Whiteness, academe, silence Doing good, openness, equal opportunity Diversity, equity, justice Talk, all talk Talk that sounds good And gives me the reassurance that academe is somehow opening up To difference. And yet The talk is far from the truth Whiteness carries out in the actions of the benevolent White man and woman Who believes she has taught the world The logics of empowerment And takes it on herself To save the downtrodden and the oppressed From the Third. Whiteness and its specters Couched as doing good Couched as altruism and progress Telling me that I am backward That I have to refer back to the games of Whiteness In order to qualify as a participant. Whiteness and its specters Telling me That the knowledge of my culture is primitive So she is going to send her missionaries and mercenaries and democracy promoters and war mongers and public health professionals To teach me to behave To pick up the language So I could be empowered under her Imperial guises.
In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems wit...