The Threshold of Democracy: The Rhetoric of Outsider Activism
A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Department of English of the College of Arts and Sciences by
Daniel G. Floyd
M.A., Eastern Kentucky University M.A.T., Morehead State University M.A., University of Kentucky B.A., Eastern Kentucky University March 2020
Committee Chair: Christopher Carter, Ph.D.
Floyd 1
Abstract This work explores how democracy is a rhetorical construct that is often used to maintain the status quo; it examines the way democratic outsiders speak within exclusive democratic frameworks. The framework of liberal democracies like that in place in the United States delimits who can speak through what is framed as insider rhetoric; insider rhetoric seeks to attain hegemonic consent by negating the validity of arguments and ideas forwarded by those who do not have authorized channels of participation in the democracy. Outsider rhetors in democratic frameworks, therefore, must forge alternative frameworks of participation. They seek to tell stories, build coalitions, engage in activist events, question assumptions and generally destabilize the hegemonic narratives of democracy. The chapters of this work focus on immigrants, prisoners and children as democratic denizens who lack authorized agency as a result of their statuses. Ethical democracies should seek to listen to all those who are affected by the decisions of the democracies. However, most democracies craft litmus tests to determine who has the right to participate within their frameworks. Often, however, those who do not have the right to participate are the ones who have the most to gain or lose as a result of the decisions—immigrants may have no say in immigration policy; prisoners may have no say in criminal justice reform; children may have no say in climate crisis action. It is, therefore, necessary to consider the ways all participants can be given a voice and heard. The chapter on immigration examines immigrant narratives of radical transparency, considering the stories of immigrants, documented and undocumented, and how they fit within the concept of American. The chapter on prisoners explores the activist actions of currently and formerly incarcerated people to highlight the way they agitate for changes to the system that impacts their lives daily. The chapter on youth activism focuses on how young people use traditional and social media platforms to forward their causes and defy the notion that they are too naïve to concern themselves with politics. The final chapter is a conclusion that articulates the changes that need to be made to democracies in order to be more inclusive, including actively listening to outsider voices, changing the mechanisms for participation within democracies and serving as allies for the voiceless. The conclusion seeks to situate the issue of insider and outsider democratic rhetorics within historical and global contexts and articulates avenues for further future research.
Floyd 2
Floyd 3
Acknowledgements I would like to thank my wife, Kristy, without whom I could not have completed this work, nor could I have maintained my confidence to enter and complete a doctoral program. She has always done whatever she could to make the process manageable for me. I appreciate my children, Avery and Gibson, for being a source of infinite joy while working through this program and on this dissertation. I would like to thank my parents, Tim and Vonda, for everything that they have done for me during this process. Additionally, I greatly appreciate the assistance provided by my mother- and father-in-law, Debbie and Rick Tuttle. My brother, Jeremiah, as well, has been instrumental in helping to keep me positive. My entire circle of family and friends have also been a tremendous help with my work. Beyond family members, I wish to thank my committee members, Dr. Chris Carter, Dr. Russel Durst and Dr. Laura Micciche, each of whom has been as supportive, committed and caring as anyone could hope from a committee. In particular, I wish to extend my deepest gratitude for Dr. Carter, whom I view as both a friend and mentor and without whom I would have surely given up on this project long ago. Finally, I wish to thank the University of Cincinnati and the UC Department of English. My work completing this dissertation was greatly aided by receiving a Ricking Fellowship Award. This award provided me with a semester course release that proved to be my most productive time working on the dissertation.
Floyd 4
The Threshold of Democracy Table of Contents
Abstract 1 Acknowledgements 3 Introduction 5 Chapter One – Immigrant Activism 47 Chapter Two – Prisoner Activism 87 Chapter Three – Youth Activism 133 Chapter Four – Conclusion 172 Bibliography 191 Floyd 5
Introduction
“I think [immigration] has very much hurt . . . Europe. And I know it politically not [sic] necessarily correct to say that, but I’ll say it and I’ll say it loud. And I think they better watch themselves because you [sic] are changing culture . . .” -Donald J. Trump July 13, 2018
“[I]f you won’t follow the law yourself, then you can’t make the law for everyone else, which is what you do—directly or indirectly—when you vote.” -Roger Clegg April 22, 2016
“Maybe all of this can be written off as the work of overenthusiastic, underinformed 17-year- olds. But the student activists aren’t acting alone. They are promoted and praised by adults who should know better” -Rich Lowry March 27, 2018
In an ideal democracy, all voices have the authority to speak out to effect change.
Democratic discourse should serve as a mechanism for the free exchange of ideas on an equal footing, no matter who supports those ideas or how large the base of support may be. In the origins of democracy, in theory, an individual would state a case before the public and receive a fair and disinterested hearing after which the people (demos) would rule (-cracy) on the matter.
In this context, the any individual person, no matter who that person was, could engage in the democratic process and feel certain of at least having the potential to achieve his/her goal.1
In contemporary practice, this approach to democracy would be unwieldy and unfeasible.
In the United States, for example, there are over 325 million people, and the sheer enormity of the population renders impractical a style of governing that attempts to give every individual’s
1 This is not to ignore the myriad problems in original democracies. Aristotle, of course, writes problematically about the rights of slave masters and of men at the expense of slaves and women. Democracy’s history is not without its issues, but this synopsis is intended to demonstrate the idealized basis of democratic discourse in contemporary Western societies. Floyd 6 issues a hearing that involves every other individual in the process. Instead, representatives for different groups and regions must serve as proxies for those people, and those representatives will, ostensibly, voice the legitimate and pressing matters brought to their attentions to a wider democratic audience. Without devoting too much time to political shortcomings, avenues for corruption and partisanships, it is needless to say that mediated representation, while practically effective, removes the individuality of democratic participants and establishes a democratic framework in which insiders (those who fit the stereotypical conception of American—white,
Christian, middle class, etc.) have a greater likelihood of achieving their democratic aims than do outsiders (those who are outside the stereotypical conception of American).
Indeed, James Madison anticipated just such issues while writing the Federalist Papers and explained the perils of a “pure democracy” and the need for a “republic.” Writing in
“Federalist Number 10,” Madison explains, “[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit no cure for the mischiefs of factions.” Madison continues to claim that “such democracies” are hotbeds for turbulence and violence. On the other hand, Madison argues that
“A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.” For American founding fathers, like Madison, it was necessary to put into place mediated representation rather than a pure democracy in order to avoid “factions” and to account for the greater number of disparate voices. Finally, the purpose of these measures, according to Madison, is to “[e]xtend the sphere, [so] you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own Floyd 7 strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, the entire purpose of establishing a republic in place of a pure democracy is so that it will be more difficult to establish majorities to the detriment of minorities; when citizens must work harder to achieve a majority regarding any given issue, it is more likely, and even necessary, that all voices will be heard who wish to speak on that issue. In effect the goal was to prevent insiders (the majority; the privileged) from excluding the outsiders (the minority; the underprivileged).2 This work will consider insiders and outsiders in detail, so it is worthwhile to consider what is meant by these terms.
In democracies, insiders are individuals and groups of people who can rest assured that their interests will be represented, even if specific individuals do not agitate for change on a given issue. Additionally, they are people who have a high degree of certainty that if faced with a situation that is not receiving enough attention, they will be able to call attention to the problem and, at least, receive a hearing about it. An example of an insider is white, native-born
Americans. Nearly three decades ago Peggy McIntosh detailed the advantages of being white in
America in her work “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” In this brief text,
McIntosh outlines numerous privileges she enjoys simply as a result of being white in America, including “I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial,” “I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without
2 Although it is not the focus of this dissertation specifically, it is imperative to note that the American founding fathers themselves adhered to a very limited concept of who could participate in democracy. Nevertheless, the republican framework they established is still in use today with crucial amendments that establish and expand the rights of all people who live in the nation. The personal flaws of the founding fathers have not created all of the inherent flaws in the system of representative democracy. Madison’s language of “factions” and “variety of parties and interests” demonstrates. Madison may have owned slaves, but his vague language in “Federalist Number 10” means that the “variety of parties and interests” could very well mean “slaves” and “the abolitionist cause” respectively. Unfortunately, Madison and the other founding fathers were thinking only of factional distinctions such as “landed and non-landed white men” or “wealthy and poor white men,” and, therefore, their vagueness about what constitutes a faction did leave open the potential for many problems faced by representative democracy in the present day. Floyd 8 being seen as a cultural outsider” and “I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help my race will not work against me.” To a democratic insider, these may not seem like privileges; this is how a democracy is supposed to function, and the ability of McIntosh and other white Americans to enjoy these democratic advantages is only an indication of the efficacy of democratic governance and its processes.
However, democratic outsiders do not enjoy such privileges, and their experiences call into question the efficacy of our democratic governance. Outsiders in this sense are those who cannot remain certain that their grievances will be considered fairly, indeed, if they are considered at all. Outsiders are those participants in democracy who do not enjoy the privileges of living in a democracy, despite having a legal sense of entitlement to those privileges. For example, immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants3, prisoners and felons who have lost their voting rights, and underage activists. For one reason or another, the aforementioned groups of people frequently struggle to find representation in democracies such as the United States, and this is largely due to their minority status or a general disregard for their considerations owing to notions that they do not belong in the process (immigrants), have given up their claims to the process (prisoners) or have not yet earned a stake in the process (minors)4. Consequently, traditional channels of democratic discourse are often closed to democratic outsiders, and these groups must turn to alternative modes of representation to call attention to their circumstances.
These alternative modes of representation will be the focus of this work, and I will refer to them
3 Many people, particularly those who hold anti-immigrant sentiments, do not believe undocumented immigrants hold any rights in democracies, but this is not the case. I will discuss the obligations that democratic nations owe to all people regardless of status somewhat later. 4 These definitions of “outsiders” suffice for the groups on which I will primarily focus in this work. It is worthwhile to note that the term “outsider” could be effectively applied to innumerable other groups in other contexts, such as women, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, people living in poverty and so many more. My decision not to focus on these groups should not be seen as a belief they are not as worthy or as rhetorically effective, simply as a recognition that there is not time enough within the scope of this project to cover all possible groups. However, there will be much room for intersectionality and additional consideration throughout. Floyd 9 collectively as “outsider rhetorics.”
The Tyranny of the Majority
It is beneficial, from the perspective of power, to take the part of the insider in American democracy5 because there is a tendency to give preferential treatment to majority rule. One of the flaws of democratic systems is that elections are frequently zero-sum games in which a simple majority vote suffices to determine policies and representatives that/whom all constituents must abide. It is, therefore, easier to make an argument from the perspective of the insider. If most
Americans are native-born citizens of the United States, the majority will vote in favor of the interests of native-born American citizens; if most Americans are not incarcerated in the prison system or have not lost their democratic rights as a result of felony convictions, the majority will vote in favor of the interests of those who are not (or have not been) in prison; if most Americans are adults, the majority will vote in favor of the interests of adults and so on ad infinitum.
In his work Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville critiques American democracy insofar as the system lends itself to governing by consensus rather than governing by what is the best or most just course of action. Tocqueville writes, “[In America,] as long as the majority is uncertain, people speak; but as soon as the majority has irrevocably decided, everyone is silent, and friends as well as enemies then seem to climb aboard together” (291). Tocqueville made this claim in 1835, but the same is true nearly two centuries later. Issues for which there is not a strong majority may offer circumstances in which all participants can expect to receive a fair hearing for their perspectives, but once a strong majority has been established, most people accept the outcome no matter who may be hurt in the process.
One sees the resignation of defeat often in cases of contentious elections. In the wake of
5 Later I will explore the way in which insiders often give themselves the label of “outsider” in the American political system. Floyd 10 the 2016 presidential election, for instance, many who had campaigned fiercely against the election of Donald Trump, such as incumbent president Barack Obama, called for the American citizenry to give Trump a chance to prove his abilities to lead.6 Trump’s campaign was founded on divisive rhetoric that sought to cast immigrants, racial, ethnic and religious minorities and other disempowered groups as the problem in America. Trump’s slogan “Make America Great
Again” (MAGA) harkens to a time in America’s history wherein things were supposedly better7;
Trump, his campaign managers and his supporters made little effort to dissuade people of the notion that this past was, in truth, much worse for non-whites, women, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants and other groups without power. Trump openly referred to Mexican immigrants as murderers, rapists and “bad hombres;” he critiqued female opponents based on their looks and their perceived strength or lack thereof; he was exposed on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women and much more. In fact, Trump frequently alluded to the fact that he would not respect the outcome of the election if he were not the winner, preemptively calling the election
“rigged” and referring to his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as “Crooked Hillary.” Despite these clear indications that Trump’s policies would presumably disenfranchise minorities and their interests, the tyrannical majority intervened to argue that citizens “must give him a chance.”
When one considers the demographics of the United States, especially the demographics of eligible voters, it is unsurprising that Trump could manage to win an election to the highest position in U.S. politics. According to the United States Elections Project, the non-Hispanic
6 Of course, it is worth noting that Donald Trump did not win by a majority of individual votes, but by a majority of votes in the electoral college. Nonetheless, the tyranny of the majority applies in this situation because the effects of zero-sum electoral politics still applies. Additionally, I will later discuss the way in which Donald Trump actively seeks not to lead all of his constituents, choosing instead to pander to his supporters and actively denigrate those who oppose him or his policies. 7 Trump supported candidate Roy Moore who ran for the senate from Alabama in 2017. Moore, an accused pedophile, was asked, as a Trump supporter, when he thought America had been great. His response was “I think it was great at the time when families were United—even though we had slavery” (“Roy Moore”). Floyd 11 white share of the electorate in 2016 was nearly 75%. Non-Hispanic white men counted for 47.8 million of the nearly 137 million votes cast (roughly 35%); this number was second only to Non-
Hispanic white women who counted for 53.1 million votes (Center for American Women and
Politics 2). According to The Independent, 63% of non-Hispanic white men voted for Trump (a further 52% of non-Hispanic white women voted for Trump). According to Peter Eisler of
Reuters, “Trump was elected with 8 percent of the black vote, 28 percent of the Hispanic vote and 27 percent of the Asian-American vote,” which represented “less support from black and
Hispanic voters than any president in at least 40 years.” One could easily claim that citizens cast their votes for the candidate they believed would best represent their own interests, and when minorities represent such an unequal share of the voting population, it is hard to see a way that the tyranny of the majority will not overshadow the interests of the most vulnerable citizens in the United States. Here is where Madison’s limited conception of what kinds of factions might exist becomes problematic, excluding core aspects of identity such as race and gender from the outset. Madison did not consider non-whites or women as democratic participants in the first place, so something like a faction of white men was not a concern he had in mind. As the right to democratic participation has been opened to most people in the United States, the faction of birth has become one of the most prominent and hegemonic forces in American politics. In the 2016 presidential election, the factional majority pushed through a candidate who was not only uninterested in issues related to the minority, but who was openly hostile to the minority, casting them as the source of the nation’s ills and arguing for an end to policies that help minorities in favor of policies that help the majority.
The concept of the majority in a representative democracy serves a hegemonic purpose.
In theory, representatives distill the desires of their constituents and vote accordingly on policies Floyd 12 that relate to those desires, attempting to do the most good and the least ill for all the people they represent. Individual constituents can petition representatives to make changes to public policies or to consider alternatives, and those constituents should be able to expect that their requests will be given reasonable consideration. However, in practice, representatives are at liberty to vote on policies and conduct political affairs in any way they see fit. Of course, if representatives act too brazenly or out of line with their constituents, they may risk being removed (via recall) or failing to win re-election, but in many, if not most, cases, representatives are insiders whose constituents are largely made up of other insiders (not to mention the practice of disenfranchisement for those who disagree, which will be discussed later in relation to prisoners). In their work
Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri explain the way representation is a hegemonic enterprise. They explain that representation exists in two forms in a democracy: first,
“[a people] is formed by mechanisms of representation that translate the diversity and plurality of existing subjectivities into a unity through identification with a leader, a governing group, or in some cases a central idea” (304-05). This means that instead of dealing with a complicated multiplicity of potentially conflicting identities and ideas, a group of people is formed into a unit
(Trump supporters, republicans/democrats, the working class, etc.). Second, “representation . . . operates a disjunctive synthesis between the representatives and the represented” (305). Here
Hardt and Negri employ the term “disjunctive synthesis” from the work of Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, which describes a situation in which two entities exist in close proximity without their worlds ever converging; hence, for Hardt and Negri, the worlds of the representative and the represented co-exist, but they never overlap. Hardt and Negri conclude “The logic of people exists only with respect to its leadership and vice versa, and thus this arrangement determines an aristocratic, not a democratic, form of government, even if the people elect that aristocracy” Floyd 13
(305). Elected representatives, authorized by the majority, act in relatively autonomous manners; ostensibly those representatives carry out the will of “the people” (albeit a homogenized people that does not necessarily represent any given constituent), but the representatives often operate aristocratically—the leader tells the people what they want; the people, acquiescing to the will of the leader, accept this proclamation as their desire.
Nonetheless, despite its flaws, those who benefit from the existing framework use the concept of American democracy rhetorically both as evidence of the equality and morality of the
United States and as justification for what elected leaders do. American democracy as proof of the superiority and morality of the United States can be seen in such examples as the moniker
“the leader of the free world” that has been given to the U.S. president since the Cold War era.
The rhetorical notion at play in this title is the juxtaposition of the U.S. and its allies against the enemies of the U.S. As “the free world,” the U.S. and its allies undoubtedly constitute the protagonists of this narrative, and because the president is “the leader” of this group, the U.S. serves as the moral beacon of democracy for the rest of the world. Another such rhetorical ploy is the claim that many of the aggressive military actions in the Middle East, South America and elsewhere are attempts to “bring democracy to the world.” Once again, as the shining beacon of democratic morality, the U.S. can claim to assist other nations in their efforts to adopt democratic frameworks, even if those military actions often serve only the interests of Americans, American politicians or American corporations.
Additionally, the concept of democracy is used to justify the actions of elected politicians in the United States. As mentioned above, U.S. politics are often discussed in terms of a zero- sum game. The gist of this winner-take-all rhetorical approach is that legitimate concerns about a politician’s actions, policies and words are irrelevant because that politician won the election. Floyd 14
Any concerns are dismissed as sour grapes and partisan attempts to delegitimize the winner. For example, during the FBI’s investigation into whether Trump worked with the Russian government to disrupt the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favor, Trump, his administration and his supporters almost always counter these charges by simply pointing out that he won the election. For those who make this claim, the upshot is clearly that challenging the legitimacy of
Trump’s victory, in only the electoral college, is undemocratic and un-American. It should be clear that these charges are only used as a means of legitimizing Trump and his insider rhetoric because, as noted above, Trump never agreed to accept the election results if he did not win.
Hence, for Trump and his supporters, the importance of adhering to U.S. democratic principles only apply if they result in Trump’s presidency and his ability to enact insider policies.
Faced with such steep opposition to minority interests, how could outsiders possibly manage to achieve anything in the contemporary political climate? By what measures can an outsider agitate for change without being dismissed immediately? Who are the activist outsiders and why do they participate in efforts to effect change? To whom does an outsider represent his/her interests? By what metric does one measure the successes and failures of outsider interests if the ballot is not necessarily a valid indicator of successes and failures? What, then, are the goals of outsiders? And, perhaps most importantly, how is power derived from an outsider positionality? A good place to start may be to explore what I consider to be a paradox of power: the propensity of people to assume the position of “outsider,” no matter how powerful or deeply entrenched in the hegemonic framework of a given society that person may be. The draw of the outsider is strong. Most people do not view themselves as inhabiting the same public spheres as
“elite” politicians, so, for politicians, masquerading as someone who is different from other politicians allows them to convince voters that things will be different (always read “better”) Floyd 15 under the care of these so-called outsider politicians.
“Drain the Swamp:” The Paradox of the Powerful Outsider
Along with such slogans as MAGA and “Lock Her Up,”8 Trump touted his intentions to
“drain the swamp” if elected. In making this claim, Trump attempted to set himself apart from the entrenched (stagnant) career politicians in Washington. He attempted to convince his supporters that one of the primary problems with politics in the United States is the fact that corrupt politicians maintain their positions of power for too long and rig the game so that they
(the politicians) may benefit from those positions to the detriment of ordinary American citizens.
Trump, as the only candidate who had never held political office, hyped himself as the only candidate capable of getting rid of the deadwood of American politics; he sought to portray himself as the outsider who could “drain the swamp.”
Of course, in one sense of the word Trump was an outsider. Despite a few false starts and failed bids to run for political office, Trump never held a public position before he was elected president of the United States. For many voters, the simple notion that a candidate is not a political insider, although certainly an innocuous cultural insider, suffices to establish credibility.
One cannot make it through an election cycle without viewing numerous negative ads that one candidate runs against his/her opponent in which the opponent is portrayed as a “Washington insider.” Trump’s opponents could not make this claim against him, and Trump made certain to remind voters of this fact at every opportunity.
However, Trump’s claims that he is an outsider only apply to the insider/outsider dichotomy in the political sense and, therefore, are largely disingenuous considering the
8 A reference to the belief that Hillary Clinton, Trump’s democratic opponent during the 2016 presidential election, should be imprisoned for her misuse of an email server during her time as secretary of state under president Barack Obama. Floyd 16 positions of power he has enjoyed throughout his life. Trump was born wealthy, started numerous businesses, owned properties in major cities all around the world, made friends with powerful people from all walks of life (politicians, businesspeople, actors, etc.), lobbied successfully for changes to policies that directly benefitted himself and much more. In most senses of the word, Trump was firmly positioned as an insider, and he was probably an insider in more respects than many of the established politicians against whom he ran his campaign.
As mentioned above, Trump is hardly the only politician to appropriate the status of outsider despite overwhelming amounts of privilege, and this desire for outsider status forms what I will call “the paradox of the powerful outsider.” Political insider status is hegemonic. In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci writes that a state’s hegemony comes from the manufacture of consent from the people. Gramsci argues that “The State does have and request consent, but it also ‘educates’ this consent, by means of the political and syndical associations; these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class” (527). The institutions of power in a democracy cannot rule without the consent of the governed, but those same institutions also often control the mechanisms by which the governed are “educated”
(school, media, church, etc.). Through this framework, those who are in power (both the individuals and the groups) are able to create a sense of consent from the governed by fostering ideologies (capitalism, Christianity, patriarchy, etc. in the United States) that make the status quo seem like the only possible world. The paradox of the powerful outsider arises because, in the
United States, most citizens are aware of these mechanisms of power, even if they do not necessarily understand the way they operate.
In the United States, voters know that money plays a crucial role in elections. In an article from 2014, Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post summarizes the findings of the nonpartisan Floyd 17 nonprofit group United Republic by writing, “Money wins congressional races 91% of the time”
(“91% of the Time”). According to The Center for Responsive Politics, another nonpartisan nonprofit, the 2012 election cycle in the United States was the most expensive in history,
“including more than $300 million in dark money spent by politically active 501(c) groups that don't disclose their donors.”
As for school systems, liberals have long complained that the conservative state of Texas determines school curriculum for most of America; Gail Collins of The New York Review of
Books writes, “Ever since the 1960s, the selection of schoolbooks in Texas has been a target for the religious right, which worried that schoolchildren were being indoctrinated in godless secularism, and political conservatives who felt that their kids were being given way too much propaganda about the positive aspects of the federal government” (“How Texas Inflicts”).
Because Texas buys more textbooks than most other states, and because it is too costly to make separate editions for different states, most textbook manufacturers adapt their content to the specifications of Texas’s conservatives and sell those same books throughout the country. On the other side of the issue, conservatives complain that universities employ almost exclusively liberal professors who indoctrinate students to liberal ideology. Writing for the Washington
Times in 2016, Bradford Richardson reports on a study that looked at the faculty of “40 leading universities” and found that “Democrats outnumbered Republicans 3,623 to 314, or by a ratio of ll ½ to 1” (“Liberal Professors Outnumber Conservatives”).
American voters are aware of these avenues of influence, and while they often believe the claims with which they already agree and dismiss the others out of hand, they remain aware that wealthy individuals, political elites and other powerbrokers around the country and the world have subtly manipulated the ideologies of most people. This manipulation is part of the reason so Floyd 18 many voters express an interest in electing a political outsider, someone who considers the interests of ordinary citizens and reacts accordingly. Unfortunately, this desire for an outsider paves the way for the paradox of the political outsider. If the findings by United Republic are accurate, almost no politicians ever win election without outspending their opponents, and the greater the disparity in money spent, the less likely an upset becomes. If the findings by The
Center for Responsive Politics are accurate, campaigns are only going to become increasingly expensive. These two findings taken together make it incredibly unlikely that a legitimate political outsider will ever win a major election because the only people who could afford to win are those who are independently wealthy or those who will conform to the demands of wealthy donors. In the absence of candidates who are legitimately ordinary citizens, many people vote for the candidates who most effectively employ the rhetoric of the outsider. However, it is important to note once again, for most Americans, political outsider status is what is important because policies that favor insiders are truly preferred.
Additionally, some people who occupy and advocate for insider positions do so from a legitimate outsider position. Members of far-right organizations in the United States are a good example of this kind of contradictory outsidership status. Helen Lewis, writing for The Atlantic about the ties between the global far right and the “manosphere”9 claims that “Anti-feminism and the far right overlap because both weave narratives around real, observable phenomena surrounding race and reproduction,” namely that women have greater control over reproduction, both in contrast to previous eras and in contrast to men, in most contemporary societies and that non-white demographics are increasing at a greater rate than white demographics. Hence,
9 The “manosphere” is the term given to the loose collection of men’s rights websites and organizations often attributed with radicalizing men, white men in particular, around the world and driving them to join the far right and to commit acts of violence. Floyd 19 although they remain one of the most powerful demographics globally, and especially in the
U.S., many white men feel threatened by increasing equality among the races and genders and react with what could be termed as outsider activism. Glenn Fleishman, writing for Fortune
Magazine, summarizes the findings of a study by the group More in Common regarding the perception of increasing polarization in U.S. politics. Fleishman writes that the group found “that only 6% of American[s] fit the definition of far right, people who feel that America is under threat and they’re the last line of defense in protecting traditional values with strident uncompromising views.” Only approximately one in twenty Americans hold these views, which certainly classifies far-right activists as outsiders to political discourse in the United States, but these activists are not the kind of outsider activists under examination in this work.
Although the far right of the United States is mostly a fringe collection of activists, they are much like the politicians who appropriate the moniker of “political outsider” in order to appeal to voters who are exhausted by politicians and political corruption—agents who have some degree of insider status and privilege, but who opt to position themselves as outsiders.
Additionally, unless members of the far right have additional statuses of democratic negation
(i.e., undocumented immigrant status, felon status or underage status), they all have a full complement of avenues of democratic participation available to them. Unlike the groups I will focus on in this work, far right outsider activists agitate to maintain the hegemonic status quo in the United States and, therefore, have much more in line with the insider rhetors as defined by this work. So, what does this paradox of power and outsider status mean for marginalized and/or disenfranchised outsider activists?
The Theory of Rhetorical Outsiders
At its core, a theory of rhetorical insiders and outsiders requires consideration of the Floyd 20 rhetoric of representation and visibility. Those people who espouse insider rhetorics need not concern themselves with whether their interests will be represented and visible for others to see; outsiders do not enjoy this same level of ubiquity. One of the key issues for practitioners of outsider rhetorics, then, is to call attention to their less-well-known interests. In her book
Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms, Wendy S. Hesford outlines a similar kind of goal for her project; in the introduction she writes, “[The focus of this book] is not on whether a rhetorical act persuades a particular individual but on how its contextualization defines the parameters of the public’s engagement with key human rights issues.” Applying this same focus to my project, one can begin to understand the way in which insider rhetoric works in a way that limits the scope of counterrhetorics; insider rhetorics normalize extreme notions of who has the authority to speak while simultaneously rendering it an act of extremism to posit alternative notions of agency. In democratic systems, there is a tendency toward the center—a move that can be seen on both sides of the political spectrum since the election of Donald Trump in the United States. Most people are comfortable with the status quo and are, therefore, uncomfortable with acts that have been labeled as extreme. When a person or group has sufficient power, money and/or prestige, that person or group can work to make fringe opinions and beliefs seem more common than they are—For instance, Donald
Trump’s policies that have not been proven to have widespread support, yet which are frequently discussed or even passed into law (the border wall, the new system of taxation, etc.). Another example are the clandestine efforts by wealthy businessmen, such as the Koch Brothers, to alter public policies in ways that benefit their bottom lines at the expense of the general public, the environment, their employees or other less powerful groups and individuals.
The actions of Trump and the Koch Brothers affect what is known as the Overton Floyd 21
Window of public discourse. This concept is named for Joseph P. Overton, who was the senior vice president of The Mackinac Center for Public Policy and who articulated this theory of public acceptance of policy. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy explains the Overton
Window, writing, “The core concept is that politicians are limited in what policy ideas they can support—they generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate policy options. These policies lie inside the Overton Window. Other policy ideas exist, but politicians risk losing popular support if they champion these ideas. These policies lie outside the Overton Window.” The Overton Window is a kind of snapshot of acceptable policy ideas in the public zeitgeist at a given moment. The window is not static; rather, it continually changes based on political contexts and rhetorics. Most Americans may not consent to the most radical ideas regarding a given policy, but if a politician floats an extremely radical idea, the opinions of his/her supporters may slowly move in that extreme direction, and, eventually, the Overton
Window will have shifted. For example, only people who hold the strictest notion of respect for the law would consent to the execution of all prisoners, regardless of the crime, but if a politician mentions that as a policy in some other time or place and proposes a slightly less brutal policy— such as the execution of all violent criminals—eventually, a compromise to the inhumane treatment of all violent criminals in prison seems like an acceptable, and even humane, approach to criminal justice reform for many people.
Because insider rhetorics and the public interests of insiders are so deeply entrenched in
U.S. democracy, individual leaders (typically politicians such as representatives or presidents) can manufacture the necessary level of consent among constituents in order to maintain the status quo. The efficacy and efficiency of this system may seem appealing to outsider rhetors who wish to insert themselves into the public discourse and mechanisms for change, but simply parroting Floyd 22 the system of the insiders is not workable when applied by those who do not already control the hegemonic structures. In Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri write:
The primary form of power that really confronts us today, however, is not so
dramatic or demonic but rather earthly and mundane. We need to stop confusing
politics with theology. The predominant contemporary form of sovereignty—if
we still want to call it that—is completely embedded within and supported by
legal systems and institutions of governance. . . . There is nothing extraordinary or
exceptional about this form of power. Its claim to naturalness, in fact its silent and
invisible daily functioning, makes it extremely difficult to recognize, analyze, and
challenge. (5)
The political mechanisms that exist in the United States are quite effective at maintaining the present circumstances, especially in that most people will fail to critique their “invisible daily functioning,” but this does not mean that those mechanisms are somehow sacrosanct or the only possible governmental construction. As Hardt and Negri note, there is nothing theological or otherworldly about the structures in which we live; the governmental structures at work in the
United States are simply part of the ideological framework of American thought—many, if not most, citizens of the United States are so accustomed to the form of government and representation in which they have lived their entire lives that they do not see how an alternative structure is even possible.
One such ideological assumption is the centralization of power. Americans elect individual leaders who are supposedly the distilled embodiment of a party’s will, its hopes and goals. Ostensibly, these individuals are the representatives10 of all their constituents. When those
10 Used here as both the sense of governmental representation and as a metaphorical stand-in for all those whom the individual alleges to represent. Floyd 23 constituents feel strongly enough about an issue that they would like to change, they are told that the best way to effect change is by “voting for new leaders” or “writing to their representatives.”
Of course, voting for new leaders requires concerted action, which may not be possible when active minority groups that are hurt by current policies are stifled by a mere plurality of apathetic voters who are unaffected by the status quo. Additionally, writing to a representative presumes that one has a representative who is sympathetic to minority causes and keeps an open mind regarding entrench policies and practices. These admonitions provide the illusion of democratic power while providing few avenues for legitimate change at the individual level. Again, this suggestion asserts the rhetorical power of democracy in the United States by presuming that a single individual’s vote can make a difference and, again, glorifies the representative in
American representative democracy. In other words, the avenues for change are localized in powerful individual leaders who have the authority to make such changes happen. An individual’s mechanism for change is limited to voting for and interacting with that representative—both of which take place out of the public’s eye. Everything in a representative democracy, whether it is radical change or conservative maintenance, seemingly must be filtered through the power structures as they exist, and those structures are centralized, without fail, in the idea of the individual. When those who petition for change acquiesce to this kind of representative agitation, they are granting Gramscian consent to the hegemony.
If most constituents feel as though they have a mechanism for effecting change, they will acquiesce to their current form of governance. The ability to vote and write to one’s representatives provide just such perceived mechanisms without requiring those who control the real mechanisms of power to give up any of their power and privilege. When the majority of citizens, especially those who live at least moderately comfortably under the status quo, believe Floyd 24 that the only way to effect change is by playing along with the system as it is currently constructed, the only changes will be superficial, and that framework benefits those who truly wield power and enjoy privilege. Victor Villanueva updates Gramscian hegemony for a more contemporary United States (Gramsci wrote the Prison Notebooks from 1929 to 1935;
Villanueva published Bootstraps in 1993) and provides a rhetorical context for the work.
Villanueva notes that Gramsci did not consider the United States to have traditional intellectuals—those intellectuals that Gramsci argues are of the dominant classes and, therefore, who work to perpetuate the status quo and dominant ideologies. It may be worth arguing whether there were American traditional intellectuals in the 1920s and 1930s, but Villanueva considers it enough to argue that there were American traditional intellectuals in the 1990s. To illustrate this point, Villanueva provides the example of E.D. Hirsch and his ideas regarding cultural literacy, which gained popular support in the mid-to-late 1980s (133-34). The gist of Hirsch’s work on cultural literacy is that there is a collection of cultural ideas that all literate people in each society should know and understand. Hirsch’s critics, of whom there are many, counter that any expected shared cultural knowledge will come primarily, if not exclusively, from the dominant culture and ideology, thus reinforcing the hegemonic power of the dominant groups and entities at the expense of minorities.
Villanueva’s criticism of Hirsch stems from Hirsch’s claims about the non-ideological middle class in America. Villanueva writes, “The middle class, after all, says Hirsch, is the dominant source of the national language and the national culture. He seems to believe that the middle class is the source of American power and the desired goal of all” (133). For Hirsch, the
American notion of the middle class exists outside of ideology and, therefore, outside of exclusivity and hegemonic influence. “The People” populate the middle class, and they come Floyd 25 from all walks of life; hence, their cultural knowledge must necessarily be inclusive and non- ideological. Villanueva counters: “But the whole notion of ‘the middle class’ is ideological”
(133). Hirsch comes from the dominant group upon which he wishes to bestow preferential treatment and cannot, therefore, see his own ideology as ideology, as Louis Althusser would note. Villanueva critiques this oversight by explaining:
Gramsci would acknowledge that civil society propagates the notion of a
relatively non-political or trans-political unifying entity called “the middle class.”
Equality within the middle class remains part of common sense, even though we
know that women of the middle class do not share equitably with the men of the
middle class. The notion remains, even though we know that castelike minorities
of the middle class do not enjoy the same bounties as middle-class whites. (134)
The middle class in America, Villanueva argues, is a rhetorical construct meant to solidify and maintain hegemonic power. Those in the middle class, as well as those who aspire to reach the middle class, provide their consent for the status quo because of the perception of control that comes with middle-class status. But, Villanueva claims, “Whatever power the middle class enjoys, it is not substantive hegemonic power. The middle class abides by the overall hegemony”
(134). The American middle class gets to play like they have power, while the real power continues to exist at the very top. The charade allows the world to continue in the same manner that it always has; it is a narrative of agency and autonomy for those whose acquiescence is necessary for this continuation to occur.
Hence, hegemonic consent operates by not calling attention to itself. There is a saying that was made popular by the film The Usual Suspects that goes, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” The meaning of this quote is that if Floyd 26 people do not believe in the devil, they will not believe in his influence, no matter how obvious it may be. The same is true for powerbrokers who operate by hegemonic consent. Althusser puts forward a similar explanation as Gramsci for the tacit acceptance of ideological concepts in discussing ideological state apparatuses. Althusser writes, “[T]hose who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology . . . As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself . . .” (“Ideological State Apparatus”). In
Western democratic functions, rationality is given a place of primacy over less rational human traits, such as emotions, at least in theory. In practice, everyone makes decisions based on a mixture of knowledge, emotions and ideologies, often while demanding empirical facts and objective positionalities from those around them. Despite the acceptance of ideology’s interpellation, many, if not most, commentators and politicians in Western democracies believe themselves to be “outside ideology,” the only ones operating from an empirical, rational base.
The capitalist fails to see how consumerism structures all interactions between its members in a way that is often negatively commodified; the Christian zealot fails to see how his/her religion denies existence and equality to most of the other inhabitants of the world. To accept that one’s beliefs are ideological is to accept those beliefs may be wrong in some way, or at least that they may not be true for everyone who were brought up and have existed in different circumstances, so one’s own beliefs must be cast as the natural order while everyone else’s beliefs are cast as mere ideologies. Ideology, and those who profit from it, must pull off the devil’s greatest trick and convince the world that it does not exist.
Of course, in hegemonic frameworks, the ideological state apparatuses often do not fall Floyd 27 for their own tricks. Additionally, those who attempt to use their money and power to influence public policy know that it is important to protect their anonymity so that the most people cannot possibly know who benefits from the policies put forward and made by politicians. This desire for anonymity of influence is the origin of the term “dark money” as it applies to politics in the
United States. Dark money is money donated to nonprofit organizations, who do not have to disclose their donors, with the goal of affecting elections and policies in the United States.
