions of Whiteness and power that help construct technologies in ways that produce unequal social arrangements and opportunities? It also would have been useful for Banks to explain how a teacher might use his discussion on King and his two myths or of Malcolm X as a Black Jeremiad within a First-Year Composition course that attempts to do the critical work that the WPA outcomes statement asks of us. This application of his good analysis could have alleviated some of my concerns about how white and economically privileged students would engage with Banks’s ideas without being encumbered by a sense of guilt or a fascination with the exotic “Other”?
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