Book Summary: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology

 Race, Rhetoric, and Technology is an amazing blend of story, history, philosophy, and design.  Oh wait, I guess I could say that it is an artful piece of rhetoric.  Each chapter is different from the others, but central to Banks' argument is this point, eloquently made by employing Dr. Martin Luther King as the supreme rhetor to deliver the message:

 "through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood.  But somehow, and in someway, we have got to do this. We must learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools" (King quoted on page 63).

In the service of creating the transformation needed to become an ethical brotherhood, the most important sets of questions that Adam Banks poses are these:  "What does this transformational ideal look like? What set of attitudes, commitments, and goals might enable one to peruse this kind of transformation?" (46).

Banks recognizes that transformative access is not just about African American or Black inclusion in the dominant cultural technologies, but about taking agency in determining what those technologies become (45) and how they are used.

Banks writes, "This kind of look [transformational] at race and technology posits that our nation is a construct, or system, maybe even a technological system, and the Constitution, federal, state, and local laws, as part of the code that runs it. Social spaces like schools, cities, the workplace, and the court system are all interfaces where people use that system. African American struggle as reflected in its rhetorical traditions, was always an attempt to both change the interfaces of that system and fundamentally change the codes that determine how the system works" (45).

This argument for transformative change is, in my mind, where the "rubber meets the road" because the soul of this country is a very destructive place, and dedicated activists and conscious users of technology must rally in the spirit of transformation.  And, while Dr. King was willing to assign the term "neighborhood" to the world we have created in this country (the level once removed from brotherhood), I would argue that the neighborhood as a cultural metaphor is no longer even apt-- we are moving farther and farther in the wrong direction.

As Banks suggest, prior to a rally for transformation, groups of people must articulate the values (attitudes, commitment, goals) behind which they will unite so as to define the nature of the movement(s).  If Martin Luther King's values are the ones that light the path for transformation, that is a very different call to action than Obama's state sponsored values leading the call to action.   The politics of this country are horrifically violent (both domestically and in terms of foreign affairs), and they get worse by the day. 

Case in point is what Banks writes abut law enforcement:

"Law enforcement is a technological system for protecting the persons and property in a society, as well as the desired patterns of relations between them.  Regardless of the availability of individual tools available to police in their work (guns, nightsticks, pepper spray, hands, feet, squad car computers, dashboard video cameras) and the wide range of force those tools represent, young Black and Latino men (and increasingly, women) are killed, injured, arrested, charged, and convicted at higher rates than other groups of people in this country" (40).  Banks continues, "any decision to about how police use the tools and the force they have is largely a result of what they have been taught about when and how to use them and the mandates that police forces are given that construct crime and criminals in particular ways" (40).

In other words, our cultural technologies and its users are programmed with a certain set of values.  The values our technologies are programmed with are exclusionary and they are physically cruel, and nowhere is this more publicly apparent--especially in the aftermath of Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson MO--than in the realm of law enforcement.  Simply wanting access to cruel and racist technologies makes no sense if a.) you are a target of their cruelty or b.) if you are against a philosophy of life (and its concomitant practices) that uses cruelty to control.  What I love about Banks' argument is that it emphasizes (or emphasizes in accessible prose) that the tool is not the point,  the values its programmers and users use it to employ are what matter.

The other important take away from Banks' book is the conundrum about access to the literacies of technology when the technologies are changing too fast to allow mastery by people who have limited access (18).  Access is a rhetorical problem. This is more evidence of the lack of intention on the part of technology users and programmers to have it be accessible to all.  That attitude must transform first.

So, as Banks suggests, the issue of the Underground becomes vital.  At some point when confronted with a culture of bullies and their arrogant insistence that they do not want you (Blacks, women, etc.) to play their game, then invent a work around, invent a different game, invent a better game.

 I wanted Banks to discuss in more detail is how Black cultural traditions could be better facilitated through more technological access.  What traditions?  In what ways? Perhaps the most interesting aspect for me is what he refers to as "soul" (129).  That intangible aspect of culture seems entirely absent from mainstream conversations about technology use.  To me, it is the loss of the concept of soul (in conversations about American culture in general) that makes the trajectory of our tool usage so dangerous.  To me, infusing technology with soul is the needed answer.  How African American agency can use the concept of soul to transform our use of technology is a part of his conversation I want to hear more about.

Banks' discussion of the Black Jeremiad begins to get at it because the concept both brings him to the issue of "soul" in less spiritual language. and it also poses the need for defining technology.  He writes, "It is still somewhat difficult to talk about discursive conventions or genres as technologies because it then becomes easy to wonder if the definition of a technology is so hopelessly muddled that it no longer defines anything" (89).

Writing is a technology because it is instrumental in the "ordering of our social, economic, and political systems"(89).   As other technologies allow the emergence of competing literacies (competing for time if not for resources), the teaching of writing as the foundational analytical skill (and, while not free, is cheap if you have a pen), keeps the digital divide from determining access to higher order thinking.

Getting back to the Jeremiad: Not only does American culture deserves a lament right now, the genre of the Black Jeremiad as one of the Black cultural traditions that Banks alludes to in this work, is a useful genre for a.) challenging the status quo's blind optimism in the face of an eroding civilization, and b.) for preserving a linguistic tradition in which unauthorized knowledge can be stored. Whiteness has experienced privilege for so long that it isn't "putting by" for the future.  We are so entrenched in our literacies of expensive technologies and outsourced access, that our folk literacies are dying.  Folk literacy is in many ways survival literacy--and here, I imagine, is a place where Black cultural practices are rich in linguistic traditions that need to be preserved in Underground locations that have nothing to do with hard drives, softwares, or even electric environments.  To me, the Underground is the place where survival literacies hide until the culture is in need of them again.  As Banks suggests, art is a wonderful place to hide these literacies.  Hip hop is a place where transformation happens (128).

http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/videos/id.18160/title.derek-minor-who-you-know-

I love the idea of designing freedom into our artifacts, and I recognize the highly subversive nature of this work.  Covert ways of coding knowledge (123) is my favorite topic.  Unauthorized knowledges are, in my mind, the Higher Ground.  I always think of Cassy in Uncle Tom's Cabin when reaching for examples of how creative subversion can liberate.  Instead of using the standard method of subversion (overt violence), Cassy uses her understanding of psychology,  of Simon Legree's superstitious nature, to frighten him (making him think his attic is haunted) which gives her the time and the space she needs to run away.

Banks writes, "Finally, there is much that this book does not accomplish, many important experiences it does not document, many important ideas that it does not explore. This book is much like one of the quilts that slaves used to guide brave souls to freedom" (146).  In this touching conclusion, Banks invites us to design additional quilts.

Disability

A wonderful thing about disability studies is that it unselfconsciously suggests that compassion can guide conversations about pedagogy:

"For educators, it is ethically questionable to practice pedagogies and construct spaces that categorically exclude entire classes of people.  We need to pay attention to the teaching of composition through the lens of disability studies to remind ourselves of just how much our profession has to learn, and just how much we have been content to ignore" (Selfe and Howe).

And so not only do we need to face our need to be compassionate educators, we need to look at how our tendencies to try and enforce and extend "normal" impede that pursuit:
 
Dolmage