Without names attached to the donation of large amounts of money to influence public policy, it is difficult for the public to know who has a vested interest in the decisions politicians make and what those people or groups stand to gain from those decisions. The nonprofit groups generally agitate for ideological purposes and to attain the consent of the general population, but they seek to accomplish these goals without calling much attention to themselves, their donors or, typically, even those very goals. This is reflected in the names given to these groups, which are frequently not descriptive and, in fact, boring, such as Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which is a libertarian-conservative nonprofit political advocacy group founded and funded by the Koch brothers. The group does not disclose its donors, and it claims to support policies that focus on
“oil and gas development,” “healthcare freedom,” “free market solutions,” etc. These policies are vague ways of saying the group opposes restrictions on corporations, universal healthcare and social welfare programs.11
These practices of maintaining clandestine membership and objectives reflect what
11 Other organizations with misleading names include: The Energy & Environment Legal Institute (an organization aimed at climate change denial), The Family Research Institute (an organization that pushes debunked science showing that homosexuals are perverts and predators), The Federation for American Immigration Reform (an organization with ties to white supremacy groups and classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-Latino and anti-Catholic views). The list could go on for pages, but these three examples should suffice to demonstrate the way in which groups name themselves in ways that could be mistaken for groups supporting the policies they oppose or for issues entirely unrelated to the actual policy goals they wish to put forward. Floyd 28
Heather Hayes has written about regarding the nonchalant approach to U.S. drone strikes in faraway nations: politicians and other powerbrokers are more capable of doing whatever is in their own best interests as long as the wider public does not know anything about it. In Hayes’s examination of drone strikes, politicians, such as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, put forward cavalier attitudes about drone strikes in Pakistan, Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations because they know the U.S. public will have little familiarity with such strikes. In the case of the Koch
Brothers and other wealthy lobbyists, they shroud programs and organizations that have tremendous actual bearing on the lives of American citizens in boring, innocuous monikers so that most Americans will remain uninterested in what these groups are doing. The choice to present oneself or one’s actions as boring, especially in the realm of politics, can be intentionally deceptive, and is often indicative of policies and programs that are worth another look.12
Presidents and corporate lobbyists rarely traffic in that which is truly banal, and their desires to be seen as doing so should always be scrutinized.
These approaches to influencing government policies attempt to prevent any kind of real scrutiny by citizens or watchdog groups. These approaches attempt to employ the rhetoric of the boring in order to evade attention. Boring rhetoric is a kind of rhetorical euphemism in which rhetors convince outsiders not to pay too close attention to what an individual or group is doing by making the available information so boring as to be unappealing to read, watch or discuss.
Examples of boring rhetoric are terms and conditions agreements for products, legal documents
12 Conversely, inane theatrics that distract public discourse from significant issues in politics can provide its own kind of diversions. Trump, for example, often creates public spectacles to divert attention from any bad press he receives during his presidency. For example, at the time of this writing, one of the biggest news stories has been Trump’s inaccurate assertion that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama and his repeated endeavors in the following days to prove he was not wrong about this assertion. Much coverage has been given to this fiasco, taking away time and energy that could have been spent covering the current economic downturn and a new investigation into Trump’s attempts to profit from his position as president through the use of government-funded travel and lodging at his personal properties around the world. Floyd 29 explaining what businesses and organizations do and government reports of controversial actions. In her essay “Nothing to See or Fear: Light War and the Boring Visual Rhetoric of U.S.
Drone Imagery,” Jessy Ohl, writing about depictions of drone strikes by the U.S. and “light war” in general, argues:
Whereas traditional war rhetorics of assent privilege effervescent imagery to
captivate and persuade audiences of war’s (il)legitimacy, a different form of
stylization is necessary to lull subjects into acquiescence. In place of the vibrant,
poignant, and disruptive images that punctuated both militaristic and pacifistic
campaigns during previous total wars, it is the bland, forgettable, and ultimately
boring images of violence that help mollify the demos to light war. (615)
Ohl writes about the actions of the U.S. government in carrying out controversial drone attacks that many members of the public actively oppose, but, Ohl argues, the U.S. government attempts to placate such critics by making the information about drone strikes difficult to find and boring upon discovery. These bureaucratic hallmarks of dissuasion are the same tactics employed by organizations like AFP, which attempt to render themselves hard to trace, easy to forget and difficult to understand in terms of policies and goals. While these organizations skirt scrutiny, they effect policies in which their ideological viewpoints are taken as the natural order of things and without ideology. The concept of hidden operates both literally and metaphorically toward the maintenance of hegemony: in the traditional, metaphorical sense, hegemonic agents work in positions that are not immediately available to public scrutiny by their natures (i.e., confidential meetings between members of the government or defense contractors carrying out secret military campaigns so that the government is not seen to be involved), and in the less traditional, literal sense, hegemonic entities shape the visual narrative in order to attain the consent of the governed Floyd 30
(i.e., broadcasting images with no context of migrant caravans approaching the U.S. border or denying reporters or visitors the ability to bring phones or cameras into prison facilities).
Outsider activists often seek to disrupt the visual hegemony by rendering visible that which the hegemons wish to keep hidden or providing context to imagery that has been put forward with the intent of standing alone.
Hence, outsider rhetors have several official channels of hegemonic power working in tandem to constrict their abilities to participate in the representative democracy of the United
States, but there are also a few important theoretical approaches to consider that are of profound concern for outsider rhetors. What follows is a brief exploration of some of these concepts; these ideas will be explored in greater detail in the body chapters of this work.
Tied to the notion of hegemonic consent and ideological state apparatuses is the concept of new materialism. New materialism is a theoretical framework that explores the agency of non- living, especially non-human, objects. People tend to consider human actions to be the only actions that count in decisions that affect the Earth and its societies, but matter has agency, for good and for bad. In her book Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett explores the way in which litter can effect change, alter people’s opinions and react to its surroundings in ways that are often reserved only for human beings. In the context of this project, institutions, buildings, walls, forms, maps, documents, signs and myriad other “inanimate” objects exert control over the human entities involved in issues related to immigration, imprisonment and maturation. Much like the theological mysticism many people bestow onto the governmental organizations, institutions, frameworks and individuals, as critiqued by Hardt and Negri, objects may serve as the onus for those disinclined to act. Despite denying the ability of objects to think, act or interact, the objects may serve as the insurmountable reasoning for which hegemonic actors Floyd 31 argue against change.
This kind of excuse for inaction may be easily understood in the cases of immovable structures such as prison complexes, border walls, the manifestations of physical bodies themselves, etc., but the inanimate objects, including these monstrous structures, gain their prominence and power via ideological mechanisms that can be changed at any moment with enough desire and action. Prison complexes are not naturally-occurring phenomena in the vein of
Uluru; border walls were not formed over eons as were the Grand Canyon or Mariana’s Trench; instead, these structures are the physical manifestations of ideas and ideologies that were put in place by politicians and other human agents that only seem impenetrable now because of complacency and consent. These structures exemplify the new materialist focus on place and space, and the ideological distinctions that arise from this differentiation.
Border walls, prisons, schools and other physical structures that will be discussed in this work are chronotopic in that their physical existences come to stand for very specific ideologies that are indicative of a given point in time. Today, most U.S. citizens will have lived their entire lives with a fairly stable set of borders (between states, between other nations, etc.), but the current geographical construction of the United States is a relatively recent one (not to mention the recency of the nation itself within the global framework of history). To understand this point, one need only look at a map of the United States before the Mexican-American War, which resulted in the Mexican Cession, or the surrender of over 500,000 sq. miles of Mexican territory to the United States. No one alive today possesses a living memory of Texas, Arizona or most of
California as part of Mexico, but this was the case less than 200 years ago. In the case of the
U.S.-Mexico border, time and space constitute a narrative that seems permanent, one in which the United States extends to a specific point, and that it is the right of the U.S. government to Floyd 32 protect its borders to that point, but this narrative is ideological—it presumes there is some kind of ethereal right of ownership bestowed on the United States rather than the fact that land acquisition and resultant borders tend to be the results of wars, occupations, surrenders and treaties and, therefore, are under the constant threat of further change.
Theories of space and place may work against outsider rhetors for the most part, but there are also ways in which such notions can be usurped and altered to better fit with outsider frameworks. Contemporary technology problematizes the notion of fixed locations, physical distribution and face-to-face networking. Social media allows activists to contact one another from completely different sides of the country or even in entirely different nations altogether.
Media such as podcasts allow people to distribute and receive ideas from one another, even if they are restricted by physical barriers such as prison walls or border fences. Traditionally, physical structures and tangible objects have worked toward the ends of insider rhetors, but a burgeoning de-emphasis on physicality in terms of space, place, objects and media favors those who have been historically oppressed. This shift toward decentralized mechanisms of participation lends itself to a more disparate framework of participation as well, one that does not require individual leaders or congregations into one physical location.
In the examples of outsider rhetoric presented in this work I will explore the notion of rhizomatic participation in social movements. If insider rhetoric relies on Gramscian consent to individual representation, outsider rhetorics (counter-rhetorics) should hypothetically attempt to move away from these notions of consent and individualism toward a participation that is non- hierarchical and built on dissensus. Hardt and Negri wonder, “At issue here is whether only hegemonic, unified subjects or also horizontally organized multiplicities are capable of political action” (173). The authors go on to argue that the horizontal and participatory frameworks that Floyd 33 facilitate contemporary biopolitical production exemplify the plausibility of cooperative, non- hierarchical social movements for change.
In the United States, this kind of leaderless resistance has a troubling history, having gained popularity in the late twentieth century through its use by white nationalists and radical far-right terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh. The height of its popularity amongst these individuals can be attributed to the essay “Leaderless Resistance” by Louis Beam, a member of the Ku Klux Klan and various Christian Identity groups. Writing an exploration of leaderless resistance that downplays its significance and ability to effect change in 1997, Jeffrey Kaplan explains the concept thusly:
More a mark of despair than a revolutionary strategy, leaderless resistance as it
was formulated and disseminated to the far right faithful sought to make a virtue
of weakness and political isolation. Leaderless resistance may be defined as a
kind of lone wolf operation in which an individual, or a very small, highly
cohesive group, engage in acts of anti-state violence independent of any
movement, leader or network of support. (80)
It is important to note that Kaplan describes leaderless resistance as marked by weakness and political isolation. The concept of leaderless movement is effective when it is difficult to coordinate more wide-scale action. Kaplan concludes his essay with the question: “In short, if a popular revolution is not on the horizon, what is left but the despairing bravado of the lone wolf assassin” (93)? Kaplan can be forgiven for coming to such a conclusion in the wake of the
Oklahoma City bombing; McVeigh had not inspired a popular revolution and was eventually executed for his actions. However, as immoral as McVeigh’s actions were, hindsight has shown them to be rather effective in accomplishing their ends. Many of the mass shooters in the United Floyd 34
States since McVeigh have taken inspiration from him, either directly or vicariously and many of the ideas he espoused are more openly shared in the mainstream of American political discourse today.
None of this discussion of the success of leaderless resistance is to praise McVeigh or similar white nationalist terrorists; rather, it is to demonstrate the efficacy of such an approach to participation within a discourse when one occupies the outsider status. Leaderless resistance does not need to be violent and it is not inherently supportive of hateful ideologies. Its lingering existence serves as proof that it can be an effective tool for coordinating disparate, small groups who wish to agitate for change that is not desired, or perhaps even considered, by most of the population. Once again, technology has spurred the rise and efficacy of such movements. The organization Black Lives Matter (BLM) is ubiquitous in the American consciousness today, but its origins are rhizomatic. The organization began as a hashtag on various social media platforms in the wake of the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman and Zimmerman’s subsequent acquittal. BLM, the organization, explains on its “Herstory” page this origin: “As
#BlackLivesMatter developed throughout 2013 and 2014, we utilized it as a platform and organizing tool. Other groups, organizations, and individuals used it to amplify anti-Black racism across the country, in all the ways it showed up.” Although the organization has organizers and coordinators who may be considered leaders, it exists more as a catch-all for activism against anti-Black racism in the United States, or around the world. No individual must wait for approval from BLM to use the hashtag or to evoke what it stands for; the leaderless movement centers around a set of ideas and nebulous goals that might be achieved from disparate, loosely coordinated action.
In many cases, social activists are liminal figures within society. As many privileged Floyd 35 members of society will not be aware of their own privilege, as is frequently the case with the readily dismissed idea of white privilege, agents for change often straddle borders between the worlds in which they operate. In her seminal work Borderlands, Gloria Anzaldua writes about her experiences between Mexico and the United States, Spanish and English, her working class background and her intellectual pursuits and more. Those who inhabit, straddle or cross borders can never fully position themselves within a single sphere.
Early in Borderlands, Anzaldúa writes about the use of borders as arbitrary mechanisms by which people are divided and the purposes for these divisions. According to Anzaldúa, borders are used as rhetorical tropes in order to preserve power structures as they exist, which largely benefits those who are safely held on the privileged sides of the borders. Anzaldúa writes:
Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us
from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A
borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of
an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and
forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the
perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the
half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of
the ‘normal.’ . . . The only ‘legitimate’ inhabitants are those in power, the whites
and those who align themselves with whites. (25-26)
Borders serve only to prevent those who occupy the different sides of the artificial barriers from understanding one another, from listening to the needs and desires of groups who are, in truth, more similar than dissimilar. Those inside the borders must not allow themselves to be softened toward the outsiders lest they lose their own power and privilege they enjoy as a result of living Floyd 36 inside the boundaries. These boundaries exist in the physical world, inside physical bodies and inside the languages we all use. Anzaldúa’s work explores the way in which borderlands present spaces and places where those who attempt to transgress the boundaries find themselves trapped in liminality, duality, the in-between. Attempts to hold onto what exists outside the border prevents acceptance inside the border; acceptance inside the border is, in truth, impossible. This leads to a constant existence within these liminal spaces, requiring the outsider to shuttle between the sides of the borders.
The concept of shuttling between languages, societies and expectations is also prevalent in the work of Suresh Canagarajah. Canagarajah, in his work A Geopolitics of Academic Writing, explains the process of achieving his first publication in a Western academic journal after having already managed a high level of success and prestige in the academic realm of Sri Lanka.
Canagarajah details the significant changes he made, moving his academic politics toward the center, at the cost of some of his more natural Sri Lankan ideologies. After his journal was accepted with the revisions suggested by the referees, Canagarajah details the critical responses he received from his former colleagues in Sri Lanka. Ultimately, he claims, “It is quite understandable that even periphery scholars who move to the center can eventually reach a point where their perspective differs from that of their colleagues in the periphery and get absorbed into center-based ways of thinking” 27). Hence, acceptance into the “mainstream” requires a shifting into acceptable terrain and the negation of non-standard frameworks (of communication, ideology, research, etc.).
However, Anzaldúa shows that sometimes even the shift is not enough for minimal acceptance. Borderlands and shuttling also create members who speak and operate between languages and frameworks, but even such halfway measures do not offer total acceptance. Floyd 37
Anzaldúa writes:
Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to
translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak
Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than
having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be
made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I
will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's
voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. (81)
Hegemonic gatekeepers insist on a total transition into the dominant frameworks of language, culture and society. Borders do not allow for differences because the acceptance of differences may serve as the first steps toward deconstructing the institutions of privilege and power enjoyed by the parties who established the boundaries in the first place. Outsiders must forego themselves to find acceptance, which is, even still, not a guarantee. The only certainty of achieving insider status is to have been an insider all along.
Outsiders may be liminal figures, but they are, at any rate, outside the primary mechanisms of power in a society, institution, culture or other organizational framework.
Consequently, the traditional modes of achieving change may not be immediately accessible to them, and they must find alternative methods for bringing attention to their causes. One such method for casting light on lesser-known issues is the rhetorical strategy of parrhesia, which could also be referred to as “speaking truth to power.” In his book Keepin’ It Hushed, Vorris
Nunley explains the importance of parrhesia to the disruption of exclusionary epistemologies.
Writing about a specific kind of outsider rhetoric employed by African Americans, Nunley explains the value of African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric (AAHHR), which is his term for Floyd 38 the epistemological rhetorics used among African Americans in African American spaces when/where white listeners are not present. Nunley claims:
[Whiteness and the public sphere are] constructed by a matrix of rhetoric and
practices that manufactures, mobilizes, and monitors truth, that indicates who can
utter truth and where truth can be uttered. While individual intention matters,
rationalities mediate intentionality, operating on the level of power, categories,
and framing. Framing what it means to be a citizen, an ideal citizen, an American
citizen, and even who or what fits the category . . .” (12)
The hegemony operates on an unseen level to determine who can say what
(when/where/why/how/to whom). Such a notion of acceptable epistemologies operates to silence voices ahead of their potentiality. It is for this reason that Nunley finds AAHHR and a better understanding of it more broadly as crucial; he argues that “hush harbor rationalities that enter into the public sphere interject into that sphere forms of intelligibility that alter the terrain of meaning necessary for a messy, but vibrant, democracy” (13). In order to truly conduct a democracy, public discourse must be a Bakhtinian heteroglossia, not just one that caters to the dominant voices.
Outsider rhetoric operates within a similar framework to the genre of “outsider art,” also known as “L’art brut,” does in the realm of visual art. Rita Elizabeth Risser defines outsider art in a piece of commentary published in Museum Anthropology in 2017 titled “Insiders Curating
Outsider Art:” “Outsider art, then, refers to works created by artists who are not trained in the norms and practices of the established art world” (79). Much like outsider rhetors who are not trained in or do not benefit from the accepted ideas of rhetoric in each society, outsider artists are not trained in the styles and expectations of the art community at large. For decades, outsider Floyd 39 artists have been receiving deserved recognition for their failure to adhere to, and intentional disruption of, critical notions of norms in artwork. Those who accept and appreciate outsider art do not do so begrudgingly; they do not consider the artwork as deficient. Instead, outsider art is celebrated precisely because it operates outside of the expectations of the field. Outsider art provides a perspective that could never originate from a trained artist because the background experiences and epistemologies are entirely different.
Risser continues her discussion of outsider art by claiming, “Typically, these artists are untutored because they are socially marginalized individuals; for example, they may be hospitalized due to mental illness, incarcerated as criminals, homeless, or poor” (79). Hence, outsider artists are not necessarily attempting simply to buck trends in the artistic community by eschewing training in favor of a devotion to amateurism. Instead, these are folks who want to engage in artistic endeavors, but who are vulnerable as a result of their statuses. Risser gives the examples of those who suffer from mental illnesses, are prisoners, deal with homelessness and/or lack material means, but this list could be expanded ad infinitum to include any marginalized populations, such as undocumented immigrants and children. The outsider artist has a desire to participate in artistic endeavors despite a lack of technical knowledge or reverence for codified traditions. Similarly, the outsider rhetor has a desire to participate in public discourse in a personal way without understanding or being accepted into the traditional frameworks of public discourse. This outsider status does not need to be indicative of deficiency for the outsider rhetor any more than it is for the outsider artist. In fact, the undermining of rhetorical norms can effectively lend itself a stronger position of agency through its organic origination. Placed side- by-side with traditional understandings of rhetorical approaches, outsider discourse may show the fallacies that undergird mindless adherence to the status quo and the hegemonic consent that Floyd 40 results from that adherence.
Therefore, another important rhetorical concept for rhetorical outsiders is Kenneth
Burke’s notion of perspective by incongruity. According to Burke, perspective by incongruity involves pushing “the use of a term by taking it from the context in which it [is] habitually used and [applying] it to another” (89). In other words, the rhetor creates a paradoxical notion of terms and ideas in order to challenge preconceived ideas and concepts. The rhetor places what Sara
Ahmed would call “sticky terms” in different contexts as a means of highlighting their stickiness.
Hence, an undocumented immigrant speaks up in order to effect changes in political policy despite the fact s/he does not have proper authorization even to be in the society s/he hopes to change. A (former) prisoner demonstrates his/her humanity, becomes a respected member of the community or speaks out on issues despite the fact s/he can no longer participate in the most fundamental way (through voting). Young people take a meaningful interest in policies and practices within society at large, despite the fact they may not be legally able to vote and most people do not give credit to youth for having ideas of their own or for understanding circumstances taking place in the world around them.
As detailed above, outsider rhetors have a treasure trove of theoretical approaches from which to operate. In practice, however, such efforts can be met with staunch opposition. On July
14, 2019, Trump tweeted that the “’Progressive’ Democratic Congresswomen, who originally come from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world . . .” should “. . . go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” The “Democratic Congresswomen” to whom
Trump refers are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, three of whom were born in the United States and one of whom is a naturalized U.S. citizen. Floyd 41
After the tweet, the crowd at Trump’s next rally chanted “Send her back,” referring to Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar. What this tweet and the subsequent chants demonstrate is that outsiders, even those who operate within the pre-ordained channels of the representative democracy of the United States, will face additional scrutiny and unnecessary obstacles in their efforts to effect change. If the official mechanisms are so distorted as to justify telling women of color in congress to “go back to where you came from,” how can the majority of outsider rhetors effectively operate in alternative forms of democratic participation? Such will be the aims of this dissertation.
Methods
The bulk of this dissertation will be carried out through textual analysis of political speeches, social media posts, news reports, organizational websites, books, events, and other texts that serve as examples of insider and outsider rhetorics. These texts will be examined through a variety of lenses that highlight their rhetorical functions as they pertain to numerous theoretical frameworks, such as border rhetorics, Marxist rhetorics and social movement rhetorics. The texts will demonstrate the way in which much of the political discourse surrounding American democracy serves as a mechanism by which outsider groups are excluded on one side and the ways in which democratic outsiders make use of alternative forms of participation in order to inject their ideas into public discourse nonetheless.
I have gathered the bulk of these texts from sources online, including various social media platforms, websites for news organizations, websites for activist organizations, YouTube and other such outlets. In most cases, these texts have been hosted by their original creators, and there is little concern about the validity and credibility of their contents. When there have been concerns, I have cross-referenced the sources I have found with several other sources in order to Floyd 42 ascertain the extent to which the information is trustworthy. As I have worked exclusively with texts, there has not been a need to obtain IRB approval for this dissertation. However, I have sought to acquire the designation of “not for human subjects” from the IRB Office at the
University of Cincinnati.
Because the subject of this dissertation is still ongoing, and, in fact, will continue indefinitely most likely, the primary focus will be the build up to the 2016 presidential election in the United States and, roughly, the subsequent two-and-a-half years. The completion of this dissertation will align with the commencement of the debates for the 2020 presidential primaries for the Democratic Party, and with those debates will most likely come a deluge of comments, policies and events that could serve as the basis for their own dissertation-length analysis.
Undoubtedly, the policies and soundbites created in the Democratic primary debates will elicit unofficial responses from Trump and other republic politicians and prominent figures. For this reason, barring extremely relevant and vital data that arises from these debates, they will not be included within the scope of this dissertation. As useful as they may be to the overall concept of this project, there must be conclusive frames and scopes in order to render this already-enormous pool of data a bit wieldier.
Additionally, original plans for this work had called for attendance at a number of events of social activism, interaction with activist participants and, ideally, interviews with a few prominent members of various groups of outsider rhetors. However, time and length constraints have become such that these plans will need to be shelved and used later as a springboard for additional research into this focal area. However, having created some interview questions and ideas for research based on these plans, I have appended some relevant materials, as I believe they may still provide additional considerations for readers and interested parties. They have, in Floyd 43 some ways, guided my research efforts, albeit somewhat tacitly.
Chapter Descriptions
Chapter one will focus on the dichotomous application of democratic rhetorical discourse as it applies to immigrants in the United States by insider and outsider rhetors. From the perspective of insider rhetors, discussions of immigrants in the United States focus on questions of citizenship, Americanness and belonging in order to limit artificially conceptions of who has a right to representation and self-advocacy in the United States. People who were not born in the
United States or those who, despite being born in the U.S., do not adhere to stringent guidelines determining proper behavior and appearance according to traditional notions of Americanness are depicted by insider rhetors as being dangerous to the interests of traditionally-defined
Americans.
Conversely, from the perspective of outsider rhetors, discussion of immigrants in the
United States problematizes the conception of a monolithic interpretation of Americanness and belonging. Through texts, events and other rhetorical acts created and enacted by immigrant outsider rhetors, this chapter will explore the way narratives can be changed to focus on the humanity of all those who reside in the United States, alternative forms of democratic participation disrupt the disingenuous rhetoric of democracy in mainstream frameworks, and activist actions can empower immigrants and foreground causes that benefit migrants and their families. Finally, these outsider rhetorics will demonstrate the fallacy of the logic of borders and boundaries, deconstructing the idea that borders are natural, commonsensical and unchanging.
Chapter two will examine the way democratic participation is further constricted in the
United States by removing the legitimate voices of prisoners. Insider rhetors attempt to portray prisoners as subhuman entities who are defined by the actions that led to their imprisonment and Floyd 44 who are incapable of change. Concern is shifted from the systems that exist to criminalize some actions and not others, and to thereby justify the loss of many basic human rights, to a concern for law-and-order policies that will protect the “law-abiding” American citizens. Such approaches are presented as commonsense methods of protecting the rights of those who can understand and operate within the status quo.
Outsider rhetors seek to problematize these commonly-accepted conceptions of what it means for a person to break the laws of a society and to lose many, if not most, avenues for civic participation as a result of those transgressions. Podcasts, social media accounts and other platforms for discourse serve as springboards for changing the prevailing perceptions of prisoners, seeking to demonstrate that prisoners are more than the sum of their crimes. Numerous advocates for prisoner rights examine the way in which market logics are largely to blame for these perceptions and call into question the ways in which prisoners in the United States are largely treated as a source of cheap, exploitable labor. Such alternative forms of democratic participation also shed light on the sinister implications of the bureaucratic dissuasions that allow prisons to continue to operate outside the public eye and without widespread scrutiny or oversight.
Chapter three focuses on the discourse surrounding the activism and democratic participation of youth in the United States. Insider rhetoric regarding youth activism presupposes a lack of interest and understanding on the part of young people. Concerns that young activists voice are dismissed as the product of a misunderstanding of the world due to inexperience or of coercion on the part of adults with an agenda operating behind the scenes, using naïve young people as puppets to acquire emotional responses from the public on heated issues such as gun control and climate change. Floyd 45
On the other hand, outsider rhetors, often the young people themselves, employ the means that are at their disposal, including social media, their physical presences and the national attention they receive from harrowing experiences like surviving school shootings to demonstrate their own senses of agency and understanding. The rhetoric of child activists demonstrates that age is not necessarily an indicator of legitimate concern and good ideas. Child activists often operate from honest concerns about their own futures and future worlds, and they are capable of understanding, orchestrating and enacting their own alternative forms of democratic participation when provided with contexts that do not actively inhibit their voices.
The fourth and final chapter serves as the conclusion for the work. In this chapter I consider potential solutions to greater inclusion of outsider voices in democracy, as well as what will not solve the issue. The contexts that foster exclusionary discourse are the products of complex factors, not individual politicians or problems. Therefore, establishing a more inclusive framework requires multiple solutions, various people and organizations and a lot of time. It is tempting to think that normality can be restored through the simple election of different politicians, but the election of exclusionary politicians tends to be the result of a reaction against outsider groups, not the cause of such groups. Outsiders and their allies must consider how to frame their rhetorical responses to exclusionary rhetors and politicians in order to bring about change and acceptance.
The conclusion also considers the way in which outsiders often have intersectional statuses of exclusion. Although not considered directly in one of the body chapters of this work, the original idea for this research was the detention of immigrant children at the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly in the Trump administration. It is difficult enough for a person to achieve democratic participation as an outsider with a singular status of outsider, and that has been the Floyd 46 focus of the bulk of this dissertation. However, most outsiders will possess multiple exclusionary statuses, and these additional struggles are exemplified by the immigrant children who are detained in literal cages by the nation that fancies itself the most democratic and free of our time.
How does one even begin to achieve a fair and democratic engagement while possessing myriad, intersectional statuses that inhibit democratic participation? How can these children carve out a mechanism for participation when the democratic society in which they aspire to live devalues the voices of children, immigrants and prisoners, not to mention the poor, non-white, non-
English-speaking and various other statuses? The conclusion attempts consider these additional troubles, as well as making a call for other potential future avenues of research and consideration.
What follows next is chapter one, “Immigrant Activism.” The chapter begins by outlining the ways in which mainstream democratic discourse in the United States operates to concretize hegemonic consent of natural-born American citizens again the interests of immigrants. The discourse of anti-immigrant politicians, lobbyists and media personalities casts immigrants as those who do not belong in American society and certainly not in its democratic discourse. The chapter, then, progresses to the alternative democratic participations of immigrant activists, such as Jose Antonio Vargas and participants in his organization Define American and the edited collections of America Ferrara and Peter Orner, which collect the stories of immigrants, documented and undocumented to humanize their experiences. These forms of outsider rhetoric serve to counter the anti-immigrant narratives that strive to take away immigrant voices from the democratic process. Floyd 47
Chapter One: Immigrant Activism
Rhetorical Insiders: Immigrant Fears
The fear of immigrants and aliens taking over the role of citizens within a democracy has a long history, and, in fact, probably dates to the creation of established civilizations. In his work on democratic governments, Politics, Aristotle writes about the dangers of overpopulated cities, claiming that “it is [easier] for strangers and sojourners to assume the rights of citizens, as they will easily escape detection in so great a multitude” (Book VII). The “other” in the form of cultural outsiders seems dangerous because it represents an unknown, something murky and strange that contradicts what the culture at large understands and holds dear. For a state and its actors, such as the U.S. government and Donald Trump, fears of the lack of security, in particular as this security relates to whiteness and white privilege, represent an easy way to score political points, a tactic that has a long history in the realm of U.S. politics. H.L. Mencken, writing in
1922, explains, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary” (qtd. in Wilson 117).
Throughout U.S. history, these “hobgoblins” have taken many forms, such as the vengeance of freed slaves following the end of the Civil War, the scourge of alcohol that led to
Prohibition and the dangers of Japanese-Americans during World War II. In the post-9/11 era of the United States, there are easy political points to be won by campaigning on the dangers of harboring a soft spot for immigrants and refugees who arrive in the U.S. searching for a better life. The anti-immigrant/anti-refugee narrative asks, “How can we possibly know who these people are?” And, on the surface, this seems to be a reasonable question. The intricacies of the processes for vetting refugees and immigrants are not the focus of this essay, but it is important Floyd 48 to understand that there is a logical basis for such fears, even if it is one that is based on a lack of understanding regarding these processes. It is a lack of understanding that is easily exploited, both intentionally and unintentionally, to justify harsh policies that dehumanize outsiders and scapegoat them for the ills that have befallen the “mainstream” citizens. The seemingly rational concerns for safety provide politicians and other isolationist rhetors ample opportunities to stoke the fears of the populous.
What makes the rhetoric of fear so powerful for politicians is that most of the concerns brought up by politicians have correlation to real-world, tangible sources of danger. Anti- immigrant politicians and rhetors do not make up boogeymen whole cloth and hope that gullible or mean-spirited citizens will latch on to these ideas; instead, they build on the fears that are already percolating in the national zeitgeist. In the introduction to the book Entertaining Fear:
Rhetoric and the Political Economy of Social Control, Catherine Chaput writes, “[R]hetorical energy and its overdetermination loosely bind society together in the interests of conserving the current political economic system. Although individuals certainly act on their own volition, their choices are powerfully proscribed by the rhetorical energy of fear” (14). Because there are, and will always be, legitimate things of which we should be afraid in the world, there is a “rhetorical energy of fear” from which fearmongering rhetors can draw.
When Trump and other anti-immigrant politicians complain that the United States cannot adequately vet the immigrants and refugees who attempt to enter the United States, their claims may be demonstrably false, but they are effective because they are made in the age of terrorism in which most voting-age citizens live with the indelible images of the attacks of 9/11 in their heads. Fearmongering is affective rhetoric, as Sara Ahmed and other scholars would call it; citizens, especially voters, are vulnerable to rhetorical appeals to emotion and reminders of our Floyd 49 national vulnerability operate on an affective level, calling attention to sticky memories of times when outsiders/others were dangerous to national identity and, more importantly, national lives.
The affective nature of such responses renders them as visceral, intractable, impervious to rational thought and, most likely, unspoken. Many people, therefore, live with the legitimate fear that terrorists will exploit vulnerable security mechanisms in order to infiltrate the country once again and carry out another large-scale attack on innocent Americans. One does not need to be gullible or mean-spirited to worry that another such attack could take place in this way; one need only not entirely understand the process by which immigrants and refugees are granted access to the United States for this kind of rhetorical fearmongering to be effective.
Of course, the myth of immigrant criminality is not entirely contrived by cynical politicians as a means of securing electoral victories; it is based in myriad other factors including emotions, profitability, control and the hierarchical structuring of society. Sara Ahmed notes that
“boundary formations are bound up with anxiety not as a sensation that comes organically from within a subject or group, but as the effect of this ongoing constitution of the ‘apartness’ of a subject or group” (51). Ahmed demonstrates this “apartness” through the example of a British
National Front poster that warns of “swarms” of “illegal immigrants and bogus asylum seekers”
(1). The poster cautions that acceptance of these others into the country will project the nation as
“soft,” and “The soft nation is too emotional, too easily moved by the demands of others, and too easily seduced into assuming that claims for asylum, as testimonies of injury, are narratives of truth” (2). Hence, making border decisions based on soft emotionality, not the cold rationality of self-preservation, endangers nations.
Beyond the dangers of emotions, Jamie Longazel explains that the criminalization of outsiders can offer imminently tangible benefits for various power brokers of nations: “. . . the Floyd 50 false premise of entrenched immigrant criminality creates profits, engenders political benefits for elites, degrades minority groups, and controls exploitable populations” (88). Additionally, professor Élisabeth Vallet author of the book Borders, Fences, and Walls: State of Insecurity?, argues that “Walls are public relations exercises where governments demonstrate that they are actually doing something. They usually create more problems.” Hence, there is great value
(political, economic, social, emotional, etc.) in maintaining the potential for danger that comes with increased levels of immigration. If the general population believes that there is an evil from which they must be protected, those who are in positions to offer that sense of safety stand to dictate the terms of societal structuring and reap the rewards that may result from that structure.
What undergirds the notion of pitting the populace against immigrants and other disenfranchised others is the reliance on the us vs. them mentality. Most politicians who employ these tactics are firmly entrenched in insider rhetoric; they are often white, American-born, heterosexual males who ascribe to the numerous beliefs systems that structure the traditional concept of American life. In contrast, those whom the majority attacks are those who are outsiders within this structure. Immigrants, especially undocumented immigrants, do not easily conform to the expectations of conservative America, and are, therefore, an easy target. Because most Americans know so little about immigrants they readily believe the spurious claims about immigrants; because immigrants do not have a solid platform, in terms of audience level, credibility or authorization, from which to broadcast the truth about themselves, anti-immigrant lies often pass along unchecked.
Hence, the real education most Americans have regarding immigrants is through a pedagogy of violence. Lynn Worsham describes this kind of education in her seminal essay
“Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion” thusly: “A rhetoric of Floyd 51 pedagogic violence will focus specifically on the way violence addresses and educates emotion and inculcates an affective relation to the world. . . . School, workplace, and family violence are pedagogies of emotion, and as such they are particularly effective ways of locating and anchoring us in a way of life” (216). Interactions with the immigrant other come from an informal source of knowledge acquisition, and it is a source of tainted information that schools the emotions in a violent way. Lynn suggests that a rhetoric of this pedagogy of violence must focus on how attention may be called to the illogical nature of such belief systems and how they inherently reinforce the status quo, not out of some natural force or because it is the most appropriate system for all society’s denizens, but because it is the best interests of the dominant hegemonic groups.
Worsham explains:
The success of decolonization depends, it seems to me, on a recognition that the
primary work of pedagogy is more fundamental than the imposition of a dominant
framework of meanings. Its primary work is to organize an emotional world, to
inculcate patterns of feeling that support the legitimacy of dominant interests,
patterns that are especially appropriate to gender, race, and class locations.
Pedagogy locates individuals objectively in a hierarchy of power relations; but
also, and more importantly, it organizes their affective relations to that location, to
their own condition of subordination, and to others in that hierarchical structure.
Pedagogy binds each individual to the social world through a complex and often
contradictory affective life that remains, for the most part, just beyond the horizon
of semantic availability, and its success depends on a mystification or
misrecognition of this primary work. (223) Floyd 52
Worsham concludes that one of the primary mechanisms for accomplishing this mystification is through the relegation of emotions into the private life. Most Americans cannot understand that their dominant ideology, as imposed by the power structures of life in the United States, prohibit, or at least inhibit, their abilities to understand the immigrant other in any meaningful way.
Furthermore, the relegation of emotions into the private sphere leaves no room for concern regarding the treatment of immigrant others in the United States. This framework operates both to maintain the dominant ideologies as they presently exist in the United States while at the same time denying that any kind of emotional schooling has even taken place. Consequently, a “good
American” is one who does not question his/her opinions about the immigrant others coming to the United States; a “good American” trusts the prevailing opinion that has been handed down by the dominant ideology and hegemonic forces.
Because of the dependence on traditional notions of what an American looks/thinks/acts like, insider rhetoric as it relates to immigrants and immigration politics relies on Gramscian notions of hegemonic consent to maintain the status quo of American public and political discourse. Insider rhetoric regarding immigration posits that immigrants are welcome in the country if they “get in line” and apply for citizenship “the right way.” Most Americans will most likely never need to apply for an immigration status inside or outside of the United States, so these expectations will never apply directly to them. Therefore, the belief that there is some simple method by which immigrants can apply for and receive American citizenship seems like a reasonable request. As a result of these two factors, many American citizens who are not explicitly, let alone maliciously, anti-immigrant will consent to laws that regulate the unauthorized voices of those who are not in the country as a result of the prescribed mechanisms.
