Black rhetorical citizenship, complicity, and coherent democratic futures

Abstract

Since 1619, African American rhetorical practice has attempted to work through the trauma that remains vivid in our authoritarian moment and has faced the question: how to reconstruct American rhetoric and democracy without reproducing the racial reasoning that gave birth to this nation. We respond to this special issue on “Futures for Rhetoric and Democracy” by braiding Black Rhetorical Citizenship (BRC) and complicity to coherence theory (CCT). BRC names the rhetorical practices through which Black communities have enacted citizenship as actions of resistance and engagement. These include counternarratives, placemaking, distribution of agency, and critical memory. CCT provides the philosophical principle for BRC: movements against racism must not mimic the logic of the systems they oppose—a principle that unfolds across complicity, essentialism, negative difference, and coherence. We yoke BRC and CCT as follows: counternarratives refuse essentialism, placemaking rejects negative difference, distribution of agency refuses the concentration of power in the charismatic leader, and critical memory sustains coherence across time. We test the braided apparatus in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s 1964 challenge to segregationist politics. This is a case study that provides evidence of BRC and CCT’s coherent practice offering a vision for rhetorical scholarship, pedagogy, and advocacy.