Rhetoric, Politics & Culture

The Compulsory Optimism of Racial Analogy: Antiblackness in “A More Perfect Union”

Alex McVey — 2025-03-27

This essay examines the use of analogy in Barack Obama's 2008 "A More Perfect Union Address."In "A More Perfect Union," Obama explains his relationship to controversial pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, delivering a speech about race relations in the United States that was widely praised by both rhetorical critics and popular pundits alike. While extant rhetorical scholarship on the speech productively tracks the rhetorical purchase of racial analogy in ameliorating the political controversy surrounding Reverend Wright, more attention is needed to the function of racial analogy in Presidential public address. Beyond its political utility, rhetorical critics praise Obama’s use of racial analogy for providing a language to break the silence of racial hush harbors and talk publicly about race, introducing difference and multiplicity into a homogenous and monoracial political culture, rallying multiracial political coalitions, and inviting audiences to move beyond racial division. I depart from these analyses, arguing that rhetoric’s disciplinary investment in analogy as a discourse of racial reconciliation betrays an axiological commitment to the compulsory optimism of white hope at the expense of an honest conversation about the scales of racial violence in the United States. By returning to a close reading of Obama’s signature speech on race, I argue that Obama’s use of racial analogy in “A More Perfect Union” makes Black suffering fungible, contorting the constitutive legacy of American antiblackness by making it stand in for complaints about a faltering white and multi-racial middle class. I claim that while the analogical staging of economic and racial grievances proved a fruitful trope for facilitating the consubstantial identification between the diverse voters in Obama’s multiracial coalition, it also facilitated the smuggling of post-racial discourse into a speech that was praised for its ability to speak honestly about race. The cost of admission into Obama’s multiracial coalition on the part of Black subjects is consent to the fantasy that white economic anxieties are analogous to the black experience of racism in the United States. I read Obama’s “More Perfect Union Address” to isolate analogy as a particular rhetorical function of multiracial antiblackness.

Epistemic Translations for Liberation

Shereen Yousuf — 2025-03-27

Twelver Shia Muslims are the minority amongst an already marginalized Muslim community in the United States and, like many predominantly immigrant-based community, confront the violence of assimilation by participating in more “model minority” or inclusionary politics. In this essay, I explore the resonances between the Twelver Shia tradition and the movements towards abolition. I argue that abolitionist rhetoric offers Twelver Shia Muslims living in the U.S. the language and practical tools to apply their own Twelver Shia tradition as an incentive towards more radical, political engagement through a process that I refer to as “epistemic translations.” Specifically, I consider how abolitionist rhetoric allows for a more generative translation of Islamic concepts into English, since they both frame social justice as a political practice that is informed by and geared towards the “horizon” of liberation. I am interested in how abolitionist rhetoric will not only help “translate” the Twelver Shia tradition that sheds light on the contemporary systems and structures of harm, but also assists in making sense how Twelver Shia tradition is applicable in social justice efforts. Rhetorical studies offer the means to assess and reveal the epistemic foundations for how people “be” and exist in this world, which is why I consider the process of epistemic translations as an inherently a rhetorical process. I essentially argue that rhetorical studies offers the epistemic “translator” the appropriate tools in navigating the complicated process of using abolitionist rhetoric to translate the shared meanings of justice to U.S. Twelver Shia communities.

Here's to the Future!: Housing Occupancy Limits and Abolitionist Perspectives on the Family Form

Ashley Ferrell — 2025-03-27

This article extends feminist theories of family abolition to examine the intersections of housing reform and the family. In November 2021, “Bedrooms Are For People” advocated for a ballot measure that would broaden housing occupancy limits in Boulder, Colorado. While the group was ultimately unsuccessful in its campaign, discourse surrounding the measure actively engaged in publicly imagining the city’s future using the image of the family. Feminist scholars have long argued that the family form can harmfully converge with racial capitalism and the restriction of care. I draw from this literature to suggest that merely attending to the language of occupancy limits cannot address the enduring racialized and gendered violence furthered by the image and discourse of the family. At the same time, by engaging in a speculative and nonlinear practice of sense-making, I argue that as we interrogate the imbrication of housing and family, we must scrutinize the inherited forms through which we come to know and to accept these arrangements. I end by raising questions about the heretofore undetermined kinds of cohabitation, care, and cognition that we might assume when unfettered by the rhetorical strictures of institutional forms.

Abolition Ecology as Articulatory and Worldmaking Rhetoric: Notes on the (Unfinished) Stop Cop City Movement

Dustin Greenwalt — 2025-03-27

The ongoing movement to stop the construction of Cop City, a proposed police training center and movie studio in the Weelaunee Forest in Atlanta, Georgia, provides an important opportunity to study abolition ecology. This essay argues that, rather than describing a pre-formed mode of politics, abolition ecology names articulatory and worldmaking processes that emerge through rhetorical practice. It shows how abolition ecology rhetorics form solidarities and worlds that exceed the logic of place that guides the study of such movements among geographers. This essay analyzes the Stop Cop City Movement to forward three theses about abolition ecology. These theses claim that abolition ecology emerges through the articulation of multiple concerns, that it is a process of emplaced worldmaking that cultivates collective love and freedom, and that it potentially builds global movements. This essay shows the importance of studying abolitionist projects for environmental communication as well as the potential for articulatory rhetorics to make accomplices against racial capitalism.

Stop the Cop Shit

Gabriella Wilson — 2025-03-27

Theorizing from the body, understanding the body “as both the locus of thinking– the site from which thinking takes place– and as the object of thought– as being already subject to interpretation and conceptualization”[i] this essay explores how embodied knowledge, or ”knowledge [that] is bound up with what makes us sweat, shudder, tremble” [ii] contributes to pedagogical philosophy. I conclude with considerations for abolitionist praxis within classroom policy and course content. This essay considers how to enact an abolitionist pedagogical praxis in the writing classroom, recounting the author's experience teaching an introduction to college writing course. Outlining three important elements that generate an abolitionist praxis, the author considers how to push students to imagine abolitionist futures that work towards collective healing and collaboration rather than punishment-oriented frameworks and policies.

[i] Ahmed, Sara, and Jackie Stacey, eds. Thinking through the skin. London: Routledge, 2001.

[ii] Ahmed, Thinking through the Skin, 140.