In actual practice, many, if not most, immigrants do not have legitimate options to “get Floyd 53 legal” or to have begun the process from a legal standpoint. As Joseph Carens notes in his book
The Ethics of Immigration, “In many democratic states, there is no effective line for admissions for those without family ties or special credentials. . . . Most of those who settle as
[undocumented immigrants] would have no possibility of getting in through any authorized channel. To say they should stand in a line that does not exist or does not move is disingenuous”
(154). Furthermore, in cases in which immigrants are fleeing violence and starvation in their home nations, claiming they should “wait in line” is unethical. In such cases, remaining in one’s home nation for even a short period of time may be a death sentence.
The concept of “getting legal” is further problematized by the retributive laws that govern applications for citizenship by those who have been found to have lived in the United States without proper authorization previously. Jose Antonio Vargas explains these restrictive laws in his book Dear America: “[U]ndocumented immigrants are banished for at least three years if they’ve lived in the country without proper documentation for six months; if they’ve been here illegally for a year or more, the banishment lasts ten years” (209). These restrictions apply equally to undocumented immigrants who arrived of their own volition as adults and to those who were brought to the country as children. Essentially, for a person who was brought to the
United States without documentation as a child, and who has lived in the United States exclusively since childhood, “getting legal” would entail leaving the country s/he considers home, and for many such immigrants this would mean leaving the only homes they have ever known, and living in an unfamiliar nation for ten years before even beginning the process of acquiring citizenship in the United States, which is itself long and arduous.
The insider rhetoric anti-immigration voices employ in order to attain the hegemonic consent to maintain status quo could easily be the subject of a rhetorical analysis in a first-year Floyd 54 composition course. Insider rhetors use appeals to logos, pathos and ethos in order to construct the master narrative of immigration and immigrants in the United States. Appeals to logos come in the form of allegedly disinterested research; appeals to pathos come in the form of fearmongering and sad stories about individuals; appeals to ethos come in the form of immigrants who oppose immigration and other people and/or groups who seem to have a better understanding of how one should feel about immigration than most citizens. I will look at some of these forms of insider rhetoric in more detail.
One of the most problematic forms of anti-immigrant insider rhetoric is the use of research by organizations with innocuous sounding names like The Federation for American
Immigration Reform (FAIR), The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) and Numbers USA. For immigrants and immigrant advocates/allies the problem with these organizations is that they provide the veneer of empirical evidence and logic while simultaneously skewing, or even fabricating, findings. FAIR, for example, was founded by John Tanton, whose views the
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) calls “white nationalist.” The SPLC came to this conclusion based on Tanton’s own words, such as his oft-cited letter written to a FAIR donor in
1993 in which he proclaims, “One of my prime concerns . . . is about the decline of folks who look like you and me.” In that letter, Tanton continued, “[F]or European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that” (qtd. in
DeParle). Despite these clear attempts to stifle immigration from a white-supremacist/white- nationalist perspective, several conservative organizations and news outlets routinely use FAIR’s information in order to bolster their arguments. For instance, an opinion piece published by Fox
News on August 15, 2019 about the reasons Trump’s new green card restrictions were not “un-
American” was written by the current director of research for FAIR, Matt O’Brien. O’Brien is a Floyd 55 frequent contributor and guest for Fox News and its anchors. The founder was a self-proclaimed white nationalist, and the group has been designated a hate group by the SPLC, but their members and findings are used, nevertheless, to promote anti-immigrant talking points for mainstream conservative media outlets.
The bland, unostentatious names of organizations such as FAIR, CIS and NumbersUSA allow them to slip by without attracting much attention for the uninitiated. Unfortunately, very prominent groups belong to the uninitiated regarding the supposed credibility of these anti- immigrant lobbyist groups. The SPLC report from 2009 “The Nativist Lobby: Three Faces of
Intolerance” notes that FAIR “was quoted in mainstream media outlets nearly 500 times [in
2008],” its staff “have been featured several times on CNN’s ‘Lou Dobbs Tonight,’ along with countless appearances on other television news shows,” and that its own website claims “it has been asked to testify on immigration bills ‘more than any other organization in America.’” This kind of message amplification creates a problem because lobbyist groups, think tanks and other anti-immigrant organizations present their findings as based in empirical data and as the result of rigorous and logical studies. For example, Ediberto Román criticizes a study by the Heritage
Foundation13 that concludes that the average cost to taxpayers over the lives of immigrants in the
United States is over $1 million per immigrant household. The Heritage Foundation determines this number by taking the average official tax-to-benefit deficit caused by low-skilled households in the U.S. and multiplying that number of the working life of an adult immigrant. Román argues that the study neglects such aspects as not all immigrants are low-skilled, not all immigrants will qualify for most social welfare benefits, not all immigrants will remain low-skilled for the
13 Just as FAIR and other anti-immigrant organizations have John Tanton as their problematic founder, the Heritage Foundation’s report was co-authored by Robert Richwine, whose “eugenics-like dissertation . . . argues that immigrants have substantially lower IQs than Whites” (Román 61). Floyd 56 duration of their time in the U.S., not all immigrant children will move into low-skilled sectors of employment, among others (60-61). The findings by the Heritage Foundation are easily and credibly refuted, but, unfortunately, many viewers/readers who are exposed to its findings will not have the desire, time and know-how to find those refutations. Anti-immigrant organizations can put forward problematic “facts” with impunity.
Such logic-based attacks on immigration provide the groundwork for fearmongering as an emotional appeal. This fear-based tactic is extremely common in political advertisements during election seasons. For example, as I write this dissertation, there is a negative campaign advertisement running against Amy McGrath, the democratic congressional candidate for
Kentucky’s sixth district. The innocuously named Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF)14 has paid for the ad. In the ominous ad, a mother worries about the safety of her children if McGrath is elected because McGrath is backed by “liberal extremists” who want to abolish ICE and craft an “open borders15” policy toward immigration. The mother bemoans the increase in drugs and criminal activity that will result from these policies. The ad is a clear-cut example of the unfounded fear immigrants used as a scare tactic; nothing in the ad actually explains how a vote for McGrath would be tantamount to voting for these policies.16 The ad does not explain how abolishing ICE would increase drugs and criminal activity in the United States.17 The ad does not explain why a policy of open borders would be a negative approach to immigration. Instead, the ad relies on the knee-jerk reaction of people who hold anti-immigrant sentiments, trusting that such voters will be sufficiently scared into voting for McGrath’s opponent, no matter what her
14 The Congressional Leadership Fund is a Super PAC formed with the intention of electing republicans to the House of Representatives. 15 The use of “open borders” as a scare tactic will be examined more thoroughly below. 16 In fact, McGrath has been critical of the calls to abolish ICE to the chagrin of many democrats in the state. 17 The organization has only existed since 2003 and has not changed much in terms of the number of undocumented immigrants, illegal drug use or crime rates in general. Floyd 57 actual stance on immigration may be, what her opponent’s stance may be or how accurate any of the fears depicted by the disquieted mother may be.
It is worth noting that Kentuckians do not have any significant reasons to worry about undocumented immigrants. The nearest border with Mexico is still over 1,000 miles away from any point in Kentucky. According to the Pew Research Center on Hispanic Trends, there were roughly 50,000 undocumented immigrants living in Kentucky in 2014.18 This figure represents approximately 1.1% of the state’s total population.19 Finally, although the research is dated, a
2002 report on immigrants in Kentucky by the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission found that “The average daily inmate population in Department of Corrections facilities in FY
2000 was about 14,500,” but “The incarceration rate for immigrants in the state penal system is very low,” with “forty-six confirmed noncitizens incarcerated in its facilities . . . in FY 2000”
(81). Furthermore, the 46 incarcerated noncitizens may have been in the penal system for offenses that included “assaults, DUI, driving without a license, failure to have insurance, public alcohol intoxication, disorderly conduct, domestic violence and some drug activity” (80). Of course, some of those violations fit with the stereotypes put forward by the CLF ad, but the other violations are both nonviolent and an unfortunate biproduct of the undocumented immigrants’ socioeconomic and citizenship statuses. All this information is not intended to minimize the severity of assaults or drug trafficking; nor is it my intention to mock the concerns of actual citizens who internalize the fears put forward by political scare tactics. Rather, this information underscores the irrationality of such fears and the way anti-immigrant groups ignore such
18 The same study estimated that there were over 11,000,000 undocumented immigrants in the United States at that time, making Kentucky’s share of the undocumented immigrant population nationwide roughly 0.0045%. 19 The 50,000 undocumented immigrants in Kentucky make it the state with the 18th lowest number of undocumented immigrants total; the 1.1% of the state’s population made up by undocumented immigrants makes it the state with the 12th lowest percentage of citizens who are undocumented immigrants. Floyd 58 irrationality in order to score political points. Voting for or against a candidate based on concerns about the dangers of immigration in Kentucky is no more rational than voting for Kentucky to implement safety measures against hurricanes; the effects may reach Kentucky to a small degree, but it should not form the basis of one’s vote, and it should not cost much by way of the state’s resources.
Nonetheless, this ad, and ones like it, are effective in part precisely because their target audiences do not have direct contact, or even reason to worry about, the threats presented in the ads. The uncertainty about who or what constitutes danger is what makes it the perfect affective rhetorical tool. Jennifer Wingard in her book Branded Bodies, Rhetoric, and the Neoliberal
Nation-State explains the necessity of maintaining an amorphous threat in the post-9/11 world.
Wingard refers to an ICE press release that details a nationwide raid in which thousands of people were arrested; the release refers to those arrested as “child molesters, gang members and other violent criminals, as well as people . . . who sneaked back into the country after a judge threw them out” (qtd. in Wingard 64). Wingard analyzes this press release, writing, “What this description of the ICE raids does is equate the child molester, the gang member, and the other violent criminals with illegal immigrants. This is a way to create association between different brands and connect them all with the ‘illegal immigrant’” (64). ICE operates with the cultural power of associative reasoning. Humans tend to seek out patterns and structures for understanding, and connections such as immigrants and criminals facilitate an understanding of the world. In order to effectively gain hegemonic consent from much of the population, agencies such as ICE must construct a threat that goes beyond families, women, children, the elderly and other innocuous people attempting simply to cross into the country without authorization or overstaying their visas. Instead, ICE creates what Wingard calls “assemblages of threats” (56) by Floyd 59 associating nonviolent offenders, such as undocumented immigrants, with violent offenders, such as child molesters and gang members, many of whom are not necessarily even foreign-born or immigrants. This kind of conflation allows for an amorphous threat that needs a panoptic agency to police. Wingard concludes, “When assembled [through association], they create not only new forms of threat that are ever-present and pervasive, but they also create the need for any agency that can help protect us and help us protect ourselves from these dangerous figures”
(75). It follows that if the general population associates immigrants with violent criminals, they will desire an organization that is able to vet those who would seek to enter the country without authorization.
Rhetorical Outsiders: Crafting Alternative Means of Participation
One of the first, and perhaps most important, considerations that must be undertaken regarding the ability of rhetorical outsiders to craft alternative means of participation is their position as potential subalterns in the senses that have been written about by scholars such as
Gramsci, Gayatri Spivak and others. The term “subaltern” does not have a settled meaning across theoretical frameworks, and the distinction is crucial and, therefore, worth noting. In the introduction to Selections from The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, the editors, Quentin
Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith note Gramsci’s intentions with the term “subaltern” as such:
“Non-hegemonic groups or classes are . . . called by Gramsci ‘subordinate,’ ‘subaltern,’ or sometimes ‘instrumental’” (20). Hence, for Gramsci, the subaltern is one of the underclasses of a society who are not represented by the hegemonic power groups. Stephen Morton extends the flexibility of the term as defined by Gramsci in his book Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason by writing that “some commentators have argued that
Gramsci used the term as a code-word for the more familiar Marxist ‘proletariat’ in order to Floyd 60 smuggle his manuscript past the prison censor during his incarceration under Mussolini’s fascist government” (96). Under any of these interpretations, it is easily arguable that the outsider rhetors whose communications, compositions and contributions to activism will be under study in this chapter inhabit subaltern positionalities.
However, Gayatri Spivak forwards a much more restrictive notion of what it means to be subaltern. In a 1992 interview with Leon de Kock, Spivak explains that the interpretation of the subaltern has been made much too broad by many people. Spivak laments, “[E]verybody thinks the subaltern is just a classy word for oppressed, for Other, for somebody who’s not getting a piece of the pie,” and she continues by arguing that oppressed groups who can speak within the hegemony are, by definition, not subaltern. If the rhetors in this chapter are subaltern by Spivak’s definition, the interpretation of their work is a lot more complicated because, as Spivak declares at the end of her seminal work “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, “The subaltern cannot speak” (104).
This is, of course, not to say that those who inhabit positions of subalternity do not have voices or cannot make utterances, but that their efforts to speak are negated by a refusal to engage in dialogue and discourse with them. If an oppressed group attempts to engage the hegemonic powers in a dialogue in order to change the structures of power, but those hegemonic powers refuse to respond to those concerns or to give them any kind of hearing, the act of speaking is rendered irrelevant.
At this point in the chapter, I wish to begin to consider the speech acts/symbolic acts/gestures toward participation in U.S. democracy and public deliberation by immigrants and to evaluate how such participants, however well invited/received, are expected to engage with the hegemonic power structures as they exist and what effect, if any, they may have on those power structures. From the perspective of liberal democracy, all speakers, no matter their Floyd 61 citizenship status should have mechanisms by which their voices are heard. Therefore, no one, not even the undocumented immigrant, should be considered subaltern in democratic societies such as the United States. In practice, democratic participation is routinely denied to those who are not perceived as belonging within the boundaries of the nation. Contemporary U.S. public discourse, according to Patricia Roberts-Miller, is stuck in an inflexible state of demagoguery wherein “the truth is determined by the identity of the people making claims, and it’s possible to dismiss any claim simply on the basis of who is making the argument” (4). For many active participants in the various mechanisms of public deliberation in the U.S., there are very clear notions of who should and who should not be allowed to participate. These assertions of the legitimacy of participation extend into elected representatives in Congress, such as when Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell silenced Senator Elizabeth Warren for reading objections to the confirmation of Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General or when Trump and his supporters advocated for “sending back” Congresswoman Ilhan Omar because of her opposition to Trump and his policies. Legitimate criticisms are cast as unwarranted because of who put them forth (a woman, a democrat, an immigrant), not because of their actual worth.
Hence, many of these mechanisms are explicitly denied to undocumented immigrants who are left in a state of limbo from which they cannot find adequate channels for representation. In some instances, the frameworks through which immigrants should be provided with mechanisms for representation are maliciously denied to them, such as in the cases of children being forced to represent themselves in immigration court or when detainees who speak little or no English are only provided texts regarding their rights or their legal recourse in
English. For Spivak, we must assist the subaltern in the fight against subalternity, and this fight involves bringing them into the hegemonic channels of discourse. Such action is possible, and Floyd 62 perhaps this is the way allies and advocates can assist in the struggle for equitable representation, but outsider rhetors may also craft alternative forms of participation. Both avenues of creating dialogue deserve examination, but we will start with a focus on the means by which the outsider rhetors themselves may create their own spaces of communication.
In his autobiographical book, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, Jose
Antonio Vargas explores many of the ways in which his voice has been denied because of his undocumented status. Despite having come to the United States as a child and having spent more than two-thirds of his life continuously in the United States, Vargas is denied countless rights and privileges that most Americans enjoy and take for granted. Vargas cannot vote, drive or hold employment legally. He cannot leave the country, even briefly, for fear that he will not be allowed to return. He recounts examples of discrimination and abuse that he has received from celebrities, politicians and regular citizens (including other immigrants who claim they entered the country “the right way”). Despite the myriad attempts to deny his experiences, Vargas has become a reluctant activist, founding the organization Define American, which seeks to change the narrative surrounding immigrants and immigration, and by practicing what he calls “radical transparency” (177), by which he means publicly declaring his undocumented status, openly writing about his experiences and engaging politicians and media personalities about his status and the way the United States talks about and treats immigrants.
Vargas’s work is a good starting point for a consideration of the rhetoric of immigrant outsiders in the United States. As outlined in the introduction to this work, immigrant outsiders are those who have been barred from the democratic process by claims that they do not belong in the country and its democratic discourse. Those who subscribe to this notion of belonging believe democratic rights to be the exclusive domain of citizenship, no matter what those citizens Floyd 63 do or do not do as a result of their status. For Vargas, the denial of a place at the seat of democracy inspires him to carve out a different kind of citizenship. In his book he writes,
“Because I am not a citizen by law or by birth, I’ve had to create and hold on to a different kind of citizenship[, which is] something more akin to what I call citizenship of participation.
Citizenship is showing up. Citizenship is using your voice while making sure you hear other people around you. Citizenship is how you live your life. Citizenship is resilience” (199).
Vargas’s argument for alternative citizenship has a basis, whether he realizes it or not, in academic considerations of citizenship. In the introduction to the edited collection Rhetorical
Citizenship and Public Deliberation, the editors Christian Kock and Lisa S. Villadsen detail what is meant by the “rhetorical citizenship” of the title. Kock and Villadsen write, “[D]iscussions as well as implementations of citizenship have focused on those aspects of it that are central to the
‘liberal’ tradition of social thought—that is, questions of the freedoms and rights of citizens and groups. The essays in this volume give voice to a ‘republican’ conception in the thinking about citizenship. Seeing participation and debate as central to being a citizen” (1). This brief explanation of concept for the edited collection provides a cogent way to understand the historical binary of citizenship: one side focused on rights and freedoms under law, and the other side focused on civic participation. Vargas has been denied the “liberal” notion of citizenship throughout his life, but his activism and advocacy for himself and others like him fits nicely with the “republican” concept of citizenship—his actions and participation can afford him a kind of
“rhetorical citizenship” in a way that he cannot, or at least cannot easily, attain the traditional form of citizenship.
Vargas’s citizenship of participation/rhetorical citizenship stands in stark contrast to the rhetorical notions of democracy held by many “legal” citizens of the United States as detailed in Floyd 64 the introduction to this work and the first half of this chapter. When the idea of democracy is reduced to “get out and vote” or “write your representative,” one sees the ambivalence of democracy and the way in which democracy is used for its basic rhetorical function of conveying a sense of just leadership and popular support. The disengagement of most citizens to the democratic process is demonstrated by tepid voter turnout percentages to U.S. elections.
According to the organization Fair Vote, “Robust voter turnout is fundamental to a healthy democracy. As low turnout is usually attributed to political disengagement and the belief that voting for one candidate/party or another will do little to alter public policy, ‘established’ democracies tend have higher turnout than other countries. However, voter turnout in the U.S. is much lower than most established democracies.” Additionally, the organization’s website includes a chart outlining the eligible voter turnout rates in the United States over the last 100 years. The chart shows that the percentage range for presidential elections has been as low as
48.9% (1924) and only as high as 63.8% (1960). For the three most recent presidential elections—2008, 2012 and 2016—voter turnout was 61.6%, 58.2% and 60.1% respectively.
Midterm elections fair much worse, with the most recent election cycle, 2018, achieving the highest percentage of the last 100 years, but still failing to attract even half the voting population, at 49.6%. What these numbers show is that one of the world’s self-proclaimed shining beacons of democracy fails to attract even half of its eligible citizens to routine elections and fails to attract even 2/3 of its eligible citizens for its most important elections. Alternatively, members of the populace who are denied official participation often seek out alternative forms of participation.
The examples of a citizenship of participation laid out in Vargas’s book reflect what are called “backchannels” for participation by composition scholars such as Margaret Price. Price Floyd 65 writes about this form of participation as it applies to scholars attending conferences, but who need support and accommodations to participate fully. Price writes, “[T]he point of flexible design is not to require each individual to attend to every mode simultaneously, but to offer a variety of modes that provide support in different ways. Thus, if a participant finds it difficult to focus on information that is presented in a long, unbroken, oral/aural stream, the backchannel may provide just the metastream that enables him to remain engaged” (128). Vargas’s citizenship of participation has the potential to do for democratic deliberation what digitally-mediated backchannels do for conference participation; if democratic engagement is lackluster in its current format, a supposedly “robust democracy” should examine alternative modes of participation.
Additionally, the creation of an alternative form of citizenship and participation in democracy further codifies the approach to outsider rhetoric in a way that is mimetic of outsider art as mentioned in the introduction. In his book Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma,
Daniel Wojcik details the ways in which outsider artists have been categorized historically.
Wojcik outlines these characteristics in the following way:
The narrative constructed about Martín Ramírez [a celebrated outsider artist]
embodies the assumptions that inform the notion of the quintessential outsider
artist: insane and unrestrained, the outsider enacts pure and genuine forms of
untutored creativity, reaches beyond the bounds of culture and societal norms,
remains oblivious to the deadening hegemony and the pretense of the art world,
and produces uniquely original works that evoke the tropes and qualities of the
mystical. (34)
Wojcik goes on to criticize this perception of outsider artists for being “alternately elitist, Floyd 66 exclusionary, patronizing, racist, and dehumanizing, ultimately reinforcing notions of the ‘artist as other’” (34-35). I do not entirely disagree with this assessment as it applies to outsider art. I do, however, hope to draw a distinction between the application of these characteristics as they apply to marginalized outsider artists by art critics and the application of these characteristics, at least in part, to marginalized outsider rhetors in this work.
As Wojcik notes, these characteristics “evoke the tropes and qualities of the mystical” when applied to outsider artists, many of whom are people who suffer from mental health conditions and others who are religious visionaries. The problematic aspect of these traits of outsider artists is that art critics are the ones who have established the exclusive frameworks of artistic expectations, yet these same critics attempt to appropriate and control the creations of outsider artists. Outsider artists, having no power in this dynamic, and often not even attempting to share their works, are unable to control the narratives surrounding their very own creations.
Hence, even though the outsider artist “remains oblivious to the deadening hegemony and the pretense of the art world,” the rigid and hegemonic boundaries of art criticism seize control of the art and artist nonetheless.
In the realm of outsider rhetoric, I see a different application of these same kinds of outsider characteristics in a way that I hope and believe is more empowering for the vulnerable outsiders who engage in the practice. In contrast, if the hegemonic powers wished to maintain control of Vargas’s voice, or the voice of any other (un)documented immigrant, those powers would allow the immigrants to speak and find a way in which to appropriate their voices to the hegemonic cause. Instead, Vargas and other (un)documented immigrants must be “untutored” in regard to the public rhetoric of immigration because the primary narrative that is taught is that immigrants do not belong; immigrants must “[reach] beyond the bounds of culture and societal Floyd 67 norms” because the cultural and societal expectation is that immigrants will “immigrate the right way” and assimilate; and immigrants must “[remain] oblivious to the deadening hegemony and the pretense of the [world of public discourse]” because the hegemony of public discourse and policy explicitly works to exclude their concerns and existence. Although the frameworks for outsider artists and rhetors are comparable, the application contrasts significantly. Whereas art critics attempt to retain control over the realm of outsider artists, outsider rhetors are in their own positions of control. Vargas’s autobiography and his attempts to create a kind of “citizenship of participation” are perfectly indicative of this modicum of self-control within a public sphere that seeks primarily to excise through neglect.
Having detailed the basis for Vargas’s “citizenship of participation,” it is useful to turn to his organization Define American in order to begin to understand the way in which immigrant outsiders may employ rhetoric in order to combat the notions of rhetorical insiders who seek to villainize immigrants, especially undocumented ones. In Dear America, Vargas explains the format and goals of his organization, and it is worth quoting at length:
Define American is unlike anything else in the immigration rights space. Our
tactics, from the outset, have focused on neither policy nor politics. Taking a page
from the playbook of the LGBTQ rights movement, we believe you cannot
change the politics of immigration until you change the culture in which
immigrants are seen. Storytelling is central to our strategy: collecting stories of
immigrants from all walks of life, creating original content (documentaries,
databases, graphics, etc.), and leveraging stories we’ve collected and stories
we’ve told to influence how news and entertainment media portray immigrants,
both documented and undocumented. (121-22) Floyd 68
Define American, therefore, does not set out in a direct attempt to change public policy regarding immigration. If a large section of the nation maintains negative perceptions of immigrants, a group comprised mostly of immigrants, many of whom do not have legal recourse to the democratic process in the first place, is probably not going to accomplish much by way of direct political action. Alternatively, Define American seeks to insert positive stories about immigrants, immigrants who view themselves as American, into the nation’s zeitgeist in the hope that their experiences can sway public opinion to some degree in precisely the same way that anti- immigration organizations, such as FAIR, CIS and Numbers USA, which have quite successfully propagated negative, and often intentionally inaccurate, stereotypes of immigrants.
The importance of narratives has a long history in the rhetorical tradition of public discourse. Villanueva critiques Richard Rodriguez’s autobiography, Hunger of Memory, and
Rodriguez’s professed assimilation and emergence as “American,” writing, “If Richard
Rodriguez had been Richard Wilson he would have had no story to tell; if Richard Wilson were describing someone named Rodriguez he wouldn’t have the same fame” (39). Roberts-Miller writes, “The central presumption behind demagoguery . . . is that our current ways of categorizing people (such as gender, race, nationality, religion) are woven into the fabric of the universe. . . . [S]ome people are entitled to more goods than others by virtue of being better— they are better by virtue of having a certain identity, regardless of their behavior” (49).
Maintaining a structure that scapegoats outsiders is reliant upon insiders not knowing too much about those outsiders. Making room for outsiders to share their own stories disrupts this framework; Later in her work, Roberts-Miller claims that a step toward returning civil discourse to U.S. public deliberation requires “Rhetorical fairness,” which “means that, whatever the argument rules are, they apply equally to everyone in the argument,” so “if a personal experience Floyd 69 counts as proof for a claim, a single appeal to personal experience suffices to disprove that claim” (125). If we adhere to rhetorical fairness, we resist the normalization of extreme narratives that depict a group, such as immigrants, as “rapists,” “murderers,” “drug dealers” or all equal to the worst of their members. Rhetorical fairness insists we hear the stories of the detainees in tent cities at the border, of families who have had members deported for minor infractions and of refugees who are fleeing violence in their countries of origin.
Define American offers everyone an opportunity to explain what is meant by the term
“American,” and this includes immigrants, both documented and undocumented, children of immigrants, minorities or anyone else who wishes to carve out an alternative understanding of the framework of what it means to be an American. This is important work that contributes to the changing of the national consciousness of what it means for someone to classify themselves as belonging within a given citizen framework. The United States prides itself on the freedom for any given person to be the person s/he wants to be, do whatever s/he wants to do and to achieve anything as a result of that freedom, but the truth is that most people are terribly constrained in how they are able to represent themselves in the United States. One need only consider the policies, restrictions and perceptions in place regarding members of the LGBTQ community, minority groups, the socioeconomically disadvantaged or any other underprivileged groups to understand the way in which a person’s identity is overdetermined by the basic categories into which s/he falls. Existing outside the understood and expected spectrum of identity results in ostracism and/or performativity. That is to say that members of non-traditional communities in the United States can resist assimilation, which will typically result in ostracism from the mainstream society, or those members must engage in citizenship performance, meaning they must forsake their own identities and play the role of the pageantry of citizenship—attempting to Floyd 70 mimic an idealized and calcified notion of what it means, not only to be a citizen in a given society, but also what it means to be a citizen of a given racial, ethnic or religious group in that society.
Many scholars have put forth evidence of the way in which the mere presence of the body of the other in American and Western societies leads to enhanced scrutiny and requires those who possess such bodies to demonstrate their understanding of expected roles and commitments
(performative citizenships) to the American and Western status quo. Ahmed writes about the
Black body in public amongst (perceived) vulnerable white bodies, claiming, “The more we don’t know what or who it is we fear the more the world becomes fearsome” (69, italics in original). Devon W. Carbado writes about his own experiences with the performativity of minority and immigrant citizenship in the U.S., and his experiences can be used to build on
Ahmed’s ideas. Carbado, a Black man from England, writes about his interaction with a White
American police officer during a routine traffic stop, but which became contentious when
Carbado began to ask questions of the officer regarding the reasons for their detainment.
Carbado explains that after plodding through several questions about where Carbado and his brother were from, including their parents’ origins, the officer finally understood Carbado and his brother’s lineage (Black, but not African American):
Unwillingly, we [Carbado and his brother] were participating in a naturalization
ceremony within which our submission to authority both reflected and reproduced
black American racial subjectivity. We were being pushed and pulled through the
racial body of America to be born again. A new motherland awaited us.
Eventually we would belong to her. Her racial burden was to make us naturalized
sons. (633-34) Floyd 71
Carbado explains the way in which he was required to subsume the identity of an African
American despite the fact his experiences did not align with those markers of identification. For the White police officer in this instance, existence within the boundaries of the United States come replete with specific roles and performances that everyone is expected to take up: as a
Black man in the United States, Carbado was supposed to follow the expected code of interactions between African Americans and police officers—Carbado’s position within
American democracy was predetermined before he even set foot in America. In other words, he had no control of his own narrative. For having had the audacity to ask questions in order to better understand the narrative being foisted upon him, the officer told Carbado’s brother, who was residing in the United States unlike Carbado, that “if he [Carbado] doesn’t want to find himself in jail, he should shut the fuck up” (634). Asking questions, talking to the police and controlling the narrative of the interactions that take place during a traffic stop in the United
States are not within the purview of American citizenship for Black Americans, and all Black people who find themselves in the United States, no matter their citizenships or origin stories are expected to perform their part in this narrative.
Similarly, Josue David Cisneros explains the expectations placed on American citizens of
LatinX heritage, especially as a result of Arizona SB 1070, which was a state bill put forward in
Arizona that would greatly expand the ability of police officers and others to scrutinize the citizenship status of those they suspected may be in the country without proper authorization.
Cisneros explains, “. . . police became critics of behaviors and demeanors, judging who performed citizenship (who seemed like they belonged) and whose performance communicated an affect of ‘alienness’” (112). The powers, though, were not even limited to police officers and other state actors; according to the bill, citizens should report people whom they deem as Floyd 72 deficient in their Americanness. Effectively, the bill becomes the justification for enforcing a monolithic notion of what it means to be American, the result of which would be antithetical to the purported ideals of a diverse democracy. Citizens and non-citizens alike would be required to put on display their levels of assimilation, or they would risk being scrutinized and interrogated for no other reason than their deviations from the master narrative that governs what it means to look and to act American. Perhaps it goes without saying that no individual, regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, etc. will be the perfect distillation of the stereotypical notion of what it means to be American. Even natural-born, white American citizens perform what is perceived to be the ideal form of Americanness. The sense of what it means to be American is nothing more than a tacit expectation of tropes and ideologies that have become the perception of American identity based on centuries of power and privilege in the United States.
For example, the beliefs that many people hold about the ties between Anglo-Saxon heritage, Christianity, traditional gender roles or even the English language and American identity are not inherent, but are arbitrary, malleable and entirely unnecessary. If such features were truly intimately connected to American identity, everyone born within the borders of the nation, or at least those born to “American” parents would subscribe to these ideas without fail, and their presence in the belief systems of all American-born citizens would render other cultures and ideologies immiscible with Americanness. Many people believe this to be the case, of course, but it does not require much critical thought to realize that such ideologies are the result of people who wish to maintain a certain sense of what it means to be American calcifying this perception by performing citizenship according to the accepted framework and refusing to deviate from that mold. All citizenship, therefore, is performative, and that is what bills such as the one above are designed to reinforce. At its core, SB 1070 is more of a rhetorical ploy than it Floyd 73 is an enforceable plan of action.
Instead of attempting to operate on verifiable conceptions of citizenship, which is what most laws regarding citizenship do, such free reign given to police officers and other civic- minded citizens by SB 1070 and similar bills would accomplish nothing but discord between
American citizens of all backgrounds, police officers and other state officials and immigrants of all backgrounds (both documented and undocumented alike). This discord is not an unfortunate side effect of a necessary and well-considered bill, rather it is the intended result of a rhetorical ploy aimed at continuing to stoke the anti-immigrant tensions that already exist in border states like Arizona. Those who put forward and support bills such as SB 1070 in Arizona have a vested interest in the maintenance of the us vs. them dichotomy between American citizens and undocumented immigrants, whether they gain politically (anti-immigrant politicians), financially
(corporations who provide border security or who maintain detention facilities) or socially/mentally (those who feel their privilege slipping away as a result of multiculturalism and increasing diversity). The case for each of these groups is strengthened by a bill that attempts to codify what it means to be American.
Most importantly, perhaps, is the effect that such an approach has on strengthening the belief systems of those who have always enjoyed at least a modicum of privilege that comes as a result of the color of their skin or the strength of their claims to citizenship. In the October 2017 issue of The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about Donald Trump as “The First White
President.” In this essay, Coates writes, “For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black president, insulted him personally,” and he extrapolates this argument from
Trump into a wider argument about the perceptions of many white Americans, especially those who support Trump, regarding the Obama presidency. Coates calls Trump the first white Floyd 74 president because, before Obama, presidents were not elected because they were white, their whiteness was simply expected—however, Trump ran for president and many people voted for as a means of negating the black presidency.
In the United States, and in other majority white nations, increasing diversity and multiculturalism, and certainly the elections of leaders who are not white, threaten the power and privilege long enjoyed by white people. The passage of bills like SB 1070 operate on a rhetorical level to confirm the right to this privilege and to justify its continuation. One sees this play out in the footage of the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, Virginia where Neo-Nazis marched through the streets carrying torches and chanting several (Nazi) slogans, including “Jews will not replace us.” The concerns about losing majority status and the power and privilege that such a status entails are very real in many sectors of white America, and these bills perform rhetorical work to legitimize these concerns and to give them power and authority to seek self-preservation.
As such, bills that require citizenship performativity are more rhetorical than practical. As noted above, such expectations of performance have detrimental effects on all people, citizens and noncitizens, including even white citizens who believe themselves to be acting out the true concept of Americanness, but its impact on immigrants is truly inhumane and unconscionable.
Each of these experiences (and myriad others that have and have not been written about) demonstrates the precariousness of the existence of the immigrant body. Hana E. Brown further explains the intricacies of identity and prosperity when she writes:
Immigrants who struggle to execute the host society’s normative and deeply
internalized bodily movements (1) interpret their bodily challenges as evidence of
their outsider identity, (2) struggle to acquire the material resources necessary to
achieve more traditionally studied forms of economic incorporation, and (3) face Floyd 75
limitations in their ability to maintain transnational networks even as those
networks play an increasingly important social role in the face of their blocked
mobility. (15)
For immigrants, even documented immigrants, routine tasks performed in the host society can demonstrate bodily expectations and may result in a loss of self-worth, as well as impede social and economic mobility. What this means is that the expectations placed on immigrants that they assimilate into some crystallized, monolithic notion of what it means to be American are not put in place to maintain national security or to uphold an integral and worthwhile idea of citizenship; instead, the requirements placed on immigrants are nothing more than anti-immigrant rhetorical tools designed to identify more easily those who do not conform to an unrealistic concept of citizenship. The requirements are designed to prevent immigrants from achieving any real successes in their adoptive countries because they cannot have the freedom to navigate their existences in their own frameworks; they must choose between maintaining their own narratives in the shadows or attempting to achieve this unachievable level of assimilation in order to foster greater acceptance. The forced narrative of citizenship and requisite performativity has long served its anti-immigrant purpose, but its true power rests in the inability of diverse groups to tell their own narratives of what it means to be American, and if a person is willing to look for them or listen, such narratives are all around.
Define American, as described by Vargas, undermines these traditional markers of what it means to be American. The perception of what constitutes an American has only become calcified because they same privileged people have been telling the same stories of
Americanness since the founding of the nation. The same markers of citizenship that were important during the American Revolution and the composition of the Constitution of the United Floyd 76
States are the pervasive notions of what constitutes an American citizen in modern times: white, male, economically-advantaged. This concept of Americanness has remained the same for well over 200 years because the hegemonic powerbrokers in the United States have remained the same, and, for the most part, they control the important mechanisms by which culture and identity are learned: schools, government, media, etc. But a national identity only represents the understanding of the citizenry as it exists in the national and cultural zeitgeist. Define American operates on the notion that the stories we tell and the stories we hear are integral to an understanding of the identities we accept. In this way, the simple act of telling one’s own story of
Americanness is a parrhesiastic act.
Define American is, of course, not alone in its attempts to tell the stories of non- traditional Americans as a means of changing the perceptions of those who do not fit with the mold of what constitutes an American by a strict and archaic definition. In 2008, Peter Orner edited a collection of stories about undocumented immigrants into a book titled Underground
America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives. In the foreword to this collection, Luis Alberto
Urrea writes, “Undocumented immigrants have no way to tell you what they have experienced, or why, or who they are, or what they think. They are, by the very nature of their experience, invisible. Most of us pass them by—some of us might say a prayer for them, some of us wish they would return to their countries of origin. But nobody asks them what they think. Nobody stops and simply asks” (1). The edited collection that follows this foreword seeks to give a voice to those undocumented immigrants who are never afforded the opportunity to share their own experiences. In giving space for undocumented immigrants to speak in their own voices about what life is like as an undocumented immigrant, the book “stops and simply asks” who are these invisible people? The act of listening to these stories is a humanizing one; the reader is asked to Floyd 77 consider the experiences of people who are forced to live undocumented lives and to sympathize with the circumstances that have led the undocumented to prefer a life in the shadows of a foreign country and culture to the alternative in their countries of origin. In listening to these stories, we engage in what Krista Ratcliffe calls “rhetorical listening.” Ratcliffe defines this kind of act as listening, not with the purpose of finding what can be appropriated for one’s own purposes, but as a “trope for interpretive invention and as a code of cross-cultural conduct” (1).
People get to tell their own stories without them being filtered through the terministic screens of others.
Similarly, the actress America Ferrara has recently compiled a collection of stories told by “prominent citizens in a variety of fields” who are all first-generation Americans. These stories are not the stories of undocumented Americans, and with high-profile names such as Lin-
Manuel Miranda, Joaquin Castro, Padma Lakshmi, Kumail Nanjiani and Jeremy Lin making contributions to the collection, it cannot be argued that the experienced detailed therein are from
“the invisible,” but it attempts to achieve the same goals as Define American and Underground
America through a different approach. The participants in this collection attract, perhaps, a greater deal of attention through their celebrity—Ferrara’s television show Ugly Betty was hugely popular; Miranda’s Broadway musical Hamilton continues to sellout every show over four years since its premiere and has pervaded the cultural consciousness of the United States at every level; Lin was a breakout star in the NBA during the 2011-12 season and continues to have success at that level—and that attention serves a different function in the battle of perception of immigrants in the United States. The authors in Ferrara’s collection, often literal celebrities, share their stories of living lives between cultures while growing up American. The stories of these well-known immigrants/children of immigrants disrupts the fear of the unknown that Floyd 78
Wingard has explained is crucial to the anti-immigrant project. Immigrants are not unknown or unknowable entities; instead, they are chefs on the Food Network, voice actors in Disney movies and members of congress. Anti-immigrant rhetors attempt to maintain the perception of immigrants as faceless masses because their fear tactics only work if the immigrants remain unknown. Each of these texts undermines these tactics by demonstrating their intentionally misleading misinformation and replacing it with verifiable accounts of the humanity of the immigrants they seek to villainize.
In some ways, these groups have attempted to highlight the way in which outsider rhetors can operate as shapeshifters of sorts, belonging to outsider demographics and taking on the appearance of insiders in order to “belong.” A common phrase used to discuss undocumented immigrants is “in the shadows.” The idea is akin to the concept of “passing” that has a troubled history of its own in U.S. history. If the immigrant can remain hidden from view enough and interact “like an American” when in public, they will be able avoid scrutiny that may lead to their detection. This is, of course, an understandable course of action for someone whose position in the nation is precarious and dependent upon skirting just such detection. These narratives show that way that shapeshifting of this sort is a kind of counterhegemonic form of outsider activism in its own right; if outsider can effectively masquerade as insiders within the hegemonic system, it greatly problematizes the logic and efficacy of the system itself.
Disruption, of norms or society or government, is a crucial component of activism and democratic participation. In the introduction to the edited collection Unruly Rhetorics: Protest,
Persuasion, and Publics Jonathan Alexander and Susan C. Jarratt explain the importance of
“unruliness,” which serves as their term for the disruption of activism within democratic frameworks, to participatory mechanisms, writing, “[W]e might assert that an ethical unruly Floyd 79 rhetorical practice, while not inherently left-leaning is one that aims to bring light to an inequality (in [Jacques] Rancière’s terms) or precarity (in [Judith] Butler’s) by disrupting routinized exchange within the public sphere” (14, emphasis in original). While civility and decorum may serve as what might be antonymously-termed unethical ruly rhetorical practice, designed to keep the status quo in place and in favor of the privileged citizens and participants in a democracy, “ethical unruly rhetorical practice” as Alexander and Jarratt have detailed in this work serves as a process by which actors with an unequal share of the public discourse are capable of shaking up the monotonous, monovocal conversations that take place in the alleged
“public sphere” of distinctive ideologies.
The ethicality of the disruption is of vital importance, however, for Alexander and Jarratt; just after the authors praise the ability of unruliness to serve an ethical and equalizing function, they make certain to distinguish ethical unruliness from what they term “violent unruliness,” which they explain via example: “Trump supporters who hit, spit on, and violently expel protestors, urged on to such violence by their leader, are enacting just the opposite of livable interdependency, their unruliness arising from a reactive impulse to exclude and silence any voices other than that of the demagogue” (14). Hence, unruliness is not inherently liberatory or exclusively under the purview of those who wish to disrupt the status quo. Just as calls to civility and decorum can serve as a mechanism to force alternative voices to self-censor and to avoid schismatic ruptures in the blanket privilege most often served by calcified frameworks of politics and social interactions, violent unruliness can operate as the method of keeping in line those unequal voices who would seek, nevertheless, to break with decorum and engage in a discourse event to which they were not invited. At the risk of idealizing the unruly rhetorical practices of underprivileged groups, what constitutes ethical unruliness must be determined by the outcomes Floyd 80 the rhetors seek to achieve. If the unruliness seeks to silence dissent in favor of adherence to the status quo and its solidified notions of privilege and power, this is not an ethical use of disruption; if the unruliness seeks to give voice to dissenters as a means of “disrupting routinized exchanges in the public sphere,” this is an ethical use of disruption. Ethical disruption may take many forms, but what it must include is an attempt to create space for a heteroglossia of voices in the public sphere, breaking with the monovocal frameworks of perceived consensus and establishing alternative epistemological understandings of the commonsense interactions and experiences of citizens and participants.
Narrative disruption in the case of immigrants is one such form of ethical unruliness, and this approach to disrupting routinized exchanges works by the “perspective by incongruity.”
Burke’s concept of perspective by incongruity posits that audiences may be influenced to change their sedimented perspectives by seeing two incongruous ideas placed side-by-side; essentially, the viewer/listener/interlocutor will recognize the absurdity of some idea that is held as
“commonsense” by seeing it juxtaposed with an odd coupling. One example of perspective by incongruity being used to disrupt hardened notions regarding an issue can be found in Bonnie J.
Dow’s article “AIDS, Perspective by Incongruity, and Gay Identity in Larry Kramer’s ‘1,112 and
Counting.’” In this article, Dow explores Kramer’s use of perspective by incongruity in his essay
“1,112 and Counting” from 1983 in order to shock the gay community, not only or even primarily the American public in general, into an altered understanding of how AIDS affected their community existentially.
Before the publication of Kramer’s essay, Dow explains that many members of the gay community were critical of Kramer because of his allegedly homophobic claims that gay people should not define themselves by their sexuality. Once medical research had established the Floyd 81 dangers of unprotected sex in the transmission of HIV, and the heightened risks that were posed to gay men in particular, Kramer and many others began to advocate for a complete alteration of the way gay men perceived themselves and formed their very identities and senses of self.
Understandably, most people were recalcitrant and unwilling simply to alter the way they viewed themselves. Dow claims that Kramer employed perspective by incongruity “to create the foundation for genuine argument” (231). Dow argues that Kramer’s essay makes use of perspective by incongruity in three stages, which she details as follows:
In the first section, Kramer relies on statistics, examples, and strong language to
shock his audience into an awareness of the breadth of the epidemic and to
demonstrate the incongruity of their denial. In the second section, his purpose
shifts as he details the lack of action on AIDS by medical and governmental
bodies. In this section, the desired response is anger, a product of the realization
that, given the gravity of the situation, the lack of action is incongruous. Third,
Kramer targets gays, lambasting them for their lack of action. In this section, his
desired response is guilt, produced when gays are confronted with the impropriety
of their own indifference. (231)
For most contemporary readers, the incongruity between the severity of the risk to the LGBTQ community in the early 1980s and the lack of governmental response will probably be well known, and the callousness with which HIV was dismissed will already be considered inexcusable.20 Dow notes that Kramer wanted to highlight how incongruous it was for a
20 One of the first terms used for AIDS by official institutions, not just homophobic trolls, was “gay-related immune deficiency” or G.R.I.D. In more colloquial parlance, people referred to the disease as “gay cancer” or “gay plague.” Additionally, recorded interviews between Larry Speakes, Ronald Reagan’s press secretary, and journalists, in particular Lester Kinsolving, about the burgeoning understanding of AIDS in the early 1980s show a willingness to laugh off the disease as something that only affects gay people, including implicit accusations of homosexuality Floyd 82 government to neglect entirely a disease that was rapidly killing large swathes of its own population simply because of prejudices held against that community, but this fact of neglect by itself would not elicit much surprise from a community as poorly treated as the gay community of the early 1980s, let alone would it elicit an existential shift in the way the community viewed its own identity markers. The truly shocking incongruity of the Kramer piece, as Dow argues, is that Kramer accuses the gay community itself of not taking the disease seriously and of engaging in the same kind of deadly dismissal that the mainstream community and government of the
United States had perpetrated. According to Dow, Kramer’s hope was that gay people who read his article would recognize their own culpability in the continued spread of AIDS and would engage in “genuine argument” about what the fundamental basis of their own identities would need to be in the wake of a greater understanding of the new dangers of casual, unprotected sex, especially between men.
Hence, there is an activist bent to the use of perspective by incongruity. In political contexts wherein participants have fostered their own identities based often entirely on their political leanings, it takes more than facts and figures to alter negative perceptions of alienated communities such as immigrants. In the United States, we are living in what has been called a
“post-truth” age, which is to say that statistics, facts, direct quotes, photographic proof and other forms of empirical evidence do not matter as much emotional responses do. Tracy B. Strong, writing the foreword for Ilan Zvi Baron’s book How to Save Politics in a Post-Truth Era:
Thinking Through Difficult Times, explains, “When Trump says something false, it is not that he does not know that it is false that matters, but that he does, perhaps cannot, acknowledge it—that is, actually mean what he says” (X). Strong continues later, “The problem is . . . that the
based on a journalistic interest in what the president planned to do about the disease and its increasingly rapid spreading through the gay community. Floyd 83 administration lacks any sense of responsibility to that human capacity that makes discourse public” (XI). This is all to say that the question in our contemporary political climate is not whether something is true or not, but whether a person (rhetor or audience) is willing to believe the version of truth that is put forward.
For immigrant rhetors and their allies, what matters in a post-truth political climate is not the statistics that show immigrants are actually a boost to the economy or that immigrants are more likely than their native-born counterparts to be the victims of a crime and less likely than their native-born counterparts to be the perpetrators of a crime (see Ediberto Roman’s book
Those Damned Immigrants). These pieces of evidence will not change the minds of hardened anti-immigrant rhetors and audiences, and they will probably not make much of an impact on the banal masses of unaffected citizens who need to be spurred on to agitate against the status quo.
What does matter to these groups is a story that has the power to personalize the experiences of and with immigrants. The statistics have less of an impact on these groups than will the stories of
Mollie Tibbetts or Kate Steinle, two women who were killed by undocumented immigrants in the United States. Even though these individual cases represent an infinitesimally small percentage of undocumented immigrants, their rhetorical value has the power to sway much public opinion against immigrants (both documented and undocumented). This is not to say that pro-immigrant rhetors and audiences should not cling to the verifiable evidence of the myth of immigrant criminality, but to those ideas must be added the element of narrative. Individual stories of immigrants and their experiences potentially serve to provide perspective by incongruity to anti-immigrant rhetors and audiences and to the undecided majority of people who simply remain in favor of maintaining the status quo.
Vargas’s story and the stories shared on Define American provide just such perspective Floyd 84 by incongruity. Define American offers members the opportunity to share their own stories regarding their experiences as an American, whether those members were born inside or outside the United States. For instance, floral designer and business owner Tobore Oweh discusses her experiences coming to the United States from Nigeria as a 7-year-old, opening her own flower shop in Los Angeles, but continuing to live in fear of losing her DACA status, requiring her to leave the only home she has known since her early childhood and losing the business she has built for herself. In another example, Vargas speaks with undocumented immigrants in Iowa during the Iowa Caucuses in 2020; these immigrants share their experiences coming to the
United States and the concerns that surround their daily lives, including fears for family and friends still living in their countries of origin, guilt for having opportunities that other family members may not have, depression because of their alleged criminal status and the shame of explaining their positions to young children and turning down opportunities because they will not be able to prove their right to work or attend school. These stories and experiences show the immigrants who share them as responsible, upstanding citizens who come to the nation with good intentions, but they have been painted as dangerous and villainous by anti-immigrant rhetors who refuse to operate in nuance regarding the issue of immigration.
Calling attention to the negative practices of anti-immigrant rhetors and exposing the racist and xenophobic ideologies that undergird seemingly neutral organizations is important work for the immigrant activist, but it is not the only kind of work one can do. Immigrants are often unauthorized, and almost as often unwelcome, so one cannot overlook the importance of embodiment, materiality, space/place dynamics and other physical aspects of the rhetoric of immigrant outsider activists. The concept of materiality must necessarily go together with an examination of the actions of people whose lives are so determined by physical objects such as Floyd 85 documentation, border walls, maps and money. One should consider the physical determinants that come into play for immigrant activists.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the goal is not, and cannot be, changing the minds of the politicians and the media folk as they are currently constituted. As mentioned above, the goal of insider rhetoric regarding immigration is to instill a sense of rage and fear into those members of the population who already harbor resentment toward immigrants and to instill a sense of complacency into those members of the population who are unconcerned about the issue of immigration.
Consequently, those who incorporate anti-immigrant rhetoric into their speeches, programs, platforms, social media accounts and so on do not wish, in truth, to foster dialogue between those who are anti-immigrant and those who are pro-immigrant; such dialogue would require allow others to take at least partial control of the terms of discussion, and that control is what allows leaders and media personalities to enjoy their positions of power within the status quo.
Nor should the goal be fostering dialogue in a sense that could be construed as
“consensus-building.” In the introduction to Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for
Political Engagement, Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee note that “neither deliberative democracy nor consensus-building responds fully to the needs of activists” (1). Consensus-building presumes there is a compromise between two sides of an issue that are equally rational and equally justifiable. In an idealistic Habermasian public sphere this kind of equidistant compromise might make sense, but in the public spheres of the real world, there are too many participants who act in bad faith for a truly fair compromise to be established when considering the lives and livelihoods of actual people who are denigrated by comfortable politicians, media personnel and others in power simply to choose a path in the middle. Activists, such as the Floyd 86 outsider rhetors who fight for immigrant rights, must break with decorum, deliberative democracy and consensus-building if they hope to inspire true change in the way immigration is discussed in the U.S.
For this reason, the actual goal of outsider rhetoric regarding immigration is a radical disruption of the narratives surrounding immigrants in the United States, followed by a legitimate discourse with all people about what it means to live and work in the United States.
This is the goal of Define American, which does not require that those who define what it means to be American be immigrants. Inviting alternative forms of participation within democracy by extending narrative access to (un)documented immigrants allows for a more robust democracy, challenges preconceived notions of groups that have traditionally been excluded and denigrated and problematizes forms of citizenship that have been crafted by those in power in order to accept only themselves and people who resemble them. These alternative forms are not magical thinking; activists, rhetors and academics who call for the participation of immigrant outsiders in the democratic processes of the United States do not believe such participation is a panacea for racism, exclusion and flawed democracy. Instead, listening rhetorically, providing avenues for participation and accepting unfamiliar frameworks for political discourse are small facets of liberal democracy that, ideally, accomplish long-term aims of openness, inclusivity, justice and fair government. It is a step in the direction of allowing all those who are affected by the decisions of a democracy to have a say in how those decisions are made.
Floyd 87
Chapter Two: Prisoner Activism
No character encapsulates the plight of the prisoner perhaps more effectively than Jean
Valjean from Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables. The novel begins with Valjean’s release from prison21 for having stolen a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s children. Upon his release, Valjean receives a “yellow passport” that marks him as a criminal and that will continue to limit the kinds of work he may perform, the places he may live, and the way strangers will interact with him. Despite having completed his unnecessarily long and difficult prison sentence, society will not allow Valjean to rejoin as a full member who enjoys basic human rights. Frustrated by this treatment, Valjean changes his name to Monsieur Madeleine and becomes a respected and wealthy businessman in another city. When Inspector Javert, a police officer who knew Jean
Valjean as a prisoner, learns that Monsieur Madeleine may really be Jean Valjean in disguise, he begins an obsessive pursuit to prove this ruse and to return Valjean to what Javert believes to be his rightful position in society, that of the (former) prisoner.
Although he is the primary antagonist of the novel, it is notable that Inspector Javert does not chase Jean Valjean from a perspective of hatred or personal disgust; rather, as the narrator describes Javert, “This man was a compound of two sentiments, very simple and very good in themselves, but he almost made them evil by his exaggeration of them: respect for authority and hatred of rebellion” (164). In this way, Javert is representative of the blind sense of justice and bureaucratic resistance to any deviation from the law, no matter how flawed those laws may be.
Javert’s unwillingness to allow Valjean to continue to effect change in his community as
Monsieur Madeleine is, strictly speaking, what the law expects, and Valjean’s fellow citizens tacitly accept such harsh treatment as a matter of course. Once a person has been established as a
21 During his time in prison, Valjean has been forced to perform strenuous physical labor that has permanently damaged his body. Floyd 88 criminal, there is no way to return from that designation.
Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables over 150 years ago in France, but its depiction of society’s view of prisoners resonates with that of the contemporary United States. In some regards prisoners may no longer be treated to the same harsh degrees, but the basic tenets of exclusion and denigration remain. The United States is one of the only industrialized nations that still employs capital punishment22, requires prisoners to perform manual labor as part of their sentence23, restricts where former prisoners can live and work upon release and alters societal perceptions of the former prisoner. Each of these punishments and restrictions mirrors a hardship that Jean Valjean faces, but in the United States Valjean would have potentially faced another punishment not depicted in the novel: he would not have been allowed to vote. In the United
States, there is no mechanism by which felons have their right to vote automatically restored. In many cases, felons must petition their state’s governor for the right to vote again. According to
ProCon.org, this approach is not only among the most restrictive regarding the voting rights of felons, it is also the least common approach. The most common approach to the voting rights of felons is to allow such prisoners to vote, even while they are still serving their sentences.
For the purposes of this research, what is important to take away from Les Misérables and its connections to the contemporary American prison system is the way the system uses an antiquated approach to prisoners’ participation in a democratic society. The American approach to prisoners’ voices renders a new category of democratic outsiders, which may lead one to wonder how a prisoner-as-outsider can find any means by which to participate in public
22 According to Nick Robins-Early, writing for The Huffington Post, the U.S. is one of nine “persistent executioners,” along with the likes of China, Iraq, Iran and Somalia, countries with poor records of human rights abuses. 23 Prisoner labor creates a problematic source of profit for the for-profit prison institutions that are frequently used as part of the U.S. prison industrial complex. This form of additional punishment will be examined in more detail below. Floyd 89 deliberations. As with the previously discussed undocumented immigrants, how does one participate in democracy when there is no legal mechanism by which to do so? How does one effect change in society, especially regarding policy issues that directly affect that person, when society has deemed him/her unworthy of a voice? The outsider rhetoric of prisoners and former prisoners in the United States will be the focus of this chapter. However, it is important, once again, to begin with an examination of the insider rhetoric as it relates to this group in order to understand how the thoughts of prisoners are negated in favor of the protection of the status quo.
Insider Rhetoric against Prisoners
Donald Trump styled himself as “the law-and-order candidate” during the 2016 presidential campaign. According to this narrative, the United States suffers from increasing crime rates, and no other politicians are doing anything to mitigate this crisis. Some of Trump’s stances on crime during the campaign were that crime was on the rise, the stop-and-frisk policies of New York City were effective, restoring the voting rights of felons was a bad idea, the United
States should be using the death penalty more than we currently do and many other “tough-on- crime” stances. In 1989, Trump infamously lobbied for the death penalty for the wrongfully- convicted Central Park Five, including taking out full page ads in New York newspapers calling for a reinstatement of the death penalty specifically for this case. Despite the fact another person eventually confessed to the crime for which the Central Park Five had been convicted, and the wrongfully-convicted men were released and awarded a settlement in 2002, Trump refused to apologize for his actions regarding the case. Not only did Trump maintain that he had not acted inappropriately in 1989, he also used those actions as evidence of his “tough-on-crime” stance during the 2016 presidential election.
The Central Park Five case is one of many examples of Trump using inaccurate claims Floyd 90 about crime and/or prisoners in order to bolster his image as the law-and-order candidate.
Trump’s claims that crime in the United States is out of control entirely ignore the fact that nationwide crime had been in a 25-year decline as Trump made these claims and, as Matt Ford notes in an April 2016 article for The Atlantic, “By virtually any metric, Americans now live in one of the least violent times in the nation’s history.” Additionally, stop-and-frisk policies in
New York have been deemed unconstitutional and ineffectual by empirical data. Jeffrey Fagan of
Columbia University explains, “You can achieve really very positive crime control, reductions in crime, if you do stops using those probable-cause standards. . . . If you just leave it up to the officers, based on their hunches, then they have almost no effect on crime.” Essentially, Trump’s claims on crime during the campaign are completely unfounded, and the only way they can have any success for him is from a rhetorical perspective. Being the “law-and-order” candidate does not mean much if the perceived threat of crime is insufficient to worry voters. Absent a crime- ridden rhetorical situation to which one can respond, a politician who wishes to appear tough on crime must create a scenario of lawlessness. Essentially, a candidate or advocate for criminal justice policies that legitimately work will start examining the issue from an honest perspective, whereas a candidate or advocate who only wants to be viewed by an audience as “tough on crime” will start from a position that views crime as an epidemic in the nation, no matter how much crime is actually taking place.
For many voters in the United States, the empirical data demonstrating the decline in crime and inefficacy of Trump’s favored policies against crime are moot points. Criminals and prisoners have forfeited their rights, and politicians should do everything in their power to remove them from society, according to these voters. This perspective on criminal justice highlights the effective strategy of dehumanizing rhetoric as it is applied to criminals and Floyd 91 prisoners. This dehumanization extends from arrest to trial to detention to release. In July 2017, while addressing a crowd of police officers, Trump encouraged the officers to “please don’t be so nice [to those who have been arrested],” and he continued, “Like when you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put your hand over it. Like, don’t hit their head, and they’ve just killed somebody. I said, you can take the hand away, O.K.?” (“President Trump Tells Police Officers”). Not only does this demonstrate a lens through which those who have been arrested are stripped of the democratic right of due process
(Trump has decided that all those who have been arrested are guilty and, therefore, unworthy of democratic protections), but also this comment, which received a substantial amount of support from the crowd of officers and conservative pundits, demonstrates a lack of basic human decency.
As the Hesford quote from the introduction notes, this rhetorical approach to the treatment of (potential) criminals is not only to convince individuals that criminals are not worthy of basic human rights; instead, Trump and tough-on-crime policies put forward by Trump and other politicians work to normalize the notion that criminals, writ large, have forgone their rights to decency, humanity and, certainly, democratic participation. An upright citizen need not concern him/herself with issues of due process, flawed criminal justice systems, corrupt politicians or officers or extenuating circumstances. All that matters is that those who follow the rules are granted humane treatment and commensurate rights, and those who do not follow the rules are not granted such privileges. It may seem that such an approach to the criminal justice process would be too petty for politicians to involve themselves in, but many scholars and activists argue that felon disenfranchisement is the bigger picture that politicians have in mind when they argue for a return to law and order policies. Floyd 92
In her seminal work The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander explores the way in which the mass incarceration of African
Americans in the contemporary United States works as a through line from slavery and Jim
Crow laws. A nation’s criminal laws are, of course, not natural, and the politicians who craft the laws, either intentionally or unintentionally, write their own biases into the laws. Unsurprisingly, when laws are primarily made by privileged white men, those laws will favor other privileged white men to the exclusion of the poor, the nonwhite and women. Examples of these discriminatory practices in the legal system abound and are so common that it is almost unnecessary to provide examples; nonetheless, for the sake of clarity, examples of each include the legal system in the United States that is largely driven by monetary concerns (the costs of bail and adequate legal counsel), which clearly discriminates against poorer people; the disparity between sentences for use of the drug crack versus use of the drug cocaine, which are nearly identical molecularly, but which carry a disparity of 18:1 with regards to sentencing, which discriminates against the poor and African Americans disproportionately because crack is much cheaper than cocaine; finally, the criminalization of abortion in many parts of the United States almost exclusively affects women.
In each case listed above, and in similar cases wherein a discriminatory law determines who is a criminal, the goal is to normalize a viewpoint, again either intentionally or unintentionally, so that people do not question the discrimination. Alexander writes:
All racial caste systems, not just mass incarceration, have been supported by
racial indifference. . . . [M]any whites during the Jim Crow era sincerely believed
that African Americans were intellectually and morally inferior. They meant
blacks no harm but believed segregation was a sensible system for managing a Floyd 93
society comprised of fundamentally different and unequal people. (203)
Just as many whites during the Jim Crow era truly believed without malice that black people were less intelligent and morally-refined, many whites today do not believe there is a disparity between the sentencing of white and black people in the United States. Without necessarily being consciously racist, many white people simply believe that black people are more prone to violence and criminality than their white counterparts.
As with anti-immigrant rhetoric discussed in the previous chapter, the rhetoric employed in order to disenfranchise prisoners and former prisoners is an attempt to establish Gramscian hegemonic consent. Although the United States imprisons a higher percentage of its population, as well as a higher number of prisoners, than any other country in the world, most citizens of the
United States will still never face incarceration, so many, if not most, people will have a difficult time relating directly to the plight of prisoner disenfranchisement. Additionally, many people dismiss any kind of concern for the rights of prisoners by claiming the solution is simple: “don’t commit felonies.” Much like the dismissive suggestions that undocumented immigrants should
“just get legal” or “wait in line,” the advice that prisoners should simply “not commit felonies” presumes several things about those who have committed crimes in the United States and the criminal justice system of the United States. The stance that people should simply not commit crimes if they wish to enjoy their constitutional rights presumes that all people come from equitable backgrounds that leave them well-equipped to simply not commit any crimes; the stance presumes that all laws are moral and fair; it presumes that the laws in the nation are carried out in equitable ways without preferential treatment given to any citizens or increased scrutiny applied to any other citizens; it presumes that those who have committed crimes in the Floyd 94 past could not possibly have changed their ways as a result of their punishment.24
Because most citizens will never be incarcerated in the United States and because the insider rhetoric regarding the commission of crimes is so dismissive about the circumstances surrounding arrests and convictions in the United States, it is easy for many people to consent to the hegemonic status quo regarding the disenfranchisement of prisoners and former prisoners. A person need not be vehemently set against those who have committed crimes or fervently in favor of law-and-order politicians in order to support, tacitly or explicitly, policies that disenfranchise those who have committed crimes. For such policies to continue, most people in a democracy need only to care little enough about the status quo not to agitate for change.
The hegemonic consent to disenfranchise former prisoners is made seemingly less problematic for those who are not directly affected by the possibility that a state’s governor often can re-enfranchise former prisoners at his/her discretion. On its face, such a process for potential re-enfranchisement has the appearance of fairness and magnanimity, but in practice the process is often arbitrary. In Florida, a panel made up of the governor’s cabinet conducts 10-minute hearings for individual applicants for re-enfranchisement. Before these hearings, Rick Scott,
Florida’s governor from 2011 through 2019, would explain: “This is a board of clemency. Okay.
There’s no law we’re following. The law has already been followed by the judges. So, we get to make our decisions based on our own beliefs. . . . There’s [sic] no standards. Each of us has the right, opportunity to make a decision based on the way [sic], what we believe” (“Felony Voting
Disenfranchisement”). John Oliver, host of the HBO show Last Week Tonight explores Scott’s
24 The belief that imprisonment does not serve a rehabilitating function for those who have been imprisoned leads one to question the efficacy of the prison system of the United States. If those who have committed crimes leave the prison system and are unchanged and just as likely to commit a crime as they were when they entered prison, of what use is the entire system? The focus on retribution over rehabilitation in the prison system of the United States is a worthwhile topic, but it is not my focus in this dissertation. Nevertheless, this concern is important to keep in mind while considering the insider rhetoric regarding prisons and prisoners. Floyd 95 panel in an episode regarding felony disenfranchisement and finds that the panel members scrutinize aspects of applicants’ lives that are as simple as traffic violations and church attendance. Furthermore, even in cases where the panel has acknowledged applicants have made tremendous changes in their lives, the panel has denied re-enfranchisement and has failed to offer applicants any advice for what they need to do to increase their chances for future re- enfranchisement (“Felony Voting Disenfranchisement”). However, so long as most of the population believes there is a process in place, most people will not feel strongly enough about this issue to agitate for change.
Rhetorical Outsiders: Participating as an Outsider “on the Inside”
In the epilogue to the introduction to this project, I quoted Roger Clegg, a former state senator from New Hampshire, addressing why felons in the United States should lose their voting rights. Clegg argues that people who have proven themselves incapable of following laws should not have the ability to make laws for other people. In an April 2018 National Review article filled with fearmongering, slippery slope fallacies and arguably disingenuous logic, Clegg and Hans A. von Spakovsky rebut George Will’s argument from the same issue that felon disenfranchisement serves the interest of conservative politicians, not the constituents and fellow citizens. Clegg and von Spakovsky wring their hands and worry that Will and people who believe like him would “let felons still in prison vote, the way Maine and Vermont do” and
“would inevitably re-enfranchise thousands, maybe millions, of felons who have not changed their ways, so that people unwilling to follow the law would be making the law for everyone else.” Clegg and von Spakovsky present this possibility as though it were a nightmare scenario, but, in this section, I intend to ask, “why not?” Would it truly be so horrific or problematic for those who are “unwilling to follow the law” to have a continued role in the democratic process? Floyd 96
Is it not more unsettling to abide a framework in which “thousands, maybe millions, of felons” have no say in the laws that will have a tremendous impact on their lives and that, quite possibly, account for their status as a felon in the first place?
As discussed above in the section devoted to insider rhetoric, a cynical view regarding felon disenfranchisement suggests that politicians in the United States, often conservative ones, have intentionally devised a means by which to take the right to vote away from millions of voters who will have a greater likelihood of voting for liberal policies. Although admittedly cynical, this explanation for the disenfranchisement of felons seems more likely than the concern professed by Clegg and von Spakovsky that somehow felons will create the nation’s laws, as though felons will somehow prevail in making theft and bodily harm legal, and that anarchy will reign.
In spite of concerns that criminals, prisoners and former prisoners will disrupt safety and security for law-abiding citizens and, therefore, have nothing of value to offer democracy and public discourse, prisoners who take an active interest in politics, government, democratic participation and other forms of public discourse actually inhabit situations and possess knowledges that may, in fact, make them superior to most in many ways when it comes to public deliberation. Jacques Rancière sums up Plato’s view of who is entitled to democratic participation in his book The Politics of Aesthetics when he writes, “Plato states that artisans cannot be put in charge of the shared or common elements of the community because they do not have the time to devote themselves to anything other than their work. They cannot be somewhere else because work will not wait” (7, emphasis in original). Much like Clegg and other conservative politicians today, Plato (as well as Aristotle and other classical philosophers) sought to exclude potential democratic participants for erroneous reasons—Aristotle excluded slaves, Floyd 97 women and basically anyone besides land-owning men; Plato excluded people who would not have the time to participate because they were workers—however, Plato’s very reason for excluding workers provides an argument in support of prisoners having a voice in democratic issues: most prisoners have an abundance of time in which they are able to deliberate on issues that interest them. Furthermore, Rancière continues the examination of political participation through the lens of Kant and Foucault when he explains: “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time” (8). What is important for democratic participation is that a participant has the time, ability and location to speak to a specific issue.
Most prisoners have a level of understanding of societal issues, especially relating to the criminal justice system and the societal frameworks that led to their encounters with that system, that most citizens will never attain. Hence, many citizens and politicians seek to disenfranchise prisoners based on morality; they treat democratic participation as though it were a zero-sum game: if prisoners gain a voice in the public sphere, law-abiding citizens lose their voice.
However, democratic participation is not a morality contest, and it is not a zero-sum game.
Democratic participation requires input from people who have an understanding of the issues at hand, time to consider those issues and a forthright desire to take actions and to put policies into place that legitimately make the society in which they function a better and more effective one for everyone involved. In many cases, this applies to prisoners as we will see through their attempts at forging alternative forms of participation below.
To begin, I will note that many prisoners have made outstanding contributions to society in several compelling ways. Often, prisoners and former prisoners become motivational speakers, using their experiences as cautionary tales for others who may be on similar life paths; Floyd 98 other prisoners and former prisoners become advocates for victims, for better treatment of prisoners, for criminal justice reform or for felon re-enfranchisement. Many prisoners use their time in incarceration to complete GED programs, complete courses of study (including the completion of university degrees) or write books that explore the experiences of prisoners before, during and after incarceration. Of course, not every prisoner will engage in such activities, nor will every prisoner reform his/her life as a result of a stay in prison; but these examples demonstrate the fact that many prisoners, whose voices are systematically silenced and disregarded, are fully capable of contributing to the democratic experience and offer a unique perspective that is not shared by many, if any, lawmakers in the United States.
Podcasts – Words that Seep Through Walls
One such recent avenue for prisoners to craft a voice and to reappropriate their humanity for the outside world, despite these attempts at sweeping disenfranchisement in the United
States, is the use of podcasts. One of the best-known podcasts in the early era of the medium is called Serial, developed by This American Life and hosted by Sarah Koenig. In the first season of this podcast, Koenig explored the murder of Hae Min Lee and the subsequent arrest, trial and guilty verdict of Adnan Syed for her murder. Over the course of the first season, Koenig provided a platform for Syed to tell his version of events to an engaged and empathetic public.
Koenig and Syed forwarded legitimate concerns about the original trial of Syed that would more than likely not have been given consideration if not for the popularity of the podcast. As a result, in 2018, the state of Maryland agreed that Syed deserved a new trial. The full details of the murder of Hae Min Lee may never be known; Syed may, in fact, be guilty of the murder, and the new trial may demonstrate his guilt in a fairer way. Nonetheless, the podcast provided a mechanism by which a single prisoner’s voice was made available to a receptive public, and this Floyd 99 popularity provides hope for others like Syed and for the general population of prisoners who are routinely silenced in favor of the law-and-order approach.
In the wake of Serial, prisoners and former prisoners have begun to use the podcast medium in order to present their own stories. Two such podcasts are Ear Hustle and
DEcarcerated. Ear Hustle is produced by Radiotopia and is hosted by Earlonne Woods, who is currently incarcerated at San Quentin prison, and Nigel Poor, who is a visual artist and someone who has volunteered as a teacher in San Quentin. The podcast is produced by several prisoners, recorded on location in San Quentin (for obvious reasons) and features interviews exclusively with other San Quentin prisoners detailing myriad experiences of life in prison. According to co- host Earlonne Woods, the hosts hope that the podcast will provide those who have never been in prison with a more robust understanding of the way prisoners are humans like anyone else, attempting to live their lives to the best of their abilities while incarcerated. The podcast, then, hopes to show that prisoners are, by and large, not monsters who have no remorse and who only want to commit crimes.
DEcarcerated is a podcast created and produced by Marlon Peterson, a former prisoner of the New York State prison system. During his time in prison, Peterson completed a degree in criminal justice and upon his release created several outlets by which to help people to transition from prison back to life outside of prison. According to Peterson’s website, “the DEcarcerated podcast highlights an individual journey of resilience, restoration, and triumph despite incarceration” (marlonpeterson.com). The United States takes a dim view of former prisoners and does little to help them re-transition to life outside of prison, and Peterson’s podcasts illuminates the struggles of such people and what they can and have managed to accomplish despite those struggles. Floyd 100
Ear Hustle provides a glimpse into prison life for the millions of Americans who are currently incarcerated. In the first few episodes of the series, listeners hear stories about choosing cellmates, reflecting on the crimes that resulted in a prisoner’s incarceration, tending to other living beings while behind bars and dealing with stints in solitary confinement. These episodes lay the foundation for a series that seeks to debunk the myths about prison that are often perpetuated by media (news, television, film, etc.). Listeners learn that most inmates can select their own cellmates and engage in activities such as watching television, reading, talking and so on in relative comfort daily. Listeners learn of an inmate, Rauch, who tends to the rodents and insects that he finds around the prison, and the way in which other inmates satisfy the urge to care for other lives, despite being confined. These episodes demonstrate the way prisoners maintain their humanity and even craft a kind of verisimilitudinous society inside their confinement. For outsider rhetors attempting to change the narrative about prisoners and former prisoners, this kind of depiction is crucial. Insider rhetors, law-and-order politicians, fear- mongering organizations and other anti-prisoner advocates attempt to illustrate prisoners as hardened criminals who do not belong in society and who are incapable of engaging in peaceful activities. However, the inmates who share their stories on these episodes of Ear Hustle demonstrate the way they adapt to their circumstances and create a social framework that could be mistaken for finding a roommate or taking care of pets if the stories were stripped of their contexts.
Of equal importance are the episodes in which the inmates discuss the crimes that have led to their imprisonment. In the second episode, “Misguided Loyalty,” Tommy Shakur Ross explains the reasons for which he joined a gang as a teenager, and how loyalty to that gang led him to murder a rival gang member in a liquor store, the crime for which he has been in prison Floyd 101 for over thirty years. Ross details the transformation he has undergone during his time in prison; he explains the importance of owning his crime and acknowledging that he is a murderer. Ross stresses that he does not believe he deserves his freedom, despite his transformation. Stories like
Ross’s are also important for outsider rhetors attempting to change the narrative surrounding prisoners in the United States. Although his story is, by his own admission, not a very sympathetic one, it depicts remorse and not a kind of showy remorse that is aimed at early release. Ross counters the anti-prisoner narrative that criminals are incapable of change and doomed for a life of recidivism. Ross does not hide the ugly details of his crime or attempt to provide extenuating circumstances for his actions; rather, in many instances he goes out of his way to portray himself in a negative light. Ross’s critical reflection and emphasis on the fact that he does not deserve sympathy or freedom demonstrate for the listeners that he is a prime example of a prisoner undergoing essential rehabilitation.
DEcarcerated addresses numerous issues related to the criminal justice system of the
United States (and around the world). In some instances, Peterson speaks with scholars and politicians about criminal justice concerns, and in other instances, Peterson speaks with or provides a platform for former prisoners to speak. For example, as of this writing, the two most recent episodes feature Danielle Sered (May 5, 2019), who is the executive director of Common
Justice, and Leigh Owens (May 2, 2019), who is the director of community engagement for the
Philadelphia district attorney’s office and a former prisoner at Rikers Island. Sered’s Common
Justice program is a criminal justice program that focuses on restorative justice, which is a framework of criminal justice in which victims and offenders commiserate about the ways in which the offenders can provide restitution to the victims. This framework humanizes both sides of the criminal justice spectrum and provides a voice for each party involved—victims are given Floyd 102 the chance to understand why their offenders targeted them and to understand the circumstances that led those offenders to feel the need to turn to crime; perpetrators are given the chance to understand the effect their crimes have had on the victims of their crimes and to understand the humanity of the people they have victimized. Owens’s employers, the Pennsylvania State
Council and the Philadelphia District Attorney, are political entities that have direct contact with
(alleged) offenders at every stage of the criminal justice process: as accused, as prisoners, as parolees, etc. These entities hold tremendous sway in the way laws are enforced and punishment is meted out, and they are inherently beholden to the biases and prejudices that are held by the officers, politicians and administrators who are in these positions of power.
In the episode with Sered, she argues for the use of plain language and creative forms of narrative in order to open up the subject of criminal justice reform to a wider audience, to
“authorize more and more people to speak from their own expertise without having to go through the sort of filter of figuring out how to be a policy wonk to do it.” Sered complains that most of the work on criminal justice reform is written in bureaucratic, policy language that excludes those who aren’t politicians, lawyers or academics. This exclusion, according to Sered, leaves us
(most people) with the feeling that we do not have any idea what we can do about the criminal justice system. Sered says the U.S. system “most[ly] . . . offer[s] prison or nothing. And it’s a terrible choice. Nothing isn’t a reasonable option.” Sered’s organization, Common Justice, offers survivors an alternative to prison or nothing—it offers restorative justice. This choice serves as an interesting microcosm of the rhetorical choices of democratic participation: a democratic society’s denizens are given the limited officially sanctioned options of participation: voting or writing congresspeople, and those options are stifling for truly democratic principles and hope for change. Similarly, the criminal justice system as it currently stands largely offers the Floyd 103 possibility of hyper punishment of prison or no punishment at all. In both cases, democratic participation and criminal justice reform, educating participants about the possibility of alternative frameworks is a crucial and activist act.
In Owens’s episode, he discusses the reasons for which he began to engage in criminal activities as a college student. Owens was not from the stereotypical background of a criminal; he came from a caring family, was a bright college student and had not gotten into trouble in the years before he attended college. Owens explains that once he began attending college, he found that he needed some additional money that he could not easily obtain, and he and some friends began selling marijuana in New York City and carrying firearms in order to provide themselves with protection in this new endeavor. Eventually, Owens and his friends were arrested and spent several years in prison at Rikers Island in New York. Owens does not deny that he was engaged in criminal activities, but he asserts that his punishment was exorbitant and had been exacerbated by the color of his skin. So, when Owens was released from prison, he began advocating for criminal justice reform and eventually took part in the campaigning efforts of Larry Krasner to become district attorney of Philadelphia. Owens describes the perception of Krasner’s campaign as “hilarious” to those in the mainstream and notes that Krasner received no endorsements from media outlets. These perceptions and slights from the mainstream were the result of Krasner’s emphasis on criminal justice reform that moved away from the “commonsense” understanding of what constitutes a criminal. Since Krasner’s election to the position of Philadelphia district attorney, he has instituted sweeping changes to the way prosecutions of crimes such as drug possession and sex work are handled. Krasner’s office does not seek punishment in marijuana possession cases, does not impose cash bail for misdemeanors and non-violent felonies and does not prosecute sex workers who have fewer than three convictions. Krasner comes to these Floyd 104 decisions, in part, by working with people like Owens, who have spent time in correctional facilities as a result of the same kinds of crimes he and his office are seeking to decriminalize.
From a rhetorical standpoint, Owens’s experiences, as shared by Peterson and his platform, provide an incongruous understanding of how the criminal justice system should operate. Clegg and other “law and order” rhetors believe that citizens like Owens have lost their rights to a voice in the criminal justice debate. Clegg worries that those who cannot abide by laws will be given the chance to make the laws if they are allowed to vote, and he and those who agree with him believe this is the commonsense stance: prisoners are to be punished, not asked their opinions about their punishments. Krasner, Peterson and many others disagree with Clegg’s conception of commonsense in criminal justice reform and operate from seemingly incongruous perspectives. Krasner seeks to alter the criminal justice system, not by speaking to those who have obeyed all the laws—at least not exclusively—but by speaking to those who have not obeyed the laws and who have suffered consequences as a result. Once again, the narrative of
Owens’s story, and of other former prisoners like him, provides humanity and understanding, perhaps even empathy, to those who see criminals as subhuman beings who are unworthy of consideration and voice. Of course, the most ardent “law and order” rhetors will not be swayed by stories that demonstrate many, if not most, people in our society who have been labeled as criminals are often, at least in part, victims of circumstance, not hardened and hateful monsters who only want to harm law-abiding citizens. However, for those who are undecided on criminal justice issues, or for those who are less firm in their beliefs about the inhumanity of prisoners, these stories may dissuade from continuing to provide their hegemonic consent.
Rehabilitative Activism
The guests on DEcarcerated and, indeed, Peterson himself demonstrate the common Floyd 105 trend that prisoners often become actively engaged in issues related to their experiences as a result of their time spent incarcerated. Many of the organizations Peterson and his guests discuss are designed with that goal in mind, and it is a crucial goal for changing general perceptions of prisoners and the formerly incarcerated. Much of the public perception assumes that prisoners leave prisons, in cases where they do, as violent and angry as there were (presumed to be) when they entered. In fact, many believe prisoners leave prison more violent and angry as a result of their incarcerations, which, Scott Decker and David Pyrooz focus on for their recently published
“Activism and Radicalism in Prison: Measurements and Correlates in a Large Sample of Inmates in Texas.” Decker and Pyrooz open their article with the comment: “There is considerable speculation that prison plays a role in radicalization. Many individuals involved in acts of political extremism have spent time in prison, adding credibility to such claims” (787). The false correlation between acts of political extremism and time spent in prison is problematic because it ignores a number of relevant factors, such as the reason extremists spent time in prison—which may have been radical acts of extremism--, other factors that may have radicalized the extremists before or after prison, and the number of former prisoners who do not become radicalized.
The study by Decker and Pyrooz was intended to examine these claims of prisoner radicalization and the level to which prisoners have been radicalized, at least within the Texas prison system. For the sake of comparison, Decker and Pyrooz used the same Activism and
Radicalism Intention Scale that had been used by two previous researchers on the topic of activism and radicalism, Moskalenko and McCauley. Moskalenko and McCauley administered this survey to students at two prestigious American universities, Bryn Mawr and Haverford
College. After Decker and Pyrooz compared the findings between their Texas inmates and
Moskalenko and McCauley’s students, Decker and Pyrooz found that “Indeed, levels of activism Floyd 106 and radicalization among 802 prison inmates who have been arrested 10,000 times and served
2,000 incarceration stints are equal to those of students at elite American Universities” (802).
The prisoners in Decker and Pyrooz’s study were asked to rank the likelihood on a scale of 1-to-
7, where one was least likely and seven was most likely, of them joining into acts that were categorized as “activist” in nature or “radicalist” in nature (without the prisoners’ awareness, of course)25. On average, the prisoners ranked activist activities as a 5.3 (very likely) rating and radicalist activities as a 2.9 (not very likely) rating (798). In other words, prisoners leave prison with a desire to affect change in their communities, but not with a desire to carry out violence or break the law in order to do so. In still other words, studies such as those carried out by Decker and Pyrooz demonstrate the fact that attempts to portray former prisoners as dangerously radicalized are effective tools of anti-prisoner, insider rhetoric that seeks to delegitimize the voices of those citizens who have the most relevant things to say about criminal justice reform and prisoner rehabilitation.
Prison Rhetoric and Border Materialism
It is nearly impossible to consider the rhetorical construction of prisoners without giving some thought to their physical constructions and materiality. The actual structures of prisons enact rhetorical ideologies and notions of what and whom is kept in and out. The panoptic structures exert their wills in a way that seems to create distance between the society, the law
25 I should note that I disagree to an extent with the metrics as defined by Moskalenko and McCauley for determining activism and radicalism. Decker and Pyrooz summarize the distinction made by Moskalenko and McCauley as “Legal and non-violent forms of political mobilization in support of a cause or a group are referred to as activism, while illegal and violent forms of political mobilization are referred to as radicalism” (789, emphasis in original). The problem with this distinction, as noted in other places in this work, is that it negates the ethically- based potential for activism that is deemed “illegal,” “violent” or otherwise “disruptive” of the status quo. The very notion of abiding by an unjust law or not fighting back against violent oppressors is its own rhetorical mechanism for stifling rhetors who do not enjoy the privileges and protections of the dominant culture, race or ideology. Taking action that runs counter to those frameworks, in my opinion, is not necessarily the product of radicalization; it is the product of rhetorical framing. Floyd 107 enforcement agents, the nondescript citizens in whose names the act of incarceration is carried out. Prison walls, cells, means of surveillance, etc. operate with their own sense of agency in order to delimit the interactions that take place between the prisoners and the outside world. This kind of material action is what Jane Bennett refers to as “thing power.” Bennet writes about her own experiences noticing “thing power” as she walked around a city when she explains, “For had the sun not glinted on the black glove, I might not have seen the rat; had the rat not been there, I might not have noted the bottle cap, and so on. But they were all there just as they were, and so I caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of these things” (5, emphasis in the original). Bennett asks the reader to consider the nonhuman agency at play in these experiences; object-oriented ontology focuses on the nonhuman, agentic assemblages that determine and constrict human (and other nonhuman) actors’ ideas and actions.
Likewise, Thomas Rickert, in his book Ambient Rhetoric, argues that “Given the far- reaching technological extensions of humankind’s cognitive processes, it again seems simplistic to relegate rhetorical powers to humans alone. Does it not seem that rhetoric circulates through both human and nonhuman elements” (3)? Rhetoric, for Rickert, is “ambient” in an age of enhanced material and technological ubiquity—humans cannot take credit, or be held responsible, for all the myriad operations and intentions that take place as a result of rhetorical constructs. Instead, rhetoric “must diffuse outward to include the material environment, things
(including the technological), our own embodiment, and a complex understanding of ecological rationality as participating in rhetorical practices and their theorizations” (3). Hence, responsibility for the exclusive frameworks that govern prisoners’ interactions with the world outside prison walls is diffuse; All involved parties are constrained, not only physically by the structure, but also rhetorically by the world that prison materiality has predetermined. The Floyd 108 materiality of prisons is agentic—what prisons accomplish rhetorically was established long before any of the human agents were alive, let alone focused on imprisonment, surveillance or rehabilitation. Because of the existence of the nonhuman material structures and their rhetorical participation, human actors are limited in their possible responses and actions. Humans may be
“blamed and targeted,” in Bennett’s words, but the ambient rhetoric made available by the nonhuman agents should at least be recognized as having a share in the blame.
The above diffusion of blame for the rhetorical constraints placed on prisoners and detainees by the physical structures of prisons is one way in which to consider objects and their roles in possible human actions and responses, but it is not the only such possibility. In her book
Not One More! Feminicidio on the Border, Nina Maria Lozano is critical of new materialist scholars and their willingness to let humans off the hook for the evils enacted by nonhuman entities. Lozano argues, “What is needed, then, is a new theoretical framework that affords scholars a space to speak about objects, things, and matter that retains the element of human agency, attunes carefully to the role of economic and cultural forces, and yet focuses on the importance of physical matter and the assemblages of things in relation to cultural phenomena”
(8). In other words, scholars should consider the nonhuman assemblages and agents that impact possible avenues of rhetoric and actions, but this should not be done at the expense of understanding that human structures, institutions and agents have put these nonhuman actors in place and those same human entities also have the power to remove those nonhuman actors at any time, but generally choose not to do so.
Podcasts that originate inside the walls of a prison disrupt the ideas of place and space that are supposed to be reinforced by the physical manifestation of the prison complex. As a physical space, prisons create an actual barrier/border between prisoners and the rest of the Floyd 109 world. Prisoners are kept in locked cells within locked buildings surrounded by locked fences and gates. They are often located at a significant remove geographically from population centers.
The obvious result of all this physical separation is that most prisoners and most non-prisoners will not encounter each other without concerted efforts on the part of both parties. The actual, physical space of the prison works ideologically, in much the same way maps and border walls work for nations, immigrants and citizens as discussed in the previous chapter, to craft an understanding of the place of the prison.
Prisons as a place serve to separate prisoners from the minds of those outside of prisons and vice versa. There are myriad intentional and unintentional reasons for this ideological separation that would require a much longer exploration than what I can offer here,26 but it should suffice to note that much of the intentional separation feeds into the issue of hegemonic consent discussed throughout this work. Most citizens will consent to the idea of imprisonment as it exists in the United States unless confronted by the reality of the prison complex. Hence, leaders work to keep citizens safe by locking dangerous criminals, and most citizens will accept that this system is for the best. Prisons as places within society become sticky with ideology that reinforces the notion that prisoners are where they need to be for the good of society and what happens behind the walls of the prison should be of no concern to those outside its walls.
As immaterial concepts, podcasts are not subject to the space/place inhibitions of prisons’ physical and ideological structures. The podcasts of prisoners disrupt and demystify the status quo prison experience by bringing the prisoners to the people and the people to the prisoners.
26 Besides, there are many important works that have already covered these kinds of ideas: Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Penn State Law’s “Imprisoned Justice: Inside Two Georgia Immigrant Detention Centers,” Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America, and Shane Bauer’s American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment. Floyd 110
Most people may never visit a prison or a prisoner, but s/he may be interested enough to listen to a podcast, and that curiosity begins the process of changing the perceptions of prisons and prisoners. In this immaterial framework, the inside and outside blur; the prisoner (physically kept inside) is transported around the world (ideologically outside), and the message disrupts the hegemonic consent bolstering the criminal justice system (rhetorically outside). The listener
(physically outside) is transported into the prison (ideologically inside) and may begin to employ mechanisms for changing the status quo (rhetorically inside).
Bureaucratic Euphemisms and Incarceration
The transposition of the prisoner and the listener may seem needlessly confusing, but it is illustrative of an important function of outsider rhetoric and agitation. The goal of such activism is to create understanding, empathy, active listening and actual change; the goal of outsider activism is to generate wider acceptance by those who are inside traditionally—those who are outside the outside, which allows us to bring to the center these traditionally marginalized views.
Prisons are designed to allow those in charge to maintain control, as Foucault notes in
“Panopticon,” but the ability to create a podcast allows prisoners to escape the guards’ gaze, at least figuratively and momentarily, and to communicate with the outside world.
While podcasts allow prisoners and former prisoners to change the narrative surrounding life inside prisons and after release from prisons, they still require that the listener be willing to engage with the topic in an open-minded way. One could surmise that a staunch law-and-order, anti-prisoner rhetor would simply not agree to listen to podcasts such as Ear Hustle and
DEcarcerated. The podcasts may perform a vital role in changing the narrative in this domain, but it does require a second party, an audience, to effect change truly. Surely some people who are undecided on what they believe about prisoners and the formerly incarcerated or policy Floyd 111 makers who are open to suggestions regarding the best approaches to prison reform may listen and be swayed by what they hear, but true democratic discourse and true change also requires engagement with those with whom one disagrees and, in some cases, even those who do not want to listen. This is, of course, a difficult task for a podcast. Protesters may be able to occupy a space and foist their physical bodies into a situation to call attention to an issue, but a podcast cannot force a person to listen who does not wish to do so. To some extent progressive podcasts that wish to advocate for change must rely on word of mouth, open-mindedness and serendipity in order to win a fair hearing. Barring these possibilities, the best podcasts devoted to outsider rhetoric can do is to change the cultural narrative surrounding an issue to such an extent that even those who do not wish to listen can no longer avoid it. This goal can be achieved by changing enough minds of people who were previously undecided and motivating enough like- minded people to join in on the conversation.
When considering the current framework of criminal justice and incarceration in the
United States, it is easy for many people to consider only the concerns of justice, retribution, illegality and humanity. When insider rhetors like Donald Trump and Roger Clegg dismiss the basic rights of prisoners, the framework necessarily only includes the victims and the perpetrators because this creates a false binary and a false dichotomy: standing with victims means standing against perpetrators; standing with perpetrators means standing against victims.
Within this framework, it is unconscionable to take the side of the perpetrator because it would mean victimizing the innocent party for a second time. Of course, a modicum of critical thought applied to the matter will reveal that it is possible to consider the interests of both the victim and the perpetrator simultaneously—this is the goal of alternative approaches to criminal justice such as restorative justice—and, therefore, to highlight the initial flaw in the rhetorical appeals made Floyd 112 by law-and-order candidates and other insider rhetors who make arguments against the rights of prisoners.
Not only is the approach of insider rhetors flawed in its creation of a false dichotomy regarding the treatment of prisoners, but also it is flawed in its creation of a false binary regarding the issue. Perpetrators and their victims are not the only people, groups or entities involved in the criminal justice process and, therefore, not the only people with vested interests in the policies and approaches to criminal justice in the United States. As mentioned above, politicians may seek to disenfranchise groups of voters who are likely to vote against them; voter suppression in the United States is a hotly contested issue, and the way a person feels about it is probably largely dependent upon his/her political persuasion: conservatives tend to favor forms of voter suppression, while liberals tend to be against them. This is not necessarily to adjudicate the validity of these positions or to declare one side as morally superior. As cynical as it may seem, liberals often are not in favor of increasing enfranchisement from a position of justice and morality. Rather, in the winner-take-all world of American politics, the desire to suppress votes or to re-enfranchise voters is concomitant with the desire to win. Studies have shown that republicans usually win elections with lower voter turnout and democrats usually win elections with larger voter turnout. Even more specifically, voters who have been disenfranchised most frequently vote democratic. Hence, voter suppression is not generally or at least primarily a sinister objective, but a tactical one. When carried out, voter suppression tends to have been codified into law by politicians in the form of felon disenfranchisement, voter ID requirements, polling place numbers, locations and times, gerrymandering, and the like. As has been a persistent theme in this work, these approaches to voter suppression seem like commonsense to many citizens because they have been around for a long time and because they are part of the Floyd 113 official governance of the United States. This means that many willfully acquiesce to the status quo regarding these policies without, perhaps, giving much thought to them. If an individual is not directly affected by these efforts at voter suppression, why should s/he care about them?
Another group that is directly affected by criminal justice policies in the United States are the people, groups and entities who are involved in carrying out these policies: law enforcement, attorneys, judges and any other groups that are connected, however tangentially, to the legal process of apprehending, sentencing and detaining criminals. It is not difficult to understand why these groups would be resistant to changing the criminal justice process as it exists in the United
States, even if they may do so unconsciously. Maintaining a narrative of high levels of dangerous/violent crime around the United States results in the transfer of military-grade equipment to local police forces around the country, increased budgets for all institutions involved in the criminal justice program, higher levels of job security for all involved and less need for (re)training. Changes to the way criminal justice is handled across the country would inevitably result in each of these facets becoming less certain. Approaches that recognize the falling crime rates nationwide, consider the humanity of everyone, even criminals, and the decriminalization of many minor offenses would mean there is no need for regular police forces to have military grade equipment, would probably divert money from the apprehension of criminals to their rehabilitation, would require smaller numbers of police, lawyers, judges, etc., and would require widespread (re)training.
The opposition to change coming from many politicians, police, lawyers and judges provides a very strong foundation for maintaining the status quo, but, perhaps, the biggest source of power for maintaining the status quo is the neoliberal commodification of the prison industrial complex. In the United States, detainment has become a literal big business with for-profit Floyd 114 prisons traded on the stock market and privatized prison corporations paying big money to build prisons and house ever-larger numbers of prisoners. In an unabashedly capitalist country like the
United States, once any institution becomes an industry it can be incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle monetary gains from the decision-making process. In the article
“Against Decorous Civility: Acting as if You Live in a Democracy,” M. J. Braun writes about this phenomenon as it applies to the commodification of higher education. Using James Arnt
Aune’s “rational choice theory,” Braun writes, “According to this central tenet of neoliberal theory, any political move to regulate markets will result in a perverse, negative consequence; therefore, any interference into free-market capitalism by the democratic polity is a perversion of the rationality of both the market and the individuals who are its rational actors” (141). In other words, when monetary gain is the preeminent determining factor of what is best for a society, government or institution, anything that hampers the ability to make money is antithetical to that purpose, no matter how well-thought-out or democratically-decided, and must be eschewed as a result.
Braun concludes this thought by writing, “When rhetors warrant arguments on ethical and humanist grounds that don’t correspond to the rationality of neoliberalism, which is bound to the ethics of efficiency, expediency, and the sovereign individual, these arguments are automatically dismissed as perversely disruptive to civility” (141). Arguments against the free- market principles that are held so dearly in the United States are labeled as radical, unfeasible and mean-spirited. Braun gives an example from her own experiences in higher education in which she advocated for better pay, hours and benefits for the contingent faculty in the English department. Although her arguments were based in ethical reasoning, provided plans of action and welcomed input from administrators for their implementation, the president of her university Floyd 115 called her unreasonable, lectured her about the untenable economics of her requests and offered no alternative plans of action. Comparable examples are readily available in our current political climate when politicians such as Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez make suggestions about how to deal with student-loan debt or climate change—attaining a higher education or saving the environment have become commodified in our neoliberal economy, so they can no longer be considered rational or, in many cases, even civil areas of discussion. In order to effect change in these areas, activists must resort to incivility and parrhesia—they must employ unruly rhetoric against the commonsense neoliberal ideologies that enjoy the tacit support of the nation, even as the democratic masses seem to favor policies that run counter to neoliberalism (polls show broad support for student-loan forgiveness, free tuition to public universities and Ocasio-
Cortez’s Green New Deal).
In the case of outsider rhetors in the realm of prisoner rights and criminal justice reform, activists must position themselves against the neoliberal logic of the private prison system of the
United States. One organization that has performed this kind of anti-neoliberal work is the prisoner-rights group Jailhouse Lawyers Speak (JLS). As a colloquial term, a jailhouse lawyer is an inmate who does not have any formal training in law, but who has put enough time and effort toward learning about the legal system while incarcerated that s/he is able to advocate for him/herself as well as for the other inmates. Hence, even the organizations name identifies its members as those who, despite their own incarceration, know something about the legal system, are willing to advocate on behalf of themselves and others, and are willing to speak back to the power systems that are in place. Indeed, on the group’s official Facebook page, the organization describes itself as being “by prisoners for prisoners.” Prisoners speaking out on behalf of prisoners is anything but adherent to the status quo. As mentioned above, the criminal justice Floyd 116 system works both to take away the voices of prisoners and former prisoners (via disenfranchisement, for instance) and to hide prisoners away from sight (in prisons far from their families and friends, for instance). Bringing about meaningful change, then, requires a bit of unruliness from groups like JLS.
On April 15, 2018, there was a riot at the Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville,
South Carolina. Seven inmates were left dead and another 22 were wounded in one of the deadliest prison riots in U.S. history. South Carolina’s governor at the time, Henry McMaster, blamed contraband, such as illegal cellphones, for the fighting amongst the inmates, and called for stronger measures to prevent cellphones from entering the prison, more guards and better pay for the guards—all of which, notably, further punish the prisoners and further reward the correctional officers. The JLS counters that the problems that led to the in-fighting were less the fault of the inmates and more the result of the conditions in which their detainment takes place.
According to JLS, “Seven comrades lost their lives during a senseless uprising that could have been avoided had the prison not been so overcrowded from the greed wrought by mass incarceration, and a lack of respect for human life that is embedded in our nation’s penal ideology” (qtd. in Smith “We Are Treated”). The lack of respect JLS refers to in this press release relates to the overcrowding of the Lee Correctional Institution—as is the case in many correctional institutions around the country—but also the poor relationships between prison staff and inmates, as well as the labor requirements/meager compensation that are found in the prison- industrial complex. Inmates in the Lee Correctional Institution engage in work for undergarment and bedding industries, among other for-profit/private companies. Such labor practices can easily be given a positive rhetorical spin in a nation that values capitalism and profit above all else and devalues prisoners and other undesirables below all else, but the framework of prison labor Floyd 117 cannot be mistaken for anything but a successor to the slave labor that haunts American history.
As previously mentioned, Alexander, Blackmon, DuVernay and others have discussed in their works the connections between slavery and the modern prison system, and while there is a strong focus on the racial aspect of prison populations in those works, one cannot overlook the capitalistic exploitation of imprisoned bodies in making these connections as well.
Shortly after the riot at the Lee Correctional Institution, the JLS organized the “National
Prisoners Strike” to take place between August 21, 2018 and September 9, 2018. The press release regarding the strike makes it clear that the strike is largely in response to the Lee
Correctional Institution riot and demands “humane living conditions, access to rehabilitation, sentencing reform and the end to modern day slavery.” The press release details ten specific demands to accomplish these overarching goals, which include improved conditions in detention centers, fair compensation for work done in prison, fairer sentencing practices, an end to racial disparity in sentencing, better access to rehabilitation programs and the restoration of voting rights for prisoners. The JLS calls for prisoners to accomplish this strike using work strikes, sit- ins, boycotts and hunger strikes. Additionally, they ask for allies who are not currently incarcerated to contact politicians and the media about the strike, to spread the word of the strike to other prisons that may have fewer mechanisms for communication with other prisoners and by finding ways to support prisoner-rights organizations and the families of prisoners who engage in the strike.
The National Prisoners Strike is an effective response to neoliberal ideologies that prioritize the acquisition of profits over whatever the stated goals of the institution may be
(prisoner rehabilitation in prisoners; student education in K-12 schools and colleges; healthy citizens in the medical profession). Prison labor is the epitome of the neoliberal commodification Floyd 118 of the criminal justice system: prisoners often have no alternatives for employment or monetary compensation while incarcerated, prison labor is often touted as performing a rehabilitative function and providing useful job skills, prisoners have few advocates to speak out against their use as low-pay labor, and prisoners often need additional funds in order to make purchases at the prison commissaries, which in many cases include necessities that should be provided by the prison in the first place. The private prison industry has no other goal besides making a profit on the incarceration of inmates—what else would it do within a framework governed by neoliberal logic? The status quo is maintained by civility and decorum; the private prison industry will only change in response to disruption. Jared Ware interviewed an anonymous representative from JLS for the activist blog Firedoglake just before the strike went into effect, and the representative said, “[Just as] comrade George Jackson said, ‘I’m for disruption,’ as long as we’re disrupting the system and not destroying each other.” Seeking change from a position of civility and decorum may have its place, but, as Braun notes above regarding institutions of higher education, altering the path of a neoliberal institution requires a disruption that affects the company’s bottom line.
Strikes and boycotts are useful rhetorical approaches for activists operating in capitalist contexts because of the way they hurt a company’s profit margins, but they have the potential to be all the more effective in the context of prison labor because the industry cannot simply bring in alternative labor options at the same cost. The very reason prison labor is so lucrative in the for-profit prison system becomes its greatest weakness when a unified strike takes place. The prisoners may hurt their own abilities to make purchases at the commissaries, but the companies who run the prisons have no alternatives that will allow them to fulfill their contractual obligations to outside corporations as cheaply as their prison labor does. Additionally, any Floyd 119 disruptions inside the prisons call unwanted attention to the questionable and potentially unethical practices that take place inside the walls of the prisons. The successful operation of a private prison requires those who are neither in prison nor involved with the operation of a prison to take no interest in what goes on there. Prison officials often hope to dissuade outsiders from paying too much attention to what goes on inside prisons by shrouding the operations in legalese, bureaucracy and boring rhetoric.
Visual Euphemisms in Prison Rhetoric
Both governmental organizations and capitalist corporations seek to prevent prying eyes from seeing much of what goes on behind their closed doors. Hegemony operates in a specific level of (in)visibility. Attaining hegemonic consent requires showing certain objects and events
(a migrant caravan nearing the U.S. border, a prison riot or an immaculately maintained prison), while hiding others (immigrant children in cages at the border, prisoners in solitary confinement or harsh working conditions inside prisons). One need only think of redacted government documents, Edward Snowden’s leaks, international spying, corporate espionage, trade secrets and such to understand just how important secrecy is to these entities. Unsurprisingly, private prison corporations who run many of the detention centers in the United States attempt to shroud the goings-on of correctional and detention facilities in mystery from the outside world. As mentioned above, this is accomplished by several tactics, which include the use of legal jargon, legal recourse, bureaucratic red tape, and, failing those tactics, simple boredom to dissuade outsiders from looking into what goes on inside prisons and what prison administrators do. In the introduction to Shane Bauer’s exposé on the private prison industry in the United States,
American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover journey into the Business of Punishment, he writes of his decision to infiltrate the prison system in the guise of a prison guard: Floyd 120
As a journalist, it’s nearly impossible to get an unconstrained look inside our
penal system. When prisons do let reporters in, it’s usually for carefully managed
tours and monitored interviews with inmates. Many states don’t allow reporters to
choose who they want to interview; the prison administration chooses for them.
Phone calls are surveilled and letters are opened and read by guards. Inmates who
talk freely to a reporter risk retaliation, including solitary confinement. Private
prisons are especially secretive. Their records often aren’t subject to public access
laws; CCA [Corrections Corporation of America, now CoreCivic] has fought to
defeat legislation that would make private prisons subject to the same disclosure
as its public counterparts. (3)
Correctional institutions, both public and private, seek to prevent outsiders from knowing what takes place inside their facilities. Vargas writes about this kind of meticulous attention to detail regarding keeping the press in the dark about the goings-on of detention centers when he writes about his experiences being shifted around a detention camp at the border. Eventually, Vargas notes, it occurred to him that he was being moved around to avoid the press who were visiting at the same time he was being detained. For the media to project his image to the outside world would invite the scrutiny commensurate with a well-known public figure’s detention at the camps. Likewise, after an inspection of the Theo Lacy immigrant detention center by the inspector general of the United States in early 2017 turned up numerous violations. Nonetheless, by the time ABC News released the story about the inspection, the sheriff’s department already contacted them to claim all the inspector general’s concerns had been addressed on the same day the report was filed. Considering the magnitude of the issues in the report (broken refrigerators, broken phones, mildewed showers, unsanitary cells, improper mingling of detainees of different Floyd 121 threat levels, etc.), it is highly unlikely that they could all have been addressed so quickly, but not to make this claim would invite further scrutiny, which a detention center cannot afford.
Allowing journalists to decide what the public needs to know would jeopardize the hegemonic authority with which the government or private correctional industries control the narrative surrounding the prison industry in the United States. In the book The Right to Look: A
Counterhistory of Visuality, Nicholas Mirzoeff writes, “[The] ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer. In turn, the authorizing of authority requires permanent renewal in order to win consent as the ‘normal,’ or everyday, because it is always already contested” (2). That is to say, the various entities who control the detention of prisoners need to maintain control of what outsiders visualize when they imagine what takes place inside the prison’s walls. “Winning consent” from citizens requires the continuance of the charade that claims prisoners are less than human, prisons are dangerous places and correctional institutions operate in the interest of the public’s safety and in humane manners that do not endanger the prisoners in the process. Visual rhetoric is an important tool in maintaining hegemonic consent about the treatment of prisoners. Most people, especially those who are not scholars of rhetoric or communications, think about rhetoric and argumentation as strictly the domain of language, but myriad scholarship examines the way in which images can perform rhetorical functions as well (Mirzoeff; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites; Laurie Gries). For instance, the Theo
Lacy Facility uses a stylized seal to represent itself. This seal depicts the facility in a manner that would be in keeping with a beach resort, replete with a palm tree in front of the building. This may seem an insignificant aspect of the facility’s representation, but it performs a vital bit of argumentation for the facility and its administrators: the seal puts forward the argument, however tacitly, that the facility is not a place where detainees are treated inhumanely; quite the contrary, Floyd 122 prisoners are essentially being detained in a resort facility. The seal argues that no onlookers need to worry themselves about what goes on inside the Theo Lacy Facility.
This kind of control is held up against scrutiny by the processes depicted above by Bauer,
Vargas and Sands (the author of the ABC News article on the Theo Lacy Facility), but these examples are reactive: when faced with a journalist or a situation that threatens to inform the outside world about some aspect of the prison system that the powerbrokers would rather remain clandestine, the correctional institutions react in order to stifle the proliferation of that information. Reactive examples are not the only ways in which correctional institutions constrain the “right to look;” or the belief that some person or entity has the authority to determine who gets to look, at what one may look, or how one should interpret that which s/he has looked at.
There is also a tight control of the narrative that originates in the materials that are disseminated by the correctional institutions and facilities themselves.
These tactics of dissuasion come together on the website for the Federal Bureau of
Prisons (BOP), which should serve as a repository for understanding something about the operations of the criminal justice system in the United States without needing a legal education, but which, in truth, seems to be quite vacuous and tepid. The home page for BOP includes links to other portions of the website, and a scrolling newsfeed of articles related to BOP, and not much else. On May 14, 2019, the date of this writing, three of the six featured articles are simply
“The Bureau of Prisons is Hiring!” and, again, images of prisons that look more like hotels than correctional facilities. As with the Theo Lacy Facility seal, the images on the BOP website perform important acts of visual rhetoric. Many visitors to the BOP website will be those who have a friend or family member detained inside the prison, so the image the website presents will be ineffective if it raises concerns over the treatment of the visitors’ loved ones. Images of Floyd 123 overcrowded cells, dirty and broken showers or spoiled food in the cafeteria would forward the argument that the prisoners are not cared for and are being treated inhumanely; images of pristine facades with kempt lawns and clean walkways give the audience the perception of service and hospitality. Both images may put forward vastly different ideas about the same facility, but the former more closely aligns with the reality of most detention facilities, while the latter serves only the rhetorical function of reassuring visitors and keeping prying eyes from scrutinizing too closely what goes on inside the facilities.
The other articles include two articles about a memorial services for fallen officers (the accompanying images are of officers and administrators on stage at what appears to be a memorial service and an image of an individual wreath) and an article about the BOP joining the
Homeland Security information network (the accompanying image is nothing more than the
Homeland Security logo and text that identifies the link as the “HSIN” or “Homeland Security
Information Network”). Noticeably, not only are these articles repetitive (there are six links that only really cover three distinct topics), but they all deal exclusively with the administrative/bureaucratic side of the BOP (hiring, information access, officer memorialization). There is no danger of the main page of the Bureau’s website telling a visitor anything that goes on inside an actual facility.
Clicking the “About Us” link does not give the visitor much more information. It leads to another page that includes links to other portions of the website, includes more images of glamorized prisons, officer commemorations and moments in BOP’s history, and a single- sentence mission statement that is as sparse as anything else found on the website to this point.
The mission statement reads: “Our agency was established in 1930 to provide more progressive and humane care for federal inmates, to professionalize the prison service, and to ensure Floyd 124 consistent and centralized administration of federal prisons.” While not saying much of anything that could allow an outsider to really know what the BOP does or how it accomplishes its goals, this mission statement says what could be considered an idealized version of what a prison system should do. The statement hits buzz words like “progressive and humane,”
“professionalize” and “consistent and centralized,” without explaining what these words mean in this context, why they represent ideal notions of prison operation or how the BOP accomplishes them. With very few changes, these two pages (the home page and the about page) could be a page unrelated to prisons—a school, a church, a hospital or even a hotel. A simple change of words like “inmates” and “prison” to “students,” “clients,” “guests” “patients,” “school,”
“hospital,” “hotel,” etc. and removal of an image of police in riot gear would render the website indistinguishable from any of these other institutions.
Even clicking on the link “Facility Overview” on the about page takes the visitor to another plain page with a single image of a guard tower, a list of abbreviations commonly used when referring to the facilities and a chart detailing the number of inmates housed within the
BOP in federally-controlled facilities, privately-controlled facilities and “other” facilities
(whatever that means). From this “Facility Overview” page, the visitor can finally click a link that provides some information about the actual operation of facilities (although still not much).
Clicking the link to “Federal Prisons” provides the visitor with some information about the number of prisons in the United States under the purview of the BOP and the five categories of prison those institutions fall under: minimum, low, medium, high and complex. Clicking on each prison type provides the visitor with basic facility information such as types of security, types of housing, level of staff-to-inmate ratio, inmate rehabilitation programs offered and a link to facilities that fall under each category. Although this technically provides information about Floyd 125 these types of facilities, the information is still sparse, providing undetailed answers to these specifications such as “dormitory housing,” “strong work and program components,”
“strengthened perimeters” and “highest staff-to-inmate ratios.” Even when providing some details about the facilities, the BOP website does not go out of its way to give the visitor any information that might actually tell him/her what goes on inside the facilities, why these approaches are taken, who does what, what kind of oversight is in place or who has ultimate authority.
One might easily attempt to dismiss the unimaginative writing and representation on the
BOP website as nothing more than the uninspired work of an employee or intern who does not have much experience with web design or press releases, but it is more likely an intentional attempt at crafting “boring visual rhetoric.” The web designer for the BOP will, of course, take into consideration the anticipated audience for the website itself. It is safe to assume that the
BOP does not receive a lot of web traffic from disinterested parties—in other words, those who do not work for the BOP or other branches of the criminal justice department, do not have a loved one incarcerated in one of their facilities, do not work for a news agency covering a story about prisons or do not write dissertations about the rhetoric of prisons probably do not frequent the BOP website. Working from this narrow list of people who are likely to visit the BOP website, the designer is more easily able to tailor the content to make an argument to placate the concerns visitors may have and quickly direct them away from sources of information that may pique their interests. This objective can be accomplished by presenting the viewer with vaguely pleasant images in which nothing happens, providing the visitor with links that contain little information, mostly in the form of slogans and platitudes, accompanied by more boring, yet pleasant, images and, finally, when providing information, making certain that it comes in the Floyd 126 form of an overload of text that is filled with complicated legal terms, references to hard-to-find policy and vague descriptions. In an essay about drone strikes by the United States and the use of what is known as “light war” more generally called “Nothing to See or Fear: Light War and the
Boring Visual Rhetoric of U.S. Drone Imagery,” Jessy Ohl argues:
Whereas traditional war rhetorics of assent privilege effervescent imagery to
captivate and persuade audiences of war’s (il)legitimacy, a different form of
stylization is necessary to lull subjects into acquiescence. In place of the vibrant,
poignant, and disruptive images that punctuated both militaristic and pacifistic
campaigns during previous total wars, it is the bland, forgettable, and ultimately
boring images of violence that help mollify the demos to light war. (615)
I believe the same is true for prison facilities in the U.S. The whitewashed images of American prison facilities are designed to “mollify” those who may seek to critique the conditions of such institutions and the treatment of the detainees. The imagery presented by the government works to sanitize the operations of any potential perception of violence and to replace it with seemingly commonplace images.
The rhetorical use of bureaucracy is a means of dispersing accountability for actions that are unconscionable, dehumanizing or otherwise problematic. Additionally, bureaucracy serves as a kind of deflection mechanism in order to dissuade outside observers through the perception that what goes on inside governmental institutions, including prisons, is simply too bland to concern anyone. Blogger Colin Dickey writes that “[T]he purpose of the bureaucratic voice is less to shape our thoughts or how we see the external world, but to reward incuriosity.” Those whose jobs require them to do unspeakable things do not need to bother themselves with the mundane decisions of higher administration; those who do not interact with prisoners on a quotidian basis, Floyd 127 much less those who never interact with prisoners, do not need to be curious about what goes on inside prisons. What is bland is safe; incuriosity is rewarding.
Joseph Cunningham, writing about the rhetoric of bureaucracy, describes the mechanisms of narrative control as such: “As an organization of control, bureaucracies are engineered to produce a series of constraints that produces a meticulously contrived meaning. Little is left to chance. Discourse functions as a process that is produced and controlled—bureaucratic discourse supplanting organic discourse” (312). Therefore, prying eyes cannot be allowed to observe what takes place inside prison facilities. One’s own observations, or the observations of an activist or investigative journalist, foster organic discourse. The bureaucracy cannot control narratives that originate outside of their planned mechanisms of discourse. When an outsider agent takes an interest and sees something different from the predetermined visual euphemism, shrouded in bureaucracy, that person sparks an organic discussion of what is going on and, most likely, will present those findings in a manner that will cultivate the interests of other outsiders to the bureaucratic framework. Because of this potentiality to disrupt the prescribed discourse of bureaucratic euphemisms in prison rhetoric, outsider rhetors effectively shed light on the contradictions occurring behind the closed doors (barb-wired walls and cell doors). In order to get a truer sense of what takes place in these facilities, one must not allow the BOP to have exclusive rights to the depiction of its facilities, the treatment of inmates or the narratives of what happens when violence occurs inside their walls. This is the kind of narrative usurpation attempted by the podcasts Ear hustle and DEcarceration and by the prisoner-rights group JLS.
In 2018, Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer published the book American Prison about his time undercover as a prison guard for the for-profit prison corporation CCA in which he detailed many disturbing aspects of the system, including training that explicitly encourages Floyd 128 guards to engage in physical violence as retaliation against inmates (24-25), company materials that openly laud the conflation of the corporation and correctional facility aspects as a means of attaining personal promotion and financial gain (7; 15), troubling similarities between private prisons and slavery/Jim-Crow-era labor (15-20). The book is interesting in that it details these disturbing aspects and shines light on practices that corporate prisons and the U.S. government would prefer to keep hidden, but it is also important to note the way in which Bauer has conducted his journalistic activism.
In the introduction to the book, Bauer explains that investigative journalism has a long and rich history and provides some key examples of this kind of work (Nellie Bly, John Howard
Griffin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Ted Conover, among others). Then Bauer writes, “Why are these types of investigation so rare today? A big reason is litigation” (9). As discussed above, in our hyper-capitalist society, neoliberal sensibilities tend to win out when pitted against public welfare and common good, in both court cases and the court of public opinion. Bauer gives the example of the grocery store chain Food Lion winning compensation from ABC News after the news outlet ran a story exposing, using undercover journalists, the grocery chain of repackaging and selling spoiled meat. The settlement was awarded by a jury who were clearly more troubled by the dishonesty of the journalists in their interactions with the company than they were by the company’s horrific actions that ran counter to public good. It is undoubtedly certain, then, that
Bauer risked greater public backlash for attempting to expose the unconscionable actions of the private prison industry—not only is he attacking a profit-making endeavor (the source of many jobs for the local areas where such prisons are built), but he is doing so in order to advocate for a group of people that the hegemonic status quo has already decided are less-than-human
(prisoners). Floyd 129
The public’s reaction aside, investigative journalism such as Bauer’s work performs a vital rhetorical function in advocacy against insider groups who have worked hard to attain the hegemonic consent of the wider public: it uses an entity’s own words and deeds against it. CCA and BOP strive to maintain their shroud of uncertainty about what goes on inside prisons so that they can operate with impunity. If the general public believes that prisoners deserve to be in prison and that they are treated humanely, or, as many people seem to believe, treated better than those who are not in prison, the corporations and departments can act without fear of consequences. Prisoners may speak out, as does the JLS and other prisoner-led coalitions, but they can easily be dismissed as biased sources of information who have a vendetta against the criminal justice system. The messages put out by the CCA and JLS are bureaucratic and filled with legalese, as discussed above, to ensure that the general public does not take an interest, and, if someone does push through, they are not able to understand or learn much about what they read anyway. However, investigative journal exposes what members of the CCA and BOP know and what they say behind closed doors; Bauer’s work, in this instance, provides the real ideas that govern the operations of the prison systems of the United States, and it largely corroborates what prisoners, former prisoners and their advocates and allies have long said about the U.S. criminal justice system.
Bauer recounts an instance from his training at the correctional facility in which the teacher discusses the correct response to an inmate spitting at a prison guard.
Unprisoned Rhetoric and the Wisdom of Walls
Most of the United States takes away rhetorical agency from prisoners before,27 during
27 As Michelle Alexander, Douglas A. Blackmon and others have written about at length, the inherent flaws of the U.S. system of mass incarceration serve to track specific members of the society into the prison system. Typically, those who are tracked into the criminal justice system are already disadvantaged members of society: racial minorities, the poor, immigrants, the intellectually disadvantaged and so on. Hence, it is quite simple to take away Floyd 130 and after incarceration. Ostensibly, those who have proven themselves unable to follow the rules of society have forgone the right to have a say in the way that society is governed, including when the issues of society directly impact one’s own life as a prisoner or former prisoner. What the experiences of rhetors such as Earlonne Woods, Marlon Peterson, the guests on Ear Hustle and DEcarcerated, the members of the JLS group and other (im)prison(ed) rhetors demonstrate is that prisoners and formers prisoners not only deserve enfranchisement and agency, but they also often have wisdom and a voice that is capable of articulating more nuanced ideas regarding prison reform than politicians and “average” citizens who lack any true or direct experiences with their own imprisonment or working with others who have been imprisoned. (Im)prison(ed) rhetors operate from a position of what I have termed here unprisoned rhetoric.
This double entendre seeks to play up the notions that rhetors who have direct experiences with the criminal justice system often desire, with good reason, to establish a criminal justice system in the nation that is not founded upon a reliance on the prison system and incarceration—it is a rhetoric, therefore, that is based on unprisonment, not imprisonment. The second aspect of this term considers insider rhetoric regarding prisoners, former prisoners and the position of primacy given to retributive/punitive imprisonment in the United States as a rhetoric that imprisons, literally and figuratively, the citizens of the United States in an epistemology of fear, abandonment and despair. Insider rhetoric traps citizens in a cycle wherein those who have committed transgressions are irredeemable and disposable. Outsider rhetoric that is unprisoned attempts to break this cycle by giving everyone the opportunity to interact with, understand and, ultimately, engage in the discourse ethically and in good faith with prisoners and former prisoners. Such rhetoric releases all citizens, not just prisoners and former prisoners from
completely the voice and agency of prisoners once they have committed a crime because they were largely unheeded to begin with. Floyd 131 the bonds of an epistemology that is based in fear. Unprisoned rhetoric functions by demonstrating that most prisoners28 are not a danger to society, especially to those whom they do not know. Most prisoners are imprisoned for non-violent offenses, and most violent offenses were committed by a person known to the victim. Of course, this does not mean that violent crimes should not be taken seriously, but it does mean that most prisoners are not a danger to society at large. Also, notably, most violent crimes are the products of very specific sets of circumstances, and, removed from those circumstances and/or the moments in time when the events occurred, the prisoners would not be a threat to their victims. Unprisoned rhetoric allows an audience to come to terms with these ideas of the relative innocuousness of prisoners to most of society.
Unprisoned rhetoric originates from the wisdom of walls prisoners might attain.
Ostensibly, prisons should serve a rehabilitative purpose for those who have been placed within their confines, but there is too much evidence that, in the United States, the prison system is used almost exclusively for punitive and pecuniary purposes. Paradoxically, the prison walls themselves serve as the rhetorical support for the claim that prisons in the United States accomplish retribution, not rehabilitation. Rehabilitation requires social interaction, with experts, family and, as is the case with restorative justice, even victims, but prison walls separate prisoners from any of these social bonds. Furthermore, the U.S. prison system relies heavily on solitary confinement, which, in addition to being largely considered ineffective and inhumane, performs the exact opposite function. U.S. prisons are designed to keep prisoners apart (from one another, families, society, etc.), and that is the imprisoned “wisdom of walls.” From a rhetoric of
28 All of this discussion about changing the perception of prisoners, including violent criminals, is not intended to exonerate all criminals or to eliminate legitimate concerns about random acts of violence, which do occur. However, it is important to understand the way in which anti-prisoner rhetoric exaggerates the dangers of such crimes and does nothing to prevent future crimes from taking place. Floyd 132 fear perspective, removing the prisoner from all other humans is logical and prudent—one cannot hurt that with which one cannot interact physically. However, unprisoned rhetoric views the wisdom of walls differently.
The unprisoned rhetoric views walls as nothing more than physical boundaries that prevent bodies from moving about as they may wish to do. Physical walls, such as those of a prison, however, can only do so much to prevent prisoners from interacting with the outside world. As the podcasts discussed in this chapter demonstrate, prisoners who are placed in the right circumstances can not only manage to interact with the outside world, but can thrive in doing so, and, hopefully, even change the perspectives held by the outside world. As such, the wisdom of walls from the point of view of unprisoned rhetoric is that they are in place to be transgressed. Although some prisoners may never be able to move past the physical walls that hold them in the same location indefinitely, with unprisoned rhetoric, they can move into the world indefinitely. On the podcast Ear Hustle, many of the prisoners who are serving life sentences explain that they felt their lives were over upon receiving their sentences, but they have nonetheless found ways to find meaning in their lives and, in many cases, take part in projects that aim to change themselves, the prison system or the world. From this perspective, the wisdom of walls is that walls are not effective for accomplishing their intended purposes and calling greater attention to this deficiency may lead to a greater embracing of the logic of unprisonment.
Floyd 133
Chapter Three: Youth Activism
Young people constitute an interesting group of outsiders. A young person may have all the demographic markings of an insider, but still not be deemed worthy of engaging in public discourse without being met with derision and condescension. Ostensibly, compulsory public education in a democracy is designed to cultivate a sense of citizenship and democratic participation, but when high school and college students attempt to participate in activist events or to speak out on issues, they are frequently dismissed as not understanding the issues or speaking only from the passion of youth. On the other hand, if young people do not take an interest in politics or societal events, adults tend to castigate them for their self-preoccupations or lack of compassion and empathy.
Paradoxically, given the charge of education in a democracy to prepare students for democratic discourse and participation, there is an ever-raging debate about the ethicality of teachers engaging in political discussions with young students. Scholars such as Paulo Freire argue that education is inherently political and, therefore, should be addressed head-on. Others such as Stanley Fish and E.D. Hirsch have historically argued that bringing politics into the classroom takes away from instructional time and imposes the teacher’s beliefs on the students.
These arguments against politics in the classroom exacerbate the double-bind faced by young people that much of society views them as simultaneously ill-informed and apathetic. If politics are not brought into the classroom, it seems the only way young people can manage to earn their place in political debate is via the passage of time, which does not necessarily have a bearing on one’s understanding of the world.
It is important to speak briefly about the issue of “politicizing” the classroom. I mentioned above that compulsory education in democracies are intended to serve as incubators Floyd 134 for public participants. The goal is allegedly to create a well-informed citizenry that can contribute in a meaningful way at every stage of public policy. However, as noted in the introduction, many people take issue with attempts to address political issues in the classroom, which leads to Texas determining the textbook curriculum for most schools throughout the
United States and to accusation of liberal indoctrination in the university system of the United
States. These attempts to depoliticize education are flawed because there is no such thing as an apolitical approach to teaching. Paulo Freire, an important figure in the area of critical pedagogy demonstrates throughout his work the flaws of what he calls “the banking model of education”
(72). The banking model presumes that students are empty vessels into whom educators can pour unadulterated knowledge, knowledge that is presumably free from bias and is apolitical. The flaw in this model arises both in the fact that the banking model of education is an ineffective method of education and because it is in no way apolitical. In Gramscian terms, the banking model of education is a hegemonic attempt to justify and even glorify the status quo through the manufacture of consent. When history textbooks gloss over the brutality of slavery in the development of the United States or tout notions of manifest destiny to justify the slaughter of
Native Americans, there are clear political implications, even if the authors/publishers claim these decisions are made in order to keep the information “neutral.” The acquiescence of consent by American students completes the hegemonic cycle of establishing an educated citizenry, one that blindly accepts the master narrative of white, European, patriarchal domination.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire refers to this idea as “narration sickness,” which is the notion that education is limited to what can be told by the experts without need of reference to experiences, especially student experiences. When underaged activists attempt to fight against these norms, they are casually dismissed as not understanding the world well enough to engage. Floyd 135
This dismissal is essential to the framework of the insider/outsider dichotomy as it relates to the engagement of underaged people in democracy.
Insider Rhetoric against Youths
At the heart of efforts to delegitimize the participation of minors in the public discourse of the United States is, again, Gramscian hegemonic consent. Arguably, attempts to win consent from constituents to dismiss the ideas of young people is easier than it may be for some of the other groups discussed above. First, the overwhelming majority of citizens of the United States is over the age of 18. According to The U.S. Census Bureau, “In the 2010 Census, the number of people under age 18 was 74.2 million (24.0 percent of the total population)” (Census.gov, bold in original).29 Even more important is the fact that no one under the age of 18 has the ability to participate in U.S. democracy in any official capacity, such as by voting or running for office.
Hence, voters and politicians in the United States have little incentive to engage with underage citizens or to concern themselves with mechanisms by which the children may have their voices heard. Those who have reached adulthood already will never again need to worry about having their opinions dismissed because of their youth, so self-interest will not motivate those who can vote or hold office to agitate for greater participation on the part of minors. Hegemonic consent operates almost as a default in this circumstance because no single voter will be affected personally by this form of disenfranchisement.
Along with the fact no voter belongs to the underaged demographic, children are still developing in many senses of the word: physically, emotionally, intellectually and ideologically.
Most children under the age of 18 will not have accrued much “real-world” experience. Adults
29 Additionally, millions of those people under age 18 will be newborns, infants, toddlers and very young children who have not developed enough cognitively to participate in democratic discourse, rendering the percentage of minors who may attempt to participate even lower. Floyd 136 often view children, especially teenagers—the group of minors most likely to want to participate politically—as naïve and emotional, and many argue that the teenagers are only parroting the ideologies held by their parents, friends or role models. In contemporary society, a common practice is to mock “millennials.” According to Kate Hayes, writing for Forbes, three stereotypes about millennials are that they “are lazy and lack loyalty,” “all think they are special,” and “can’t take criticism and are overly sensitive” (“9 Ways”). If this is how older generations view millennials, it should be unsurprising that many of the older generations will consent to dismissing the ideas of younger generations. It should also be noted that Hayes’s article was written in 2018, the year in which the age range for millennials was 22-37 years old. The millennial generation is not even that young, relatively speaking, so how much more will people dismiss the thoughts of those who are even younger and even less like themselves? Once again, the hegemonic consent to ignore what young people think about important issues is not necessarily malicious in its intent; rather, many older voters simply believe that underaged citizens will come to understand issues better as they grow older, but until the young people grow up, the adults will enact the policies that govern the best interests of the children. Children are, thus, used rhetorically by adults (“protect the children”), but cannot deign to believe they have a voice of their own.
When Children Have Experience, But Are Still Dismissed
On February 14, 2018, a former student brought a gun to Marjory Stoneman Douglas
High School (MSDHS) in Parkland, Florida where he began shooting, killing seventeen people and injuring another seventeen. As with most school shootings in the United States, a heated debate about gun control arose as a result of the shooting, and numerous survivors among the students of MSDHS became active in the national debate, forming a political action committee Floyd 137
(Never Again MSD) for the cause, organizing a march in Washington (March for Our Lives) and engaging in a televised town hall on the issue one week after the shooting with senators Marco
Rubio and Bill Nelson, representative Ted Deutch, Broward County sheriff Scott Israel and NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch. Two of the most prominent activists in this movement were David
Hogg and Emma González, both of whom have continued to push for greater gun control on the public stage since the attack.
In the wake of the shooting, most politicians and political pundits were respectful of the students despite their vocal activism in support of gun control. As mentioned above, prominent supporters of the second amendment and conservative issues in general such as Marco Rubio and
Dana Loesch agreed to discuss the issue of gun control and school safety with the students live on CNN, and, for the most part, all parties were at least civil. Additionally, most major news outlets in the United States featured the student activists to allow the students a chance to express themselves. However, as could be expected, after a few weeks had passed since the shooting, which occurred on February 14, 2018, and the activists showed no signs of relenting in the pursuit of stricter gun control, those who opposed gun control became less inclined to brook the students’ activism and turned to insider rhetoric to render the activism less credible.
In March of 2018, only roughly a month after the shooting, Fox News host Laura
Ingraham tweeted: “David Hogg rejected by Four Colleges to Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.) [sic].”
It goes without saying that Hogg’s acceptance or rejection from a variety of universities around the country was immaterial to any actual news story, but it served as a means through which
Ingraham could attempt to dismiss the legitimacy of Hogg and his agitation for tougher gun control in the United States. For many high school students, applying to college represents a Floyd 138 transition to greater maturity; it symbolizes completing high school, relying less on parents or guardians, perhaps moving out on one’s own and/or to another part of the country and taking steps into what is colloquially known as the “real world.” Acceptance to college is also indicative of intelligence, both in terms of what students have already shown themselves capable of doing intellectually and the potential that an admissions board believes the student to possess.
Hence, when Ingraham gloats about Hogg’s rejections from several universities, she attempts to infantilize him and to portray him as unintelligent. The fact he is applying to college reminds readers of his youth, and the fact he was rejected signals to readers that he is not intelligent enough to have a voice on any meaningful issues.30 For Ingraham and like-minded individuals, it does not matter that Hogg and his fellow students have firsthand experiences related to the second-amendment debate in the United States—in fact, they have much more relevant experience than probably most gun rights advocates ever will; what Ingraham attempts to convince her viewers/followers is that the opinions of Hogg and the other survivors do not matter because they have not lived long enough to understand the intricacies of an issue that has directly impacted their lives. A base number of years lived takes precedence over direct experience for no reason other than tradition.
Ingraham’s claims return us to the notion of narration sickness on two fronts: her viewers need not interact with youth activists to understand how little they know about gun violence and second amendment rights, and the youth activists are admonished to accept the narrative as it is told by the experts (presumably Ingraham, politicians, the NRA and gun-owning adults). Again, the problem with this reliance on narration sickness is that the youth activists such as Hogg and
30 Of course, it is also noteworthy that she mentions Hogg’s very solid 4.1 GPA in the tweet and UCLA’s low acceptance rate. She attempts to provide herself with a buffer against claims that she is attacking Hogg by presenting these circumstances, as though she is truly reporting his rejection through concern for his future. Floyd 139 the other survivors have firsthand experiences with gun violence that most second-amendment advocates do not: they have survived the precise violence against which they protest and, therefore, experiences cannot be allowed to provide validation in the argument; the master narrative must reign supreme.
Ingraham’s transition from hosting the survivors of the Parkland shooting on her show to demonizing one its most prominent members in the span of about a month represents a fairly predictable approach to the right of self-representation as it relates to children in the West, and especially in the United States. Wendy Hesford claims in her book Spectacular Rhetorics:
Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms: “The Spectacle of children suffering relies on certain international and national scripts—such as the rescue narrative and deterministic models of child development—that displace children’s negotiations of enveloping discourses and material circumstances and thereby reinforce their disenfranchisement as moral agents and historical actors in the public sphere” (153). In the wake of tragedies that strike children, the
Western tendency is to remove the voice of the children affected by the tragedy and perform the necessary “rescue narrative” on their behalf.
Hesford continues: “Self-representation is an important form of rhetorical agency. But children’s self-representations can also serve as a means of self-recognition for the powerful—a representational pattern that shows how children’s agency is caught up in global politics of recognition and economic distribution” (155). The suffering of children is a powerful rhetorical trope, but it is not one that hegemonic agents can allow the children to control because children have not been adequately educated in the proper status quo responses espoused by the hegemons.
Much like the control of bureaucratic discourse as discussed in chapter two, if children are given the control to foster organic discourse about the issues that affect them directly, they may Floyd 140 advocate for causes and situations that run counter to the goals and desires of the politicians, power brokers and other (adult-run) organizations.
In attempting to appropriate the responses to the suffering of children, politicians, pundits and other social and cultural elites seek to gain rhetorical efficacy from the rescue narrative through the stripping of children’s agency. What is important to understand in this framework is that, as Hesford also notes, “the protection of children as property is not the same thing as recognizing children’s political status as persons. The absence of children’s points of view has fed stereotypical images of children as passive, helpless subjects” (156). Speaking/acting on the behalf of such children without consulting their voices is a means of appropriating their rhetorical worth with no regards for an understanding of their experiences. Although she did not directly link her tweet with Hogg’s advocacy in favor of gun control, Ingraham attempts to depict Hogg as a “passive, helpless [subject] and to infantilize his image in an effort to delegitimize his agitation for change and to reappropriate the discourse of gun control for the hegemonic powers already in place in American politics.
Rhetorical Outsiders: Youth in Action
This section on the activism of youth should probably begin with a historical/political/social consideration of what constitutes youth in any given framework. In contemporary U.S. society, there are several markers of maturity in the life of a young person.
The ages 16 and 21 are important milestones because they are ages at which young people become legally allowed to drive a car and purchase alcohol respectively. Both acts are of vital importance to many people, especially young people, in the United States, so the fact that we, as a society, have decided these ages are appropriate for carrying out these acts holds some significance. Of course, while being mature enough to drive responsibly and to drink alcohol Floyd 141 responsibly operates at a certain level of consideration for the safety of the individual who does these acts, there is also a more important social consideration at play as well. Driving necessarily takes place in a social framework in which the driver must act responsibly for his/her own safety and the safety of others (passengers, other drivers, pedestrians, etc.). Likewise, drinking alcohol comes with the potential for achieving dangerous levels of intoxication that are hazardous for the one who imbibes as well as those around that individual (drunk driving, aggressive behavior, lower levels of inhibition, sexual assault, etc.). Despite the crucial importance of these two ages in American culture, the pinnacle age of maturity for the young person in the United States is 18.
In the United States, as well as in many other countries is the Western world, age 18 marks a young person’s maturity into adulthood. Many legal permissions and obligations come along with the simple fact of reaching this birthday milestone. For instance, an American 18- year-old can vote, purchase cigarettes, purchase lottery tickets, open a bank account, get a tattoo and many other actions that were previously impermissible. Additionally, the 18-year-old
American may have to register for the draft/be drafted into the military (this is also the age at which one can join the military voluntarily), may be selected for jury duty, may be legally responsible for financial obligations, can be sued, can be tried in court as an adult and many other requirements from which s/he was previously protected. The implication is that the young person, now become an adult, is capable and responsible for nearly full participation in American society, complete with all the privileges and obligations that such participation entails.
For most Americans, the above list will seem to be commonsense and not worthy of much consideration; aside from a few differences in age restrictions in different states around the nation and a few nationwide changes over the years, these age markers have remained fairly consistent so long that there is not much value in worrying about why the ages have been chosen Floyd 142 or if and when those ages may change. Nonetheless, it is important for my purposes to consider the way in which age in the United States functions rhetorically, and a crucial part of understanding this rhetorical aspect of age is to understand the way in which bureaucratic necessities governing age requirements can become intertwined the social perceptions of ages. In other words, generally for legal reasons, ages such as 16, 18 or 21 become definitive markers of when a person is ready to engage in the activities. When doling out age-restricted privileges and responsibilities, bureaucrats cannot rely on flexible guidelines to assess when individuals can perform these tasks effectively. Someone may be ready and able to drive at the age of 14, while someone else may not be ready until the age of 18, but determining these differences bureaucratically would lead to chaos—the anathema of bureaucracy. Instead, the state determines an age at which most people will be capable of effectively accomplishing tasks such as driving, and allows everyone who reaches this age to prove him/herself capable. This does not inevitably mean that someone who is 25 will be a better driver than someone who is 15, and it certainly does not mean that the 25-year-old will know more about the operations of an automobile than the 15-year-old, but it systematizes the process as a matter of necessity. The same idea can be applied to most other privileges and responsibilities that comes with specific ages, such as voting or handling one’s own financial situation.
Because these age markers have been necessitated by the state, they can easily become slippery forms of denotation for what a person is or is not prepared to do. The act of voting at the age of 18 serves as an effective example for this point. Because an American citizen cannot vote until s/he turns 18, the implication is that those people who are not yet 18-years-old cannot truly understand politics, society, government or foreign affairs until reaching this arbitrary age marker. In actuality, understanding and participation in these areas is not dependent upon Floyd 143 attaining a certain number of years on Earth—as though understanding the world is some teleological process through which we all transgress. Rather, understanding and participating in politics, society or any other realm of the democratic process is experiential, and it will be, necessarily, different for every person. If a 17-year-old senior in high school is interested in becoming a political science major in college, there is a good chance s/he will know a lot more about current affairs and politics than will a 40-year-old who self-describes as “apolitical.”
Nonetheless, the 40-year-old will enjoy many privileges in the democratic process that are not yet available to the 17-year-old (including the ability to run for president). The age markers for democratic participation, such as 18 to vote or 35 to run for president are intended to be indicative of experience with the political process, but, as this case demonstrates, such markers are better thought of as guidelines.
Someone may counter that it is not really significant that the 17-year-old soon-to-be political science major does not yet have full functionality within the American democratic framework because those avenues will begin to open up on his/her next birthday, and that simple fact is true; however, this kind of case is representative of the way in which age is rhetorical.
Despite the fact this young person may be as well-versed in American politics as any political pundit, there is a good chance that his/her opinions will be dismissed as naïve solely because of his/her age. After all, for the seventeen-year-old to understand politics truly, s/he must be able to engage in the process. The logical fallacy at play here is not that difficult to follow: someone who disagrees with this student will presume that because the student is not yet old enough to vote, s/he does not really understand the way the world works and, therefore, any opinion s/he formulates will be flawed as a result of inexperience.
A terrific example of this kind of dismissal recently occurred when a group of school Floyd 144 children confronted Diane Feinstein urging her to support the “Green New Deal” proposed by
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey in the U.S. House of Representatives. In response,
Feinstein told the children, “You didn’t vote for me,” and “There’s no way to pay for it.” She then lectured the children about the fact she won her election because she understands how the process works, implying that the young activists were naïve about the way the system works. It is hard to imagine that Feinstein would have been so dismissive, or at least not dismissive on the same grounds, of constituents who were of voting age. She could not have claimed with certainty that an adult activist “didn’t vote for [her],” and she would need to operate with some level of concern for attaining the adult activist’s future votes as well.
But the children were not proposing fantastical solutions to climate change; they were legitimately-concerned children agitating for a solution that has a broad-base of support among many sectors of the U.S. population, adults and children alike. Polls taken near the end of 2018 and beginning of 2019 show that almost three-quarters of Americans now believe in the impending climate crisis (69% according to a poll by Yale University and George Mason
University, and 71% according to a poll by the University of Chicago and the Associated Press
(Irfan)), and of those who believe in the dangers of climate change, 83% believe the government needs to take measures to ameliorate those dangers (Irfan). This belief is not limited to the democrats either; several republican lawmakers who have previously been opposed to environmental regulations have begun to campaign on the issue and to call for regulatory measures in the houses of congress (such as Senator John Barrasso). Despite this shifting ideology regarding the immediacy of the climate crisis and the need to do something about it, even politicians who are largely considered “progressive,” such as Feinstein, take on a condescending approach when discussing such topics with children. Floyd 145
What these easy dismissals demonstrate is the societal acceptance of the narrative that children are not fully-formed humans yet, not yet capable of rational human thought. Society expects children to become practiced in democratic participation through hypothetical scenarios in the classroom setting or through participation in highly-insulated/-structured (practically irrelevant) organizations.31 Children, then, as seemingly incomplete beings, have no business taking part in real-world discourse and debate. Jessica K. Taft explores this perception in her work with teenage girls who see themselves “becoming activists.” In her article, “Teenage Girls’
Narratives of Becoming Activists,” Taft summarizes a large body of child development and psychology research that asserts that youth are generally characterized as “lacking in various ways: lacking in reason, lacking in empathy, lacking in moral clarity, and lacking in understanding of social rules and norms (Lesko, 2011)” (29). Taft continues that other research has shown that such perceptions of the agency of youth, or lack thereof, is marginalizing, disempowering and dismissive as it instills a belief that children are only a vehicle for the creation of their future selves (29). As Taft argues, this reliance on a deferral to one’s future self is problematic in the condescension it fosters, and fallacious in the assertion that adults are somehow “finished products.” But, even more troubling, Taft’s work demonstrates the way in which the youth activists she interviewed have internalized the idea that they are only “becoming activists.” Taft concludes:
Finally, in drawing on the traditions of coming of age narratives and
developmental discourses on adolescence, girls also unwittingly replicate ideas
about young people as subordinate, incomplete, or deficient. Coming of age
narratives inevitably position childhood as ‘lacking,’ and the child as innocent,
31 Such as student government bodies, model UNs, special interest clubs, etc. Floyd 146
incapable, unable, and not a full subject. Even the adolescent, as the one who is
still ‘in-process,’ is assumed to be less than what he or she will be as an adult.
(37)
In contrast, when youth activists are encouraged to share their experiences and receive validation for their efforts and ideas, the master narrative regarding the incompleteness of children and the completeness of adults is destabilized. Aside from hegemonic control of a sizeable portion of the population, there is no rational reason for dismissing the views of youth activists. Experience and an understanding of one’s positionality and circumstance are not dependent upon attaining a certain number of years. A higher degree of visibility for youth activists is crucial for exposing the precarity of the anti-youth insider rhetoric position that children are uninformed, uninterested or overly manipulable.
The children who confronted Diane Feinstein, the survivors of the Parkland Shooting and any number of other youth activists are speaking from a fount of experience that is not restricted to a specific number of years of life achieved or several years of education attained. They attempt to address issues that are of critical importance to their own lives and about which they know a great deal through experience and concentrated focus. As Ali A. Abdi writes about in his article “The Rhetorical Constructions of Global Citizenship and the Location of Youth: A
Critical Analysis,” youth in a global context are becoming less and less certain about their futures and their abilities to attain gainful employment in the globalized, post-capitalist economies of the world. Abdi writes, “In both developed and developing countries, the youth are facing bigger challenges in procuring viable and livable employment possibilities via, among other areas, the regional grouping of global manufacturing and service industries” (45). Students’ concerns are often dismissed because they have not completed their educations, have not held Floyd 147 real-world jobs or have not experienced other foundational life events, but they are not oblivious to the precarious circumstances surrounding their futures—the goal of compulsory education in most of the industrialized world is to prepare students for their adult lives, but those lives are often at odds with what they have learned in their educational frameworks.
Additionally, if the United States is, as most consider it to be, a deliberative democracy, there are certain requisite guidelines to which public discourse must adhere to maintain its legitimacy, according to Seyla Benhabib. Benhabib explains that there are three features for discourse in a deliberative democracy: “1) participation in such deliberation is governed by the norms of equality and symmetry . . . 2) all have the right to question the assigned topics of conversation; and 3) all have the right to initiate reflexive arguments about the very rules of the discourse procedure and the way in which they are applied or carried out” (70). Hence, in a deliberative democracy, anyone can engage in public discourse on an equal footing and can critique what is being discussed, as well as how that topic is being discussed. All facets of deliberative discourse are, therefore, up for debate by the participants within a deliberative democracy.
What becomes even more significant about these “rules of engagement” for deliberative democracy is Benhabib’s notion of who has the right to engage in this kind of public deliberation. One may read and accept the features of deliberative democracy, presuming that the scope of such deliberation will be necessarily limited to some exclusive label as “citizens” or, more exclusive still, “free citizens,” but such is not the case according to Benhabib. Benhabib writes, “There are no prima facie rules limiting the agenda of the conversation, or the identity of the participants, as long as each excluded person or group can justifiably show that they are relevantly affected by the proposed norm under question” (70). Benhabib even goes on to assert Floyd 148 that “In certain circumstances this would mean that citizens of a democratic community would have to enter into a practical discourse with noncitizens who may be residing in their countries, at their borders, or in neighboring communities if there are matters that affect them all” (70).
Deliberative democracies do not, therefore, have the right to dismiss voices out of hand if those voices have some justifiable connection to the topics under consideration. Benhabib’s cause for inclusion in deliberation could extend to any chapter of this project (immigrants, prisoners or youth), but it seems particularly salient for this chapter on youth activism.
The youth of a given deliberative democracy can certainly make the case that they will be affected by the decisions of that democracy; in some cases, youth can make the case that they will be inordinately affected by those decisions (as with the climate crisis or gun control issues).
If youth activists can demonstrate that they understand the issues and can demonstrate that those issues will affect them personally, and, in most cases, this has proven to be the case, their ages are a flimsy basis on which to dismiss their grievances. Not only do youth activists have this right within a deliberative democratic model of public discourse, but they have the right to question how these decisions are being made and enacted. Parkland survivors are well-positioned to critique politicians for their acceptance of NRA contributions; Greta Thunberg is well- positioned to critique Donald Trump for turning a blind eye to the detrimental effects of his administration’s policies regarding worsening the climate crisis (even if he is a U.S. politician, and she is not a U.S. citizen because the climate crisis is a global concern). The exclusionary boundaries of political discourse in a deliberative democracy are not designed to ignore relevant voices and concerns and remain ethical.
Unfortunately, in truth, as mentioned in the previous section, requirements such as age and education are largely in place to maintain the hegemonic consent of the population. Children Floyd 149 have in many cases experienced more foundational life events than many adults and, therefore, are better qualified to speak about certain issues than those who have legal rights and obligations to take part in the democratic process, but their young ages are convenient mechanisms by which their opinions can be dismissed. In terms of education, numerous scholars have explored the way in which compulsory education in the United States and other democracies is truly about teaching structure and conformity to authority (Freire; Shor; Bourdieu and Passeron), which inadvertently or intentionally includes acquiescence to the status quo. Abdi concludes his essay with the following claim:
While civic education, many times represented as citizenship education (although
the foci might not critically converge in many instances), is included in many
school curricula, it is more often than otherwise intended to teach governance
structures and nationalist doctrines that are designed to serve the interests of the
governing elite. The governing elite includes those in so-called liberal
democracies in the West where, via the machinations of the interconnected power
elite (Wedel, 2009; Mills, 2000), ideas and information are manipulated through
corporatized media structures that hardly speak for the masses, let alone for youth
interests and needs. (49)
The notion that young activists cannot understand real-world topics until they have completed their educations is paradoxical in that it pretends students should not apply what they are learning in their public educations (ostensibly they are learning to be effective participants in democracy) in contexts relevant to their own lives. As Abdi notes, this dismissal and admonition to “wait until you are in the real world” only serves to reinforce to pedagogy of conformity as it is taught in democratic classrooms. Floyd 150
Societies have long been dismissive of the passion of youth for action. In Pierre
Corneille’s 1636 play Le Cid, The Count of Gormas chides the eponymous Don Rodrigo, Le Cid, for his youth and naivety, to which Le Cid responds, “Je suis jeune, il est vrai, mais aux âmes bien nées La valeur n’attend pas le nombre des années! (I am young, it is true, but to well-born souls valor does not wait for a certain number of years!)” (translation mine). This quotation shows that for centuries young people have sought to act for themselves despite the dismissal of their elders. As a result of these centuries of youthful rebellion, there is a large cache of examples of the way in which young people have asserted themselves that includes music, art and fashion, all of which could be construed as inward-looking and insular projects that do not necessarily move much beyond a person’s inner circle. However, many young people (have) wish(ed) to engage in broader activist actions, and the prevalence of social media, and most young people’s propensity to make use of these services, allows student to fulfill this kind of engagement in a much more prominent way than was previously possible.
As mentioned above, Laura Ingraham attacked David Hogg because of his views on gun control. In response to these attacks, David Hogg, his sister and his followers organized boycotts of Ingraham’s sponsors until several of the sponsors withdrew their support for her show, and she was forced to issue the half-hearted apology already discussed. The boycott of a product is something that people in a consumer-driven culture have always been able to weaponize in order to sway businesses to change a position, but in the age of social media, users are able to organize instantly and extremely visibly in ways that were not previously possible. Those threatening to boycott may be young, and therefore less powerful, than most citizens, but they are capable of making their presences known much more effectively than they may be able to in other domains and, perhaps, they may be able to use social media platforms more effectively than their older Floyd 151 counterparts. There is, of course, a danger in considering all youths to be digital natives, but, as with any technology, those who grow up with a tool as a ubiquitous presence in their lives, the use of the tool will eventually become second nature, part and parcel of their daily lives. A business will likely determine that it is better to avoid bad publicity, such as the kind garnered by a 54-year-old talk show host attacking a 17-year-old school-shooting survivor, than to continue to have their advertisement seen by the viewers of a single show.
The Age of Imprisonment
In discussing the vitality offered to the activism of youths by social media, it is important not to forget the determinism of material circumstances for children. Social media, smartphones, tablets and other communicative technologies are crucial for the advancement of youth activism, but the importance of such technologies also underscores the way in which people under the age of eighteen can be severely limited in their ability to take part in public forums by material
(socioeconomic) limitations. A smartphone works as a clever tool for participation, but an underprivileged youth may not be able to afford one, or s/he may have a phone but cannot afford to pay for the data that would be necessary to engage. In this way, children are limited by the relative privilege they already enjoy, and in many cases, they cannot personally do anything to change those circumstances.
The space and place dichotomy for people under the age of eighteen largely manifests itself as a result of the circumstances of the parents/guardians of the children. Most children have no say in where they live, where they go to school, how much free time they have, if they can have a job (and, if so, how long they can work), where they can travel, etc. Often, when high school students work it is out of necessity, and, if they do work, that only takes away more of the potential time that they could engage in activism. The homes, schools and places of work for Floyd 152 these students are all physical spaces in which students interact, but they are also ideologically- laden places that play determining roles in how the students may engage socially and politically.
For instance, students in New York City, Los Angeles or Washington D.C. may have little trouble finding like-minded peers and organizations that support the causes they espouse; however, students in small towns, rural areas and places wherein the students constitute a minority, ideological or otherwise, they may have difficulty organizing or engaging in activist events.
School buildings and materials themselves are ideological places because, while they perform extremely important educative functions for the formative intellectual development of children, they are also severely limiting places that prevent students from spending time exploring other parts of the world, nontraditional ideas and concepts or alternative viewpoints. In many parts of the country, particularly the rural areas mentioned above, students attend schools made up of a faculty and student body that largely look the same as they do and espouse the same worldviews.
How do young people engage in the democratic process or in other public forums in which people share their voices and ideas then? And how does their rhetoric operate on a broader scale that encompasses an audience not only made up of their peers, but that also includes adults, especially those who may be disinclined to listen to a young person? As with any demographic, young people have found many ways to be activists and to engage in the community that serves as a determining factor for their lives.
One such example of the way in which young people may get involved in their communities is through an organization like the Youth Activism Project. This organization is coordinated by adults, but it has the goal of allowing young students to brainstorm, organize and Floyd 153 enact the kind of activism that is important to them. On the Youth Activism Project website, the goal of the organization is explained as such:
Youth Activism Project campaigns are fully youth-led. Youth Activism Project
provides support and resources, such as providing background information on the
bills, coaching students on public speaking, bouncing around ideas, and providing
space for debriefing and celebration. But in the end, our youth leaders call the
shots. They decide on the problem they want to solve and what actions to
take. (Emphasis in original)
One of the unfair criticisms of young people who attempt to engage in or organize activist events is the notion that they do not truly understand the issues or how to address them. Although the concept of vulnerable populations needing to rely on allies in order to make their voices heard is problematic, an approach such as the one put forward by the Youth Activism Project is a useful one for minimizing the veracity of this criticism. Young people can come up with their own issues to address, and adults provide funding, connections, information and other kinds of support that will allow the youths to move forward with their ideas. As unfair as it may be, the understanding and support provided by adults for these student-directed issues brings a degree of clout that may help the students to achieve results that they may not have otherwise. However, the fact that the activists are children can also be a crucial component of the success for programs such as the Youth Activism Project.
For instance, one of the projects described on the Youth Activism Project website is a community policing initiative in Chelsea, Massachusetts. The “Discrimination Busters” program was designed to “work together as a community to shorten the separation between police officers and the people within the community.” As part of this program, community outreach officers Floyd 154 visited local schools and worked with the students to brainstorm ways in which officers and young people in the community could foster a better relationship amongst themselves.
Additionally, students arranged to visit the police station and to discuss the ideas further with the officers there. In this instance of police interaction, it is most likely important that the diverse group of people who interact with police officers are school-aged children. Such interactions allow for a building of mutual respect and understanding that may be more difficult for both sides once the children have grown and left school.
The fact that this organization allows the child activists to control their own areas for activism and forms of engagement is important because there is certainly the danger of young people being manipulated by larger entities, or even the government itself, in order to advocate for policies and other actions that only truly represent the status quo in the first place. In the article “One Train Can Hide Another: Critical Materialism for Public Composition,” Tony Scott and Nancy Welch explore the way in which the social media/internet virality of the #Kony2012 campaign was not as grassroots as many believed or wanted others to believe. Scott and Welch write, “Through such an inventory [of the flaws of the campaign], we move from celebrating
Kony 2012’s apparently sui generis virality to understanding it as part of a historical process among contending powers” (564). This issue with new media campaigns and their perceived connection to youth activism is that hegemonic entities can co-opt the platforms, disguise their true purposes and garner “grassroots” support for plans that those in power already want to put in place. As Scott and Welch continue later: “[These criticisms of the #Kony2012 campaign] also
[bring] into view a new understanding of Kony 2012’s rhetorical mission: to secure audience allegiance for policy already being pursued. Viewed from this wider angle, Kony 2012 did not fail to foster in-the-streets activism because, all along, more passive acceptance is what it Floyd 155 sought” (565). The concerns regarding charismatic leadership, especially as it pertains to youth activists being led by adults persist, even in the domain of engaged youth participating in advocacy in a youth-centric framework of new media and internet virality. Young people’s concerns are frequently and easily dismissed, but, often, when they are not in control of their own mechanisms for activism, those mechanisms may become additional tools for the acquisition of hegemonic consent.
But even in the cases of children who are limited by the efficacy of social media or who cannot participate in activist organizations such as the ones described above, watching other minors engage elected officials, police personnel and the figureheads of powerful organizations as the survivors of the MSD shooting did in the town hall that aired on CNN provides a powerful rhetorical tool for vulnerable activists. Young people may be under the erroneous impression that simply because they cannot vote, they also cannot address, let along challenge, these people who are in positions of authority. When the student-survivors of MSD challenged these authority figures in front of the entire nation, and really the entire world, they showed how those who may not have legitimate mechanisms for participation within the democratic framework of the United
States can still carve out alternative mechanisms for participation. This formation of a citizenship of participation, à la Vargas from chapter one, fits nicely with the calls made by Hardt and Negri to change the system of democracy in order to make legitimate change.
Solidifying alternative institutions in an already-established governmental framework may seem like, and may truly be, a daunting task, but an articulation of alternative participations is a good first step to changing such frameworks. Working with Gramsci, Hardt and Negri and other Marxist thinkers, Jan Rehmann argues for the necessary approach that a movement must take in order to achieve true and lasting change in a “undemocratic” governmental framework Floyd 156 such as the one that exists in the United States. Rehmann writes, “OWS [Occupy Wall Street] has altered the public discourse, but not the structure of the economy and the state, nor the inner composition of the hegemonic apparatuses. . . . Without some stable positions in civil society which allow us to spell out the critique of capitalism again and again, the “good sense” elements in common sense risk subsiding after a while, drowned out by the prevailing ideologies” (12).
Rehmann shares Gramsci’s example of the Catholic Church “reiterat[ing] its doctrines again and again so that they got firmly anchored in the common sense of its believers” (12). These examples once again demonstrate the way in which ideologies become unchallenged concepts that adherents believe to be natural, commonsense and even the only possible frameworks available. Repetition establishes consent.
To bring this back to the notion of the survivors of the Parkland shooting, the ideological framework has already established the notion that young people do not have the authority to speak out against what they perceive to be injustices. Institutionally, those who are under the age of eighteen do not yet have the legal right to vote. This voting restriction does not necessarily require continual repetition to work effectively as it is a cut-and-dried requirement of voting in
U.S. democracy—most children know that they do not have this right until their eighteenth birthday—and because the requirement has been in place for such a long time, it mostly proceeds without challenge. The implicit message behind the age requirement for voting is that children do not have a place in public discourse—if they had anything of value to add to the conversation, they would have the right to vote.
Additionally, less formal components of American ideology convey the idea that children do not have a legitimate voice in public affairs. There is a long history of scholarship that considers the way in which the public school system in the United States, and other democratic Floyd 157 nations, operates as a mechanism to instill obedience to authority. Students, in this framework, are expected to learn structure, acquiescence and obedience alongside the content and coursework. Even less formally, “commonsense” advice such as “respect your elders” and “you will understand when you are older” solidify the idea that children have nothing of value to add to public discourse. These ideologies have been solidified into the mindset of most Americans in a way that means they will not be critiqued or challenged in any way. Many Americans believe it is a character flaw for a young person to question the claims an adult makes, no matter how flawed those ideas may be.
It is as a means of undermining this problematic ideology that the televised townhall operates as an effective rhetorical tool for youth activists. Most of the ideology that children should respect their elders and accept the decisions made by adults are based on the notion of experience. Adults tend to have experienced more of the world than children; therefore, even if children feel strongly about an idea, an adult will probably know more about the issue at hand and will have a better idea regarding the efficacy, necessity and validity than will the child.
However, in the case of the townhall discussion between the Parkland survivors and congresspeople, police officers and organizational representatives, the issue at hand was gun safety and gun control, and the young people on the stage had a greater base of experience than did the adults. Consequently, the students of MSD were able to engage in parrhesia and perspective by incongruity. Many of the powerbrokers, largely for political or monetary reasons, claim that the issue of gun control is overblown, but, for the most part, these powerbrokers are speaking without a base of experience built from their own interactions with guns. The children, on the other hand, know the truth of the dangers of guns and are willing to speak that truth to power. They are able to establish an incongruous relationship with the authority figures who are Floyd 158 made up of elected officials (those who are in charge of creating laws that protect children and restrict access to guns), police officers (those are responsible for the safety of citizens and for carrying out the state’s monopoly on violence), and the spokeswoman for the NRA (those who spread the idea that guns are a constitutional right and are not the danger that gun controls advocates claim). Given the participants only, a person could reasonably assume that the adults would be better informed on the issue, but, in this townhall, the incongruity exists because the children have the greater wealth of experience. As the students speak truth to power, any response that the authority figures may put forward to contradict the children seems somewhat hollow because the children have the greater base of experience. It is hard for these authority figures to claim laws are effective, police have the situation under control or that guns are not dangerous when faced with the firsthand experiences of a clearly vulnerable population who understand the situation well enough to contradict them.
As this incongruous discussion played out on national television, youth activists around the country and the world were presented with the evidence that they have the right to engage in public discourse, especially when the discourse relates to an issue that affects those children in particular. Children may not have the legal mechanisms to alter the democracy of the United
States as it is currently organized, but they could carve out alternative forms of participation.
They can disrupt the hegemonic consent as it exists; they can alter the “symbolic order” that constitutes the ideology that excludes them from public discourse. The more children see youth activists engaged in public discourse, the more they will be able to see themselves engaged in such activism; the more youth activists take control of the discourses that matter to them, the more the ideology that excludes them from those discourses will be changed into a more accepting framework. Although this acceptance does not immediately change the institutional Floyd 159 frameworks, it does complete the first step in this process, at least according to Gramsci, Hardt and Negri, and Rehmann, because it begins to shake up the ideology that determines who has the right to speak.
The Rhetoric of Temporary Disenfranchisement
It is important here to address again the concept of the subaltern as discussed by Spivak.
It would be an extreme fallacy to refer to the youth, especially the youth of the United States, as subaltern. Although they are deprived of many forms of agency in the current framework of democracy, children do have numerous mechanisms by which they can make their voices heard and, more importantly, unlike the subaltern, most children in the United States will eventually reach an age of maturity and social circumstances from which they are officially provided a platform for democratic participation. Unlike race, religion, sexual orientation, or (often) economic status, one’s status as a minor as it relates to age is not permanent. However, it is important to upset the boundaries and limitations on active participation, nonetheless. Although all youth do not inhabit subaltern positionalities that will stick with them throughout their lives, the denial of the right to speak, or the immediate dismissal of what certain people have to say, limits the potential avenues of participation for all members of the democracy. Establishing channels of participation for those who are frequently denied the right to speak, even if only temporarily, is important for opening channels of participation for all.
This may seem to be a pedantic point to make regarding the rhetoric of youth as outsiders, but it is a nuance worth exploring. Opponents to the expansion of voices and representations in democratic societies often bemoan the restrictions created by “P.C. culture,”
“social justice warriors” and other activists; popular memes that circulate among groups opposed to such diversity make references to “liberal tears” and “snowflakes,” or assert that “facts don’t Floyd 160 care about your feelings,” and these dismissals are founded upon the belief that claims of injustice made by pro-diversity advocates are hyperbolic. Although most of these accusations of exaggeration are disingenuous and made by people seeking nothing more than to dismiss out of hand any grievances people may have, whether legitimate or not, it is also important to maintain a sense of perspective both for countering such accusations and for keeping oneself situated in the struggle for equal access to democratic participation. Youth activists should not be cursorily dismissed, but their struggles are not inherently as dire as the struggles of other groups, especially youth in other cultures and circumstances.
Another example of a child activist disrupting hegemonic consent on a global scale is
Malala Yousafzai. In 2012, Yousafzai was a 15-year-old Pakistani girl who advocated for the education of young girls in Pakistan and maintained a blog for the BBC that detailed violence in her native Swat district. Yousafzai had begun to receive national and global attention as an education activist as evidenced by her nomination for the International Children’s Peace Prize and her reception of Pakistan’s National Youth Peace Prize. As a result of the attention surrounding Yousafzai and her cause, on October 9, 2012, the Taliban attempted to murder her as she rode home on a bus after taking an exam. It took several months, but Yousafzai made a full recovery following the shooting and began to use her experience to bolster her advocacy for children’s right to education on a global scale.
The enhanced recognition of Yousafzai and her work following the attack allowed her to become a globally-authorized voice on matters of education and violence. Despite the numerous outsider identities she held, Yousafzai was able to meet with several world leaders, including
Queen Elizabeth II and President Barack Obama, gave multiple addresses to prestigious institutions, such as Harvard, Oxford and the Girl Summit in London, and received many awards Floyd 161 and honorary degrees, most notably the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. Yousafzai used her newfound status as the voice of the oppressed to continue her advocacy against hegemonic consent, not just as it applies to the oppression of women in Pakistan, but also as it is carried out by global actors like the United States.
When Yousafzai met with President Barack Obama at the White House in 2013, she criticized his administration’s use of drone strikes in Pakistan. Recapping the discussion,
Yousafzai explained, "I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. . . .
Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people.
If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact" (“Malala Confronts Obama”). The use of drone strikes by the Obama administration is an excellent example of hegemonic consent for the use of Zizekian objective violence by the United States, and it is an issue that often passed under the radar of national consciousness in the United States because of carefully crafted rhetorical euphemisms and deflections.
While youth activists in other countries fight for inclusion of all people into educational institutions, in the United States, part of the democratic participation carried out by students is the student walkout or student strike. Unlike working adults, most young people do not have jobs from which they can effectively strike, and most do not have a tremendous amount of personal purchasing power with which to boycott. These limitations may narrow the avenues by which young people can agitate to make others, especially adults, listen to them, but it does leave a very significant opportunity: refusing to take part in compulsory education. In early 2019, groups such as U.S. Youth Climate Strike in the United States and The School Strike for Climate globally encouraged students who were disappointed by the lack of legitimate action on climate change by politicians to skip school and to engage in organized protests on specific days. These Floyd 162 organizations have gained a great deal of traction, with over one million students worldwide taking part in the student strike of March 15, 2019.
Such actions by students call attention to their concerns on several levels. First, the students are leaving school to take part in public demonstrations in favor of action on climate change; the students are not merely leaving school to go home or to perform some other activity that will take them out of the public eye. Additionally, in countries where education is compulsory, many children opting to remove themselves from the classroom in a coordinated manner will get the attention of school officials and news outlets. Finally, in the United States and other countries, school funding is provided based on attendance, and attendance records are, therefore, meticulously kept and sent to government organizations to determine funding levels.
Days on which many students were not in school will certainly cause questions at the governmental level as well. Hence, the efficacy and publicity of a school strike means students do still have a tremendous tool at their disposal in order to grab the attention of dismissive adults.
Not only do these strikes effectively call attention to an issue of grave importance to the students, but it encourages the students to take an active role in their educations by engaging them with real-world concerns regarding the planet. Several academics and scientists around the world have voiced support for the student strikes, essentially endorsing the validity of the students’ information and concerns. Additionally, the U.S. Youth Climate Strike (USYCS) includes a thorough page on its website for “Our Mission” that lists in great detail the demands of the organization, which includes the passage of the “Green New Deal,” discussed above, the requirement that decisions made by the government be research-based and the inclusion of climate change in K-8 school curricula, among other demands. For each demand, the USYCS has included several bullet points that explain the importance of these demands and how they Floyd 163 could be implemented. The organization has a well-thought-out platform that could legitimately rival those put out by politicians in the United States, despite the fact the organization’s executives are all students between the ages of 12 and 17.
From a rhetorical perspective, therefore, the USYCS and the global student strikes have a wealth of effective aspects: an effective means of drawing attention to their issues, the emotional appeal of children and other future generations being most affected by climate change, well- researched and scientifically-endorsed information, a global network of engagement and a variety of platforms by which to spread their message. Such an effective rhetorical message against climate change and climate change denial upsets all the tropes by which adults may attempt to dismiss the concerns of young people.
However, the importance of the message and the efficacy of its delivery have not silenced all detractors. UK Prime Minister, Theresa May, criticized the students for wasting value class time that could be devoted to lessons (McGuinness). The prime minister of Australia, Scott
Morrison said of the events that there should be “more learning and less activism” (Bedo). Also, many students have been punished for having taken part in the strikes (Barrie; England).
Undoubtedly, these criticisms are based more in political talking points than in rational thought because even cursory consideration of this kind of student engagement should demonstrate that the students involved in the strikes are achieving the ostensible goals of compulsory education in a way that is much more meaningful than could be done with the students sitting idly in classrooms. The quick dismissal of students becoming engaged in a meaningful movement exemplifies adults who are out of touch pertaining to issues that are of the utmost concern to young people and, paradoxically, provides the precise reasons for which it is essential that young people should be encouraged to take a more active role in the democratic polis, not discouraged Floyd 164 and dismissed.
But the young people interested in changing attitudes regarding climate change do not only engage in school strikes in order to call attention to their concerns. 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg is credited with originating the school strikes around the globe in 2018, and she continues to address powerful people in major forums, such as the World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland and the U.S. Congress, and she does not mince words when she does so. In early 2019, Thunberg told the World Economic Forum in Davos that “Adults keep saying we owe it to the young people to give them hope. But I don’t want your hope. I want you to panic” (Weir). The rhetorical approach to a comment such as this one is unruly. Thunberg does not want empty platitudes and pledges from world leaders about what they hope they can leave for the youth of today; such activists want world leaders “to listen to the scientists . . . to unite behind the science . . . to take real action” (Asmelash). Unruly actions like striking from school, sailing across the Atlantic Ocean to address the U.S. government directly and saying that one wants world leaders to panic is a resistance of the normalization of extreme notions and the deference to profit motives that have been put forward, and into positions of primacy, by insider rhetoric regarding climate change and the activism of youth.
According to the mainstream narrative, adults know what is best for the children who will inherit the world in the future, so the input of children is not necessary regarding climate change.
However, the normalized extreme notions of the importance of climate change is that it should not be taken seriously because of a number of scientifically-debunked reasons, such as the idea that the earth goes through warming and cooling periods naturally, that humans are not responsible for climate change, that climate concerns are overblown or that changes and environmental regulations will not achieve the desired outcomes. Despite the complete lack of Floyd 165 credible evidence that these positions have any merit, they are treated as legitimate positions in
U.S public discourse because they serve the profit interests of some of the most wealthy and powerful individuals in the country and around the globe.
Thunberg and other youth activists use disruptive tactics to call greater attention to the inaction that world leaders have been guilty of and that has endangered the lives and qualities of life for the youth of today. The activist acts of these activists call into question the unquestioned acceptance of narratives that decry environmental regulations and other actions as nothing more than alarmist scare tactics. The actions of these climate activists highlight the corporate interests that sacrifice long-term global welfare for the benefit of short-term monetary gains for a handful of wealthy individuals. Of course, there is value in youth, and adult, activists quietly making small-scale changes to avoid the climate crisis, but disruptive actions are necessary in order to shake the hegemonic consent that serves as the principle enabling factor for unabated climate change.
Naïve Rhetoric and The Wisdom of Inexperience
As has been discussed throughout this dissertation, insider rhetoric holds as its foundations the status quo, inertia, tradition and anything else that privileges everything remaining the same as it has ever been. When children are admonished that they do not understand the world because of their lack of experience, there is a clear genuflection being made to society as it is currently formulated. When an insider rhetor tells a young person who takes an interest in politics, social justice or other forms of activism that the young person will understand better when s/he is older what that insider rhetor means is that the young person will become disillusioned with the possibility of change, that the person will become complacent and acquiesce to the necessary hegemonic consent needed to govern in a manner that does not dare to Floyd 166 disrupt institutions and privileges as they are currently constructed. The “experienced” rhetor is, therefore, critical of the naivete of the youth rhetor as a mechanism for justifying the systems that are in place and his/her own position within that framework. In a falsely constructed binary between naivete and sagacity, naivete is, undoubtedly, determined to be flawed, unrealistic and inferior. The negative connotations surrounding naivete seem to be almost universal, not just in the venue of youth activism, but in all matters. Children are often considered naïve for believing they will grow up to be professional athletes, actors, musicians or astronauts because such a small number of such professionals exist at any given moment; if a child holds onto these unrealistic dreams for too long, adults tend to worry that the young person will never focus on a
“real” job. Often when a person has been unexpectedly hurt by someone else, the injured party will chasten him/herself, or be chastened by others, as being naïve. In some instances, naivete may be problematic or even dangerous, but it worth considering what naivete means on a deeper level and asking oneself if naivete must always be a bad thing. Might frameworks exist in which naivete may be beneficial? In those frameworks, might there even be value in naïve rhetoric and the wisdom of inexperience?
For a person to be naïve, there must be an expected framework in existence already.
Naivete implies a lack of experience, whereas sagacity implies an abundance of experience. Such firmly placed frameworks make sense when considering the natural order of the world, things that are immutable laws of nature. For example, in spite of the depictions of lions, bears or snakes as friendly in many texts designed for children, it is naïve for a person to believe one of these creatures encountered in the wild would pose no danger or would, quite the contrary, be friendly. This kind of inexperience is dangerous and clearly needs to be remedied. Of course, animals can be tamed, but wild animals will always present the possibility of danger and there is Floyd 167 nothing humans can do to disrupt this natural order—wild lions are not social constructs, they are the products of evolution.
On the other hand, let’s consider the example of the child who wants to be a professional basketball player. In a vacuum, there is nothing inherently wrong or laughable about this goal.
There are professional basketball players, and they were inevitably children at some point, probably children who wanted to be professional basketball players when they grew up. Where this dream becomes unrealistic is in the realization that, each year, approximately 500 players will play in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Most players’ careers will span a few years, so from year-to-year, most of those 500 players will probably stay the same. It is reasonable to think that over the course of a potential player’s career, only a few thousand players will make it into an NBA game. Weighed against the millions of people who play basketball worldwide, it is unimaginable to think that a child has any hope of playing basketball professionally.
Without critically analyzing this framework, it may seem as immutable as the natural laws that determine that a lion will try to eat a person in the wild. With a bit of critical thought, though, it should become clear that the NBA and its expectations governing players’ abilities are a social construct. Each year only about 500 people play in the NBA because of a number of aspects that could, in theory, be changed quite easily: the number of teams in the league, the number of players on each roster, the expected skill level of the players, the amount of money paid to the players, the number of years players can play and so on. Imagine how many more professional basketball players there would be if there were 60 teams that each had 25 players on the roster instead of the current 30 teams with 15 players. Next, imagine that players were only allowed to play in the league for three seasons, necessitating an entirely different crop of Floyd 168 professional players every few years. One can argue about the diminishing quality of the game that would result from such changes, but they are all within the realm of possibility. The current framework that makes becoming a professional basketball player seem like an impossible task is entirely dependent on the epistemologies that govern expected levels of skill, marketability (of teams, players, leagues, etc.) and exclusivity. Much of these logics are dependent upon neoliberal logics that determine how much people are willing to pay to watch a player’s skill and, at its core, body. Players and their skills are commodified, rendered into a dollar figure that explains how much they are worth and how much people are willing to pay to see them interact with other players and their dollar figures. These ideas that determine who plays in the NBA may seem unlikely to change, but the point is that they are changeable, and a large part of the reason they remain unchanged is simply because people mostly view them as unchangeable.
This detour through the market logics of the NBA may seem out of place in a discussion about the voice and agency of youths, but it serves a useful role in elucidating the role of naivete within societal and cultural frameworks of public discourse and democratic participation. Youth activists like the Parkland survivors are dismissed as naïve because they are young and mostly limited to the experiences they have been able to garner from life as high schoolers (as previously discussed, this view ignores the major factor that their experiences include surviving a mass shooting). Hence, when they advocate against the second amendment, their opponents charge that they are too young and naïve to understand the bill of rights and the necessity of maintaining “a well-regulated militia” (whatever that means in the twenty-first century). Even their supporters may charge that they are too young and naïve to understand how entrenched the
United States is in its gun ownership. These charges of naivete are premised on the notion that gun laws in the United States are immutable—they are the wild lion, not the NBA. But, of Floyd 169 course, in truth gun laws are not the wild lion, they are the NBA, and that means they are social constructs and, therefore, changeable. Accusations of naivete against the Parkland survivors are kneejerk defense mechanisms that are designed to shut down any ideas put forward that challenge the comfortable status quo.
It is here that I would like to argue that naivete can be refreshing and useful. I do not intend for this section to become a “pie-in-the-sky,” wistful examination of the vigor of youth.
Rather, we need to consider the legitimate value that exists in viewing the world and its societal frameworks through the naïve lenses of youth, ones that have not become calcified to the way things are. Many adults feel that global systems are intransigent, and this belief is largely borne of the fact that the systems have remained the same throughout entire lifetimes. Nothing ever seems to truly change in hegemonic power structures, it simply changes forms. One might consider the arguments that demonstrate how the mass incarceration system of the United States is the new Jim Crow, and that Jim Crow was the new slavery. Despite the strides that seem to have been made regarding race relations in the United States, many of the frameworks continue to operate under different guises. How can we assume that any great changes will take place when one of the largest injustices in world history has maintained a legacy in contemporary society? Arguably, this question should be reversed. How has our perception that nothing ever truly changes allowed one of the largest injustices in world history to maintain a legacy in contemporary society? Could the answer be that such changes never happen because of our naiveté of experience? Could it be that society smothers change that could happen because it is not the kind of change that has happened previously? Could such changes be fostered through the wisdom of inexperience?
It is, perhaps, worth noting that a perfect, if unfortunate, example of the success of this Floyd 170 kind of naiveté is the very election of Donald Trump itself. Almost all polls, pundits and people did not think that Trump could win the election. This assumption was largely based on the perceived adherence to stagnant trends in American (and global) politics. A brash outsider (not of the sort this dissertation has examined, but a political outsider nonetheless) should not have been able to win against Hillary Clinton (the physical embodiment of American politics). Pundits did not take Trump’s candidacy seriously, and many voters stayed home or voted third party as a protest to the quality of candidates who are nominated. The election seemed safe for Clinton, probably even a landslide, because nothing ever changes. Clinton is the kind of person who was elected president before 2016. The naiveté of experience rested assured that this would be the case again. And, yet, inexperience prevailed.
Although for the reasons detailed throughout this work the outcome was an unfortunate one for democracy in the United States, there may be a lesson to learn from it, nonetheless. It is the lesson that no one should be dismissed based on perceived inexperience. When recalcitrant experience lets down its guard, the wisdom of inexperience just may have a chance to step in and foster real change. Youth activists are a great source of just this kind of inexperience and exuberant naiveté. The prevailing opinion is that nothing substantial can be done about gun violence in the United States, nothing significant can be done to curb the impending climate crisis, nothing can supplant neoliberal capitalism in the United States and around the world, nothing can alter the bleak economic outlook facing the youth of today, and the list could go on.
However, these dire prognoses have been made from the position of “experience” and serve the rhetorical purpose of attaining hegemonic consent for the status quo. What if, instead, we approached these issues as though we were young people, inexperienced in the realm of global politics, but experienced in the realm of what needs to be done, what should be done and what Floyd 171 we hope will be done? Such belief may begin as a simple rhetorical gambit, but that is just the kind of first step that could foster real change.
Floyd 172
Chapter Four: Conclusion
To begin a conclusion of this examination of insider and outsider rhetoric in the public discourse of the United States, I believe it is important to understand that none of the rhetorical ideas under consideration in my dissertation are dependent upon the presidency of Donald
Trump. Much of the focus in this work has been on the words and actions of the Trump campaign and administration, and it may seem that the easy solution is to agitate against his re- election32 or simply to wait out this presidency for things to return to “normal.” Instead, the forms of insider rhetoric that I have explored in this dissertation existed long before Trump announced his candidacy for president and will continue to exist after he has left office unless outsider rhetors and their allies continue to push back against the hegemonic consent of the status quo. Trump’s presidency seems ever-increasingly tenuous as a result of investigations by the
Department of Justice, accusations of felonious acts by his former associates and cabinet members and lagging approval ratings. One way or another, Trump may not occupy the presidency for much longer, but his legacy of insider rhetoric and fearmongering will linger.
Although Trump did not create the concept of insider rhetoric as it applies to immigrants, prisoners, youths or any number of other vulnerable populations, he has exacerbated the issue of insider rhetoric by pandering to Americans’ greatest fears and by “saying what is on his mind” or
“telling it like it is.” Many of Trump’s ardent supporters will gleefully note that his refusal to engage in PC (politically correct) culture is one of the main reasons they love him. This claim is indicative of the existence of anti-immigrant, anti-prisoner and anti-youth rhetorical positions that pre-existed Trump. People who have long enjoyed privileged positions as a result of the way
American society has been structured for centuries feel empowered by Trump. When Trump
32 Or to call for his impeachment, which looks increasingly likely. Floyd 173 refuses to criticize white supremacists and Neo-Nazis in the wake of violent demonstrations and, instead, alleges that there are good people on both sides of the issue, the implication is that a person can be against diversity and hold beliefs about the superiority of his/her own race and still be a good person. That kind of exoneration speaks positively to a wide swathe of the American
(and global) population.
Trump did not create those beliefs in his supporters; rather, he spoke the rhetoric that simply allowed those supporters to embrace their beliefs in a more open manner without guilt or shame. A greater acceptance of diversity in culture necessarily leads to a leveling off privilege amongst the constituent populations. Privilege, by definition, is preferential treatment given to one person or group at the expense of another person or group. Those in favor of increased diversity and tolerance often tout the benefits for those vulnerable populations who receive greater degrees of acceptance, privilege and quality of life. However, they must remember that the other side of this coin is that those who have long enjoyed a high level of privilege simply as a result of their birth may believe themselves to be the victims of diversity and, consequently, may lash out in retaliation to this loss of privilege. I do not urge readers to keep such populations in mind as a call to have sympathy for the groups who have lost such privilege and who violently attack or seek to re-oppress groups that have only recently found a modicum of privilege, or even comfort. Rather, it is important to keep such groups in mind because they largely constitute the basis of insider rhetoric, and as long as they feel entitled to something that may now be denied to them, there is a likelihood the nation (or other nations around the world) may elect another leader like Trump.
Because the sentiments that privilege insider rhetorics pre-date the Trump administration, it means that extricating them from our society, and societies around the world, will need to be a Floyd 174 perpetual work-in-progress. Around the world, there have been several political gains made by rightwing populism, especially in its calls for isolationism and exclusivity. Several countries in
Europe reacted with neglect and violence in the wake of an influx of Syrian refugees and other refugees from the Middle East fleeing for their lives from ISIS in their home nations; the United
Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in order to maintain greater control of its borders, trade and general identity; France’s far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, received the second most votes in their most recent presidential election; Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate who has spoken about his desire to relax gun regulations, bring back the death penalty and employ torture in an effort to reduce crime; in the Philippines, president Rodrigo Duterte openly asserts that he kills drug dealers and drug users, and Human Rights Watch claims that, by the beginning of 2018, Duterte’s regime had murdered more than 12,000 suspects in the first two years of its “Drug War” (“Philippines: Duterte’s ‘Drug War’”). Each of these examples is offered to demonstrate the way in which vulnerable populations are being put at ever greater risk by the majority groups of nations around the world.
Insider rhetoric operates to scare the largest groups of voters into an acquiescence to tough policies that allege to protect one’s own kind at the expense of outsiders. Trump, Le Pen,
Bolsonaro and Duterte are merely emblematic of this desire for security in what are perceived as uncertain times. It is for this reason that one cannot simply be satisfied with returning things to
“normal” with a more traditional president in the United States after the end of the Trump administration. Rather, outsider rhetors and their allies need to agitate for candidates who will work to stem the tide of isolationism and bigotry and work toward greater inclusivity and diversity both in politics and in society. Better still, outsiders and their allies need to agitate for change to the systems that are in place in democracies such as the United States, United Floyd 175
Kingdom, France, Brazil and other nations around the globe. As Hardt and Negri argue, the systems as they exist function in a manner that seeks to entrench power and to set it at a remove from the actual population. As Gramsci notes, this entrenchment of power is accomplished by manufacturing consent among the largest groups of citizens and voters. Arguably, nothing will ever change in the United States so long as we are governed by representative democracies that are driven by capitalism, consumerism and neoliberalism. Furthermore, outsiders and their advocates must not be satisfied with working to change things domestically. We need to seek ways to empower outsiders and their forms of rhetoric around the globe.
It may seem to be a monumental undertaking to change the president or the party in power in the United States, let alone actually to change the systems of government in place in the
United States and around the world or to change the mindsets of large groups of people, especially those who have long enjoyed high levels of privilege. However, that is not to say that such changes should not be attempted. In the remainder of this section, I will offer some thoughts on the ways in which outsider rhetors may be able to accomplish progressive changes in the
United States and abroad.
What Can Outsiders and Their Allies Do?
Although I mentioned in the previous section that simply voting Trump out of the presidency would not solve the issue of the predominance of insider rhetoric in American democracy, it is a good first step. Although Trump enjoys a stalwart base of support—estimated by many to be roughly 1/3 of the United States—his general support has been quite low from his candidacy through the time of this writing in January 2019. Polls of Trump’s agenda regarding issues such as immigration and the building of a wall on the border between the U.S. and Mexico typically indicate a very low level of support for his proposed approaches to immigration and Floyd 176 border security. This does not necessarily indicate a lack of support for his rhetoric, but it does show that most Americans find his plans to be costly and ineffectual. Outsiders and their allies could begin by using the unpopularity of this administration and of politicians who have shown unwavering support to the administration to elect leaders who are more open to diversity and the ideas and rhetorics of outsiders. When the rightwing of American politics has chosen to put forward and elect demagogues, Nazi sympathizers, Holocaust deniers, white supremacists and other hatemongers, it is not the time for the leftwing to put forward and attempt to elect moderates and those who would compromise with those hatemongers. Instead, outsiders and their allies need to make a strong refutation of the racist, bigoted and sexist ideologies that have paved the way for such candidates not only to be relevant in nationwide elections, but to win them. Some possible avenues for making these kinds of changes will follow.
Increasing Awareness
Unfortunately, slogans are easy, and it is much simpler to rally voters behind vague ideas such as “Yes, we can!” or “Make America Great Again.” It may seem daunting to do more than distil complex political ideologies into these three- or four-word phrases in an era where voters are inundated with information and much of it is misinformation, but the only way to move toward a more inclusive and diverse democratic polis is through the arduous education of oneself and others regarding the myriad factors at play in a democracy. Words such “diversity” and
“socialism” have practically become dirty words in our political climate, but this is mostly because of intentional misleading information on the parts of those who stand to benefit from maintaining the status quo. One way of moving toward a public sphere that includes outsider voices is to reframe the discussion of these terms so that they are more reflective of what they truly represent. Floyd 177
Listening to outsider voices does not mean acquiescence to the minority view to the detriment or complete neglect of the majority. To do so would perpetuate the exact argument against, for instance, the electoral college in the election of U.S. presidents. The electoral college is a measure that is ostensibly in place to ensure candidates must consider the needs of the less- densely-populated rural states, whose needs and interests rarely align with those of the more populous urban centers, but that truly results in the elections of presidents who do not represent the interests and wills of the majority of Americans. Such an approach is the winner-take-all political framework incarnate combined with preferential treatment given to the minority to the complete exclusion of the majority.
Majority rule is undoubtedly flawed, but that does not automatically mean minority-rule is the solution. Public deliberation does not need to be a winner-take-all framework wherein no consideration is given to different perspectives, no matter how close the elections may be or how divided in opinion the country may be. Consideration of alternative forms of democratic participation highlights the way in which every issue is a spectrum, not a binary with, and only with, polar-opposite positions. For instance, immigration issues are not as supporting immigrants to the neglect of natural-born citizens or supporting citizens to the neglect of immigrants; supporting prisoners does not means actively opposing “law-abiding” citizens; listening to youth does not mean excluding more mature voices. Even though our current rhetoric of democracy often makes it seem so, democratic participation is not a zero-sum game in which the more alternative voices can speak, the less mainstream voices get to say. An honest consideration of the plurality of voices that belong to all affected parties, or even those who are merely interested in a topic despite not being directly affected, allows for more effective deliberations of topics of public interest and more robust democratic participation. Such considerations allow voters, Floyd 178 politicians, interest groups and other relevant parties to locate their ideas along the spectrum of a given issue. Once such nuanced positions are understood, policies and approaches to governing can be developed that do not merely rely on the tacit acceptance of by the majority of a nation’s citizens.
Agitating for Legal Changes
An additional way in which activists and allies change foster change and acceptance of outsider voices in U.S. democracy is through activism for legal changes regarding democratic participation and decreased persecution. Such changes may be vague and malleable dependent upon which outsider group one focuses on. For example, much work is underway to restore voting rights to former prisoners in many states. This does not mean that the work is finished or even close to finished for recognizing the voices of prisoners and the formerly incarcerated. Most obviously, not all states are pushing for the restoration of voting rights; much work remains to be done in order to assure that past mistakes—and in many cases minor mistakes—do not cost people the right to participate within democratic discourse and deliberation. Less obviously, one must consider the fact that, as this work has attempt to demonstrate, voting is not the only means of participation, or even necessarily the most important form of participation. At the time of writing, West Virginia prisons are receiving free tablets for the inmates to read, send emails and communicate with family members through a new contract with Global Tel Link, but the catch is that the prisoners will have to pay exorbitant fees per minute of usage: $0.05 per minute to read;
$0.25 per minute to video chat; $0.25 per text message; $0.50 per photo message (Ciaramella).
These prices are outrageous enough on their own, but once one considers that these tablets will replace books provided for free by the prison and that prisoners in West Virginia, on average, only make between $0.04 and $0.58 per hour that they work (Ciaramella), the prices are rendered Floyd 179 cruelly restrictive.
Reading and interacting with one’s family while incarcerated should remain rights, and we should strive to make these things more accessible to prisoners, not less. The movement toward free tablets that allow for such activities and interactions is a nice step forward, but the prohibitive prices placed on these “free” activities is an unfortunate two steps back. Along with agitating for the restoration of voting rights, arguing for changes to these kinds of predatory neoliberal practices that plague the prison industrial complex is another way of inviting prisoners and the formerly incarcerated into public discourses and deliberations at a higher, and arguably more humane, level.
Other outsider groups may not have such straight forward avenues for legal changes regarding participation. Youth, for example, do not necessarily suffer from legal limitations on their engagement in public discourse, but struggle against the stigmatization of their participation. Youth rights advocates could argue for changes to the voting age, but it is unlikely, and probably unfeasible, to argue for the abolition of voting age requirements. Hence, even if some changes were made in this capacity, it would most likely only result in a slight alteration of the age at which citizens could begin to vote. Once again, the argument against the perception that voting is the only, or even the most important, democratic function is useful here. Children do not need to be granted voting rights at an earlier age to be allowed to take part in public deliberations. More programs and organizations could be created to foster, or at least simply offer, opportunities for minors to engage in political discourse at a younger age and to be taken seriously in doing so. Organizations such as the Youth Activism Project could receive public funding in order to allow children to become involved in causes that interest them at a greater rate. Government agencies could consult with young people about the policies and decisions that Floyd 180 will affect young lives, such as school curricula, educational programs, climate crises, etc.
Politicians and leaders could be required to listen to the concerns put forward by their youth constituents, even if they are not old enough to vote or run for office themselves. These are all legal frameworks that could afford youth activists greater degrees of democratic participation without necessarily changing voting age restrictions.
It is unnecessary at this juncture to detail all the legal changes that could take place to make the democracy in the United States more inclusive and effective. It suffices to note that there are many ways in which legal roadblocks to democratic participation can be undone and more people can be invited into the conversations that affect their lives daily and in incredibly meaningful ways. Of course, the activists detailed in this work demonstrate that people are already engaging in these kinds of activities, but their participations will be made stronger and less easily removed in the future if they are codified into law. These changes will not be made by politicians on a whim; these changes will not be made solely as the result of agitation for rhetorical outsiders. In order to achieve meaningful change, everyone must take part in the fight for systematic overhaul.
Acknowledging Alternative Participation
Intimately connected to the two previous avenues for change is the acceptance of alternative forms of democratic participation. Acknowledging that voting is not the only means of participating in a democracy is a means of both calling greater attention to the needs and desires of democratic outsiders and of affecting change at the political level. So long as most citizens only value voting and writing members of congress to the exclusion of alternative, inclusive modes of participation, the hegemonic framework that determines what is valid participation can continue. Voting and writing members of congress are isolated and insular acts, Floyd 181 and they allow democratic participation to continue in the dark and at the individual level. If the legally-authorized citizens only participate through these means and only expect others to participate through these means, there can be no real change to the mechanisms of participation.
Instead, those so-called authorized citizens could learn about, engage in and give value to the kinds of democratic participation that are, or should be, available to all affected parties in a democracy. Giving platforms to those groups who are legally excluded from democratic participation, such as immigrants and former prisoners are ways of valuing the ideas and issues relevant to those groups who are most affected by them. Engaging with political ideas in non- traditional formats, such as podcasts and social media, is a way that political discourse can include activists such as youth activists and prisoner activists who are limited in their movements by barriers, both literal and societal. Working with others to affect changes in politics and in communities also works to change the notion that democratic participation only happens in isolation and in secret. Openly working with others destabilizes the hegemonic concepts that acquires consent from the governed to exclude those who are determined to have no recourse of participation for themselves.
Intersectional Outsiders
Having explored the agency and voice of some of the most vulnerable citizens
(documented and undocumented) in the United States, it is important now to turn to the concept of intersectionality and to examine the ways in which a person’s ability to speak or to be barred from public discourse is not dichotomous. It is not as though issues of agency are black and white with no room for gray uncertainty. Intersectional statuses create the potential for liminality as well as compound discrimination and cross-sectional neglect. Summarizing Devah Pager’s findings on the effect of criminal records on employment among black and white job applicants, Floyd 182
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “The negative credential of prison impaired the employment efforts of both the black man and the white man, but it impaired those of the black man more. Startlingly, the effect was not limited to the black man with a criminal record. The black man without a criminal record fared worse than the white man with one” (“The Black Family”).
Intersectionality, as exemplified by Pager’s findings, works to graduate levels of discrimination.
According to the logic of the white, patriarchal master narrative governing the United States, it is better to be a white man with no criminal record than a white man with a criminal record; it is better to be a white man with a criminal record than a black man with no criminal record; it is better to be a black man with no criminal record than a black man with a criminal record; it is better to be a black man with a criminal record than to be a black woman with no criminal record, and so on.
It is from this platform that I seek to explore the group of people who were the catalysts for my project: undocumented migrant children who were separated from their parents and detained at the U.S.-Mexico border under the Trump administration’s policy of “zero tolerance” toward undocumented immigrants entering the country. As a result of this “zero tolerance” policy, over 2,500 immigrant children were separated from their families, and after a suit by the
ACLU, the government had to reunite all children and parents by July 27, 2018; however, according to multiple reports by NBCNews, CNN, The Washington Post, ACLU and others, as of late August 2018 more than 500 children were still not with their families. As of this writing (late
September 2018), CNN reports that there are still nearly 200 children awaiting reunification and that “[t]he vast majority of them have parents who were sent back to their home countries” (“34
More Separated Kids Released”). Many of these children are five-years-old or younger. Because of their intersectional statuses, these children are the epitome of outsiders: lacking the required Floyd 183 authorization to be in the United States, lacking the ability to move for themselves, and lacking the maturity and understanding to comprehend their situations and act accordingly. From whence comes their agency, and how might they employ that agency or have others employ it in their names? How can such a grievous wrong be appropriately rectified when the victims have so little recognized claim to the democratic process?
There does not remain enough space in this project to consider in enough detail specific intersectional rhetorical projects of outsiders; it will have to suffice to note that intersectionality is ubiquitous and, therefore, its outsider rhetors will be as well. One need only consider examples that come directly from this dissertation to begin to grasp an understanding of intersectional outsider status; for example, many, if not most, undocumented immigrants in the United States are also impoverished—if they were not impoverished, they would most likely not be undocumented immigrants. The lack of financial means for immigrants is often the reason for which they come to the United States in the first place.
Insufficient money concerns in the home nations of immigrants may lead to starvation, proximity to violence, conscription into gangs, susceptibility to human trafficking and any other number of dangers; additionally, employers in the United States often encourage undocumented immigration (either intentionally or unintentionally) by offering low-skill, low-paying jobs that most citizens of the United States are unwilling to take because of the availability of better jobs through channels only available to “legal” citizens. These socioeconomic concerns often leave prospective immigrants in positions where documented immigration is not possible because of time constraints, lack of “desirable” skills or inability to pay for the “legal” immigration process and all that it entails. These monetary issues continue for impoverished undocumented immigrants once they encounter threats of deportation in the United States because immigration Floyd 184 courts rarely provide undocumented immigrants with legal representation, which is something that would not affect an immigrant with financial means.
The list of ways in which poverty intersects with one’s status as an undocumented immigrant could continue on well beyond what has been covered here, but these issues should provide enough detail for a better understanding of the way in which intersectional outsider statuses weave a thread through the lives of outsiders, each aspect adding a nuance that alters the circumstances for that person and rendering his/her experiences in a particular way that cannot be ascertained without a full understanding of those circumstances. This dissertation has been an effort to explore the ways in which outsiders with isolated statuses of oppression may find ways to speak back against the democratic state and to speak truth to power, but the examples provided mostly focus on those individual circumstances. How does an outsider find agency when faced with seemingly insurmountable outsider statuses all weaving together to make it fantastical to imagine most citizens would have any desire to listen? How could Jakelin Caal
Maquin speak? How could Darlyn Cristabel Cordova-Valle speak? How could Felipe Gomez
Alonzo, Juan de Léon Gutiérrez, Wilmer Josué Ramírez Vásquez or Carlos Hernandez Vásquez speak? These are immigrant children who died in the custody of the U.S. Customs and Border
Patrol. Each aspect of their demographics silenced them to the United States public, and they lost their lives because of that silence.
How do such voices gain rhetoricity? The first step requires a willingness to listen to the voices of others. If one considers the ease with which the concerns of immigrants, prisoners and children are dismissed, as examined in the previous chapters, how much easier do these dismissals come when the outsider rhetors are a combination of these underrepresented statuses?
The children in the border camps cannot hope to find support for their causes as immigrants Floyd 185 because they do not share common citizenship with the most important audiences for making changes. Their detainment causes many members of those same audiences to perceive them as criminals. Their young ages rob them of the agency that would be afforded to most adults in their situations. Despite the monumental life events unfolding for them at the border, they have no official mechanisms by which to advocate for themselves in the democracy that touts itself as a beacon for the world.
Despite the lack of agency and voice afforded to these children, perhaps paradoxically, immigrant children are often required to represent themselves in immigration courts. As lambasted on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, immigration courts rarely provide legal counsel or even translation services for the immigrants who must make their cases for entry into the United States. This means that children, many of whom speak little, or no English must represent themselves. The assistant chief immigration judge, Jack H. Weil, claims, “I’ve taught immigration law literally to three-year-olds and four-year-olds. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of patience. They get it. It’s not the most efficient, but it can be done” (Markon, emphasis mine).
Weil’s claim is a patently absurd justification of the status quo, and it represents the unfortunate quagmire of maintaining rigid systems that require the same standards from everyone, insider and outsider alike. Young children are not capable of understanding immigration law; as the deliberate misinformation about immigration discussed in chapter one demonstrates, many
American adults do not understand immigration law. Additionally, those who do not speak
English will struggle to understand legalistic jargon without translation. In cases that may literally amount to life or death, immigration courts expect unrealistic participation from complete outsiders in the same way, or even to a more stringent level, as insiders. Such mechanisms paradoxically allow for outsider participation within the democratic framework, but Floyd 186 in a manner that destines them to fail. An outsider-focused alternative framework for democratic participation would necessarily consider the way in which such outsiders could be given a more realistic and fairer opportunity to make their cases for inclusion into U.S. society, one that operates in their languages, at their levels, with expert accommodations and with a reasonable consideration of their humanities.
Further Research
The aims of this research project have been limited in scope. Although I have explored three different outsider groups and the ways in which various concerns may intersect with these groups, there is still much room for the inclusion of other outsider groups in the realm of public discourse. Much research has been done and remains to be done considering the public discourse of groups such as the LGBTQ+ community, specific races, the impoverished and others. Such work is vital and must continue for a robust democracy to come into existence truly. Democracy in the United States was originally crafted by privileged white men and has continued to offer privileged positions to this demographic, lending weight to their voices and opinions seemingly in perpetuity. As has been discussed herein, the preservation of such privilege is among the reasons theorized for the election of Donald Trump and other politicians who embrace far-right ideologies.
Without an exploration of the alternative voices that constitute our democracy, the entire concept of democracy in the United States is a bit of a rhetorical gambit to maintain the status quo of privileged people who have always been in positions of power. The privileged folks in the democracy put forward the notions of equality, bootstraps mentality, the American Dream and our society as meritocratic in order to justify the positions of power that they were essentially given at the expense of others. The illusion of democracy works by convincing those who have Floyd 187 no power, privilege or prestige that the current framework is the will of the people and that anyone who is not happy can change his/her circumstances with enough effort. An examination of the voices of outsiders and a consideration of what makes their ideas noteworthy problematizes these concepts of just democracy. It is important to disrupt the use of democracy as a mere rhetorical tool to justify the hegemony of power and privilege as it currently exists in the United States and to highlight the ways in which other voices have a right to be heard if we are to have a true democracy.
Another important avenue for research into the rhetoric of democratic outsiders is an intimate examination of the protests and rallies organized by such groups. Activist events were originally part of the project planning for this dissertation, but time and space constraints have rendered such interactions impossible. Activist events such as those in support of immigrant rights or prisoner rights, and those events organized by youths, such as organized walkouts of high school students in opposition of gun violence, provide fascinating areas for consideration because they generally include both members of such communities and their allies. Additionally, they tend to include a broad range of members, ranging from those who are only casually interested in taking part in such events to those who organize the events and who work full time on these issues in order to agitate for change.
Important research could be conducted that considers how such events come to fruition?
What are the anticipated goals of such events? How is a centralized message decided upon, if indeed a centralized message is important? How does the event and its organizers/participants wish to be viewed by those who are not part of the group/event, and how is this perception accomplished? Future research could be done to survey these questions with the “rank-and-file” members of a protest and analyze their responses alongside the answers of event organizers or Floyd 188 prominent activists in the area of research. Additional consideration may be given to how the responses differ among those who are part of the community directly affected by the activist event (for example, the responses of immigrants taking part in a pro-immigration rally) and those who identify as allies taking part in the events.
Activist events allow for a greater coming together of participants who take an interest in issues that may not be adequately represented, and these differences constitute the rhizome of activist agency; however, rhetorical approaches and goals will almost certainly differ from one participant to the next, and these approaches and goals will also change depending upon the presence or absence of a singular leader. There is undoubtedly invaluable information about the employment of rhetorical tropes in these different rhetorical situations. Each participant may seem to have the same overarching goals, but it is crucial to bear in mind the way an actual outsider finds agency in such events—if it is only through the “benevolence” of more-privileged allies, such events may need to be reconsidered so that all voices can exist independently.
Equally importantly, audiences must consider what is gained from a rhetorical perspective when outsider voices are raised independently.
Additional consideration could also be given to the way in which the concept of democracy functions rhetorically in the United States and in other democracies around the world.
This dissertation has considered, in part, the way in which insider rhetors in the United States frequently use the concept of democracy as a means of justifying actions, generating support (or complacency dependent upon the situation) and constructing strict ideas about what it means for a nation to be a democracy, for a person to be a citizen within that democracy or for a voice to have legitimacy in the public sphere. How is democracy deployed as a rhetorical trope in other circumstances? Can such a rhetorical trope be used with more positive intentions and Floyd 189 implications? Is such a concept of democracy only useful when there is a vacuum of genuine democratic principles in play? Essentially, it would be useful to understand better if there is a need for a rhetorical notion of democracy if a democracy truly functions in an effective and inclusive manner.
Finally, an additional avenue for consideration could be an even deeper examination of the way the concept of “democracy” itself functions rhetorically. A recent trend by Trump supporters on social media has been to downplay the significance of Clinton’s popular vote victory in the 2016, despite the fact she received nearly three million more votes than Trump, and despite the fact that Trump’s -2.1% popular vote margin was the third worst margin for the winning candidate in a U.S. presidential election since popular vote records started to be kept in
1824 (Patel and Andrews), by claiming the U.S. is a “republic,” not a “democracy.” Again, as discussed throughout this work, the United States is not a pure democracy, which would most likely result in chaos in a nation so large in population and physical size. This does not mean, however, that leaders are not democratically-elected and, therefore, it is a republic at the exclusion of democracy.
What is at the heart of these assertions that the United States is not a democracy is a self- serving distinction between the two terms. Although both words, democracy and republic, have denotative definitions that could be found in any dictionary or encyclopedia, they are also terms that have been given several degrees of nuance throughout history and are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive. I would assert that any time someone makes this argument, they are only interested in minimizing the importance of their preferred politician or leader failing to secure a plurality of votes. After all, the United States has always fashioned itself as a beacon of democracy and many of its military interventions and coups have ostensibly been carried out Floyd 190 with the express intention of propping up democracy around the globe. Further research could undoubtedly explore contemporary perceptions of these terms, especially as they are viewed by differing political affiliations in the United States.
Floyd 191
Bibliography
Abdi, Ali A. “The Rhetorical Constructions of Global Citizenship and the Location of Youth: A
Critical Analysis.” International Journal of Development Education and Global
Learning, vol. 8, no. 2, 2017, pp. 37-51.
“Age and Sex Composition: 2010.” Census.gov.
https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf.
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004.
Alexander, Jonathan, Susan Carole Funderburgh Jarratt and Nancy Welch. Unruly Rhetorics:
Protest, Persuasion and Publics. U Pittsburgh P, 2018.
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New
Press, 2012.
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Translated by Ben Brewster.
Marxists.org. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Aristotle. Politics. Edited and Translated by Ernest Barker. Oxford, 1958.
Asmelash, Leah. “16-Year-Old Climate Activist Greta Thunberg Tells Congress to Listen to the
Scientists and Take Real Action.” CNN, 18 Sept. 2019.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/18/politics/greta-thunberg-climate-hearing-congress-
trnd/index.html. Accessed 20 Sept. 2019.
Baron, Ilan Zyi. How to Save Politics in a Post-Truth Era: Thinking Through Difficult Times.
Manchester UP, 2018.
Barrie, Josh. “Three Schoolgirls Have Been Banned from Their End of Year Prom after Going
on a Climate Emergency March.” iNews, 21 June 2019. Floyd 192
https://inews.co.uk/news/uk/schoolgirls-banned-prom-attending-climate-emergency-
protest/.
Bauer, Shane. American Prison: A Reporter’s Undercover Journey into the Business of
Punishment. Penguin Books, 2019.
Bedo, Stephanie. “PM Scott Morrison Slams Student Protest, Greens Say He is ‘Out of Touch.’”
News.com.au, 27 Nov. 2018. https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-
change/why-scott-morrison-is-worse-than-tony-abbott/news-
story/ac9c3a43a0097e668b5e4ab4406bcb4a.
Beiritz, Heidi. “The Nativist Lobby: Three Faces of Intolerance.” SPLC, 1 Feb. 2009.
https://www.splcenter.org/20090131/nativist-lobby-three-faces-intolerance.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010.
Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from
the Civil War to World War II. Icon Books, 2012.
BOP. Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2019, https://www.bop.gov.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture.
Sage, 2014.
Braun, M.J. “Against Decorous Civility: Acting as If You Live in a Democracy.” Activism and
Rhetoric: Theories and Context for Political Engagement,” edited by Seth Kahn and
JongHwa Lee, Routledge, 2011, pp. 137-46.
Brown, Hana E. “Immigrant Bodily Incorporation: How the Physical Body Structures Identity,
Mobility, and Transnationalism.” Social Problems, vol. 64, no. 1, 2017, pp. 14-29.
Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Bobbs-Merrill, 1977.
Canagarajah, A. Suresh. A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. U Pittsburgh P, 2002. Floyd 193
Carbado, Devon W. “Racial Naturalization.” American Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 3, 2005, pp. 633-
58.
Carens, Joseph H. The Ethics of Immigration. Oxford UP, 2013.
Center for Responsive Politics, The. “Political Nonprofits (Dark Money).” Open Secrets.
https://www.opensecrets.org/outsidespending/nonprof_summ.php
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. U California P, 1984.
Chaput, Catherine. “Introduction.” Entertaining Fear: Rhetoric and the Political Economy of
Social Control. Eds. Catherine Chaput, Mary Jean Braun, and Danika M. Brown. Peter
Lang, 2010.
Charmaz, Kathy. Constructing Grounded Theory. SAGE, 2014.
Ciaramella, C.J. “West Virginia Inmates Will Be Charged by the Minute to Read E-Books on
Tablets.” Reason. 22 Nov. 2019. https://reason.com/2019/11/22/west-virginia-inmates-
will-be-charged-by-the-minute-to-read-e-books-on-tablets/.
Cisneros, Josue David. The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Border, Citizenship, and Latina/o
Identity. U Alabama P, 2014.
Clegg, Roger. “If You Can’t Follow the Laws, You Shouldn’t Help Make Them.” Editorial. The
New York Times. 22 April 2016.
Clegg, Roger and Hans A. Von Spakovsky. “There Are Good Reasons for Felons to Lose the
Right to Vote.” National Review, 8 April 2018.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/there-are-good-reasons-for-felons-to-lose-the-
right-to-vote/.
CNN. “CNN Town Hall in Wake of Florida School Shooting.” YouTube, 21 Feb. 2018.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaLh74eXTDo. Floyd 194
---. “Malala Confronts Obama.” CNN Politics, 11 Oct. 2013.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/10/11/obamas-meet-with-malala/.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” The Atlantic, October
2015. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/the-black-family-in-the-
age-of-mass-incarceration/403246/.
---. “The First White President.” The Atlantic, October 2017.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-
nehisi-coates/537909/.
Collins, Gail. “How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us.” The New York Review of Books, 21
June 2012. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/06/21/how-texas-inflicts-bad-
textbooks-on-us/
Congressional Leadership Fund. “Amy McGrath: Wrong on Illegal Immigration.” Campaign
Commercial.
Corneille, Pierre. Le Cid. Livre de Poche, 1986.
Cunningham, Joseph. “Rhetorical Tension in the Bureaucratic University.” Journal for Critical
Education Policy Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, 2017, pp. 305-331.
“Danielle Sered: I Don’t Know Who Invented Violence.” DEcarcerated from The Weaver
Fellowship, 5 May 2019, https://decarceratedpodcast.libsyn.com/i-dont-know-anyone-
who-invented-violence.
DEcarcerated from The Weaver Fellowship.
https://www.marlonpeterson.com/decarceratedpodcast.
Decker, Scott H. and David C. Pyrooz. “Activism and Radicalism in Prison: Measurement and
Correlates in a Large Sample of Inmates in Texas.” Justice Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 2, Floyd 195
2019, pp. 787-815.
Define American. “Our Innovative Mission.” Defineamerican.com
https://defineamerican.com/about/
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. U
Minnesota P, 1987.
DeParle, Jason. “The Anti-Immigration Crusader.” The New York Times, 17 Apr. 2011.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/us/17immig.html.
“Dennis and Dee’s Mom Is Dead.” It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, season 3, episode 3, FX,
20 Sept. 2007. Hulu.
Dickey, Colin. “The Elements of Bureaucratic Style.” Longreads, April 2017,
https://longreads.com/2017/04/12/the-elements-of-bureaucratic-style/. Accessed 15 Mar.
2019.
Dow, Bonnie J. “AIDS, Perspective by Incongruity, and Gay Identity in Larry Kramer’s ‘1,112
and Counting.’” Communication Studies, vol. 45, nos. 3-4, 1994, pp. 225-40.
DuVernay, Ava. 13th. Netflix, 2016.
Ear Hustle from Radiotopia. https://www.earhustlesq.com/.
Eisler, Peter. “Trump Won with Lowest Minority Vote in Decades, Fueling Divisions.” Reuters,
23 Nov. 2016. https://www.aol.com/article/news/2016/11/23/president-elect-trump-won-
with-lowest-minority-vote-in-decades/21612682/.
England, Charlotte. “School Climate Strikes: Tens of Thousands of Children Skip Class in Third
National Action.” Rights Info, 12 April 2019. https://rightsinfo.org/school-climate-
strikes-tens-of-thousands-of-children-skip-class-in-third-national-action/.
Fair Vote. “Voter Turnout.” https://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101. Floyd 196
Accessed 11 Sept. 2019.
“Felony Voting Disenfranchisement.” Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, season 5, episode 22,
HBO, 9 Sept. 2018. HBO Now.
Ferrara, America. America Like Me. Simon & Schuster, 2018.
Fish, Stanley. Save the World on Your Own Time. Oxford UP, 2012.
Fleishman, Glenn. “The Far Right Represents Only 6% of U.S. Citizens, Study Says. 67% Make
up the ‘Exhausted Majority.’” Fortune, 22 Oct. 2018. https://fortune.com/2018/10/22/far-
right-americans-just-six-person-study-says/.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 2000.
Ford, Matt. “What Caused the Great Crime Decline in the U.S.?” The Atlantic, 15 April 2016.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/what-caused-the-crime-
decline/477408/.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan.
Penguin Books, 1991.
“Gender Differences in Voter Turnout.” Center for American Women and Politics. 5 June 2019.
https://cawp.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/resources/genderdiff.pdf. Accessed 30 Aug.
2019.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from The Prison Notebooks. Edited and Translated by Quentin
Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. The Electric Book Company, 1999.
http://abahlali.org/files/gramsci.pdf.
Gries, Laurie. Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. Utah
State UP, 2015.
Guardian News. “Diane Feinstein Rebuffs Young Climate Change Activists’ Calls for Green Floyd 197
New Deal.” YouTube, 23 Feb. 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEPo34LCss8.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Assembly. Oxford UP, 2019.
---. Commonwealth. Belknap Press, 2011.
---. Empire. Harvard UP, 2001.
Hariman, Robert and John Louis Lucates. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public
Culture, and Liberal Democracy. U Chicago P, 2011.
Hayes, Heather. Violent Subjects and Rhetorical Cartography in the Age of the Terror Wars.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Hayes, Kate. “9 Ways Young Professionals Can Prove ‘Millennial Stereotypes’ Wrong.” Forbes,
11 Jan. 2018. https://www.forbes.com/sites/katehayes/2018/01/11/9-ways-young-
professionals-can-prove-millennial-stereotypes-wrong/#456725e5172b.
“Herstory.” Black Lives Matter. https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/herstory/. Accessed 30 Aug.
2019.
Hesford, Wendy S. Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms.
Duke UP, 2011.
Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass
Incarceration in America. Harvard UP, 2016.
Hirsch, E. D. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Vintage Books, 1988.
Hjelmgaard, Kim. “From 7 to 77: There’s Been an Explosion in Building Border Walls since
World War II.” USA Today, 24 May 2018.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/05/24/border-walls-berlin-wall-
donald-trump-wall/553250002/.
Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables. Penguin Classics, 1982. Floyd 198
Human Rights Watch. “Philippines: Duterte’s ‘Drug War’ Claims 12,000+ Lives.” Human
Rights Watch, 18 Jan. 2018. https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/01/18/philippines-dutertes-
drug-war-claims-12000-lives.
@IngrahamAngle (Laura Ingraham). “David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He
Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA...totally predictable
given acceptance rates.).” Twitter, 28 March 2018.
https://twitter.com/ingrahamangle/status/979021639458459648?lang=en.
Irfan, Umair. “Americans are Worried about Climate Change—but Don’t Want to Pay Much to
Fix It.” Vox, 28 Jan. 2019. https://www.vox.com/2019/1/28/18197262/climate-change-
poll-public-opinion-carbon-tax.
Jailhouse Lawyers Speak. “About.” Facebook. 14 Sept. 2015.
https://www.facebook.com/BlkJailhouselawyer/.
Kahn, Seth and JongHwa Lee. Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political
Engagement. Routledge, 2011.
Kaplan, Jeffrey. “Leaderless Resistance.” Terrorism and Political Violence, vol. 9, no. 3, 1997,
pp. 80-95.
Kentucky Legislative Research Commission. “Immigration in Kentucky.”
https://www.lrc.ky.gov/lrcpubs/Rr305.pdf.
Kock, Christian and Lisa S. Villadsen. Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation. Penn
State UP, 2012.
Kock, Leon de. “Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writers Conference in
South Africa.” ARIEL, vol. 23, no. 3, 1992, pp. 29-47.
Kopan, Tal. “34 More Separated Kids Released; Hundreds Remain in Custody.” CNN, 20 Sept. Floyd 199
2018. https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/20/politics/separated-children-deported-parents-
reunifications/index.html.
“Leigh Owens: From Rikers Island to the Philly District Attorney’s Office.” DEcarcerated from
The Weaver Fellowship, 2 May 2019, http://decarceratedpodcast.libsyn.com/leigh-
owens-from-rikers-island-to-the-philly-district-attorneys-office.
Lewis, Helen. “To Learn About the Far Right, Start with the ‘Manosphere.’” The Atlantic, 7
Aug. 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/anti-feminism-
gateway-far-right/595642/.
Lowery, Wesley. “91% of the Time the Better-Financed Candidate Wins. Don’t Act Surprised.”
The Washington Post, 4 April 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/wp/2014/04/04/think-money-doesnt-matter-in-elections-this-chart-says-youre-
wrong/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8ca05b7da408.
Lowry, Rich. “Teenagers are Making Our Public Debate Even Less Civil.” The Salt Lake
Tribune, 27 March 2018. https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2018/03/27/rich-
lowry-teenagers-are-making-our-public-debate-even-less-civil/.
Lozano, Nina Maria. Not One More! Feminicidio at the Border. Ohio State UP, 2019.
Madison, James. “Federalist Number 10.” Bill of Rights Institute.
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/primary-source-documents/the-
federalist-papers/federalist-papers-no-10/. Accessed 30 Aug. 2019.
Markon, Jerry. “Can A 3-Year-Old Represent Herself in Immigration Court? This Judge Thinks
So.” Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/can-a-3-
year-old-represent-herself-in-immigration-court-this-judge-thinks-
so/2016/03/03/5be59a32-db25-11e5-925f-1d10062cc82d_story.html. 5 Mar. 2016. Floyd 200
Accessed on 2 Dec. 2019.
McGuinness, Alan. “Theresa May Criticizes Pupils Missing School to Protest over Climate
Change.” Sky News, 15 Feb. 2019. https://news.sky.com/story/theresa-may-criticises-
pupils-missing-school-to-protest-over-climate-change-11638238.
McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” UMBC Psychology
Department. https://psychology.umbc.edu/files/2016/10/White-Privilege_McIntosh-
1989.pdf. Accessed 12 Dec. 2018.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke UP, 2011.
“Misguided Loyalty.” Ear Hustle from Radiotopia, 28 June 2017,
https://www.earhustlesq.com/episodes/2017/6/28/misguided-loyalty.
Morton, Stephen. Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity, and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason.
Polity, 2007.
Nunley, Vorris. Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor
Rhetoric. Wayne State UP, 2011.
O’Brien, Matt. “No, Trump’s New Green Card Rules Are Not Un-American, Anti-Immigrant or
Unlawful.” Fox News, 15 Aug. 2019. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/matt-obrien-
theres-nothing-unamerican-anti-immigrant-or-unlawful-about-enforcing-public-charge-
laws.
Ohl, Jessy J. “Nothing to See or Fear: Light War and the Boring Visual Rhetoric of U.S. Drone
Imagery.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 101, no. 4, 2015, pp. 612-32.
Orner, Peter. Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives. Verso, 2017.
“Our Current Campaigns.” Youth Activism Project. https://youthactivismproject.org/what-we-
do/our-current-campaigns/. Floyd 201
“The Overton Window.” Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
https://www.mackinac.org/OvertonWindow. Accessed 30 Aug. 2019.
Patel, Jugal K. and Wilson Andrews. “Trump’s Electoral College Victory Ranks 46th in 58
Elections.” The New York Times. 18 Dec. 2016.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/18/us/elections/donald-trump-electoral-
college-popular-vote.html. Accessed 26 Nov. 2019.
Penn State Law. “Imprisoned Justice: Inside Two Georgia Immigrant Detention Centers,” May
2017. https://projectsouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Imprisoned_Justice_Report-
1.pdf.
Pew Research Center on Hispanic Trends. “Demographic Profile of Hispanics in Kentucky,
2014.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewhispanic.org/states/state/ky/.
Price, Margaret. Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. U Michigan
P, 2013.
@PrisonReformMvt (C. Leonard). “@JailLawSpeak and currently caged individuals came up
with this list last year. It is not unreasonable, it is extremely do-able. Tweet this to all
your state reps now, please!!” Twitter, 13 July 2019,
https://twitter.com/PrisonReformMvt/status/1150099128568954880.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by
Gabriel Rockhill. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Southern Illinois UP,
2005.
@realDonaldTrump. “....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and
most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back Floyd 202
and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then
come back and show us how....” Twitter, 14 July 2019, 5:27 a.m.,
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1150381395078000643.
---. “So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from
countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most
corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at
all), now loudly...... ” Twitter, 14 July 2019, 5:27 a.m.,
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1150381394234941448?lang=en.
Rehmann, Jan. “Occupy Wall Street and the Question of Hegemony: A Gramscian Analysis.”
Socialism and Democracy, vol. 27, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1-18.
“Remarks by President Trump and Prime Minister May of the United Kingdom in Joint Press
Conference.” The White House, 13 July 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-
statements/remarks-president-trump-prime-minister-may-united-kingdom-joint-press-
conference/.
Rhodan, Maya. “President Trump Tells Police Officers Not to Be ‘Too Nice’ with Suspects.”
Time, 28 July 2017. https://time.com/4878838/president-donald-trump-police-officers/.
Richardson, Bradford. “Liberal Professors Outnumber Conservatives Nearly 12 to 1, Study
Finds.” The Washington Times, 6 Oct. 2016.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/6/liberal-professors-outnumber-
conservatives-12-1/.
Risser, Rita Elizabeth. “Insiders Curating Outsider Art.” Museum Anthropology, vol. 40, no. 1,
2017, pp. 79-87.
Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Demagoguery and Democracy. The Experiment, 2017. Floyd 203
Robins-Early, Nick. “America is in Poor Company When It Comes to the Death Penalty.”
Huffington Post, 30 April 2014. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/world-death-
penalties_n_5242482.
Román, Ediberto. Those Damned Immigrants: America’s Hysteria over Undocumented
Immigration. New York UP, 2016.
Rumbaut, Rubén G. and Walter A. Ewing. “The Myth of Immigrant Criminality.” Border
Battles, 23 May 2007, http://borderbattles.ssrc.org/Rumbault_Ewing. Accessed 3 Apr.
2017.
Sands, Geneva. “’Serious’ Health, Safety Concerns at Immigrant Detention Facility: Inspector
General.” ABC News, 8 Mar. 2017, http://abcnews.go.com/US/health-safety-concerns-
immigration-detention-facility-inspector-general/story?id=46005536. Accessed 7 Apr.
2017.
Scott, Tony and Nancy Welch. “One Train Can Hide Another: Critical Materialism for Public
Composition.” College English, vol. 76, no. 6, 2014, pp. 562-79.
Serial from WBEZ. https://serialpodcast.org/.
Shor, Ira. When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy. U Chicago
P, 1996.
Sims, Alexandra and Andrew Buncombe. “Who Voted for Donald Trump? Mostly White Men
and Women, Voting Data Reveals.” The Independent, 9 Nov. 2016.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-elections/who-voted-for-donald-
trump-white-men-and-women-most-responsible-for-new-president-elect-voting-data-
a7407996.html.
Smith, Tim. “’We Are Treated Like Slaves.’ Spurred by Lee Prison Riots, Inmates Launch Floyd 204
National Strike.” WLTX19, 21 Aug. 2018. https://www.wltx.com/article/news/we-are-
treated-like-slaves-spurred-by-lee-prison-riots-inmates-launch-national-strike/101-
586155679.
Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Archive.org.
https://archive.org/stream/CanTheSubalternSpeak/Can_the_subaltern_speak_djvu.txt
SPLC. “John Tanton.” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/john-
tanton.
Taft, Jessica K. “Teenage Girls’ Narratives of Becoming Activists.” Contemporary Social
Science, vol. 12, nos. 1-2, 2017, pp. 27-39.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by Henry Reeve. Penn State.
http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/LojkoMiklos/Alexis-de-Tocqueville-Democracy-in-
America.pdf.
U.S. Youth Climate Strike. “Home.” https://www.youthclimatestrikeus.org/.
Usual Suspects, The. Directed by Bryan Singer. Gramercy Pictures, 1995.
Vallet, Élisabeth. Borders, Fences, and Walls: State of Insecurity? Taylor & Francis, 2017.
Vargas, Jose Antonio. Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Immigrant. Harper Collins,
2019.
Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. NCTE, 1993.
Ware, Jared. “’I’m for Disruption’: Interview with Prison Strike Organizer from Jailhouse
Lawyers Speak.” Shadow Proof, 16 Aug. 2018. https://shadowproof.com/2018/08/16/im-
for-disruption-interview-with-prison-strike-organizer-from-jailhouse-lawyers-speak/.
Weir, Bill. “Greta Thunberg: The Teenage Old Soul of the Climate Crisis.” CNN, 20 Sept. 2019.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/20/us/greta-thunberg-profile-weir/index.html. Accessed 20 Floyd 205
Sept. 2019.
Wilson, Mary J. Walker. “The Rhetoric of Fear and Partisan Entrenchment.” Law and
Psychology Review, vol. 39, 2014, pp. 117-60.
Wingard, Jennifer. Branded Bodies, Rhetoric, and the Neoliberal Nation-State. Lexington
Books, 2015.
Wojcik, Daniel. Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma. UP Mississippi, 2016.
Worsham, Lynn. “Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotions.” JAC, vol.
18, no. 2, 1998, pp. 213-45.
Zizek, Slavoj. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. Picador, 2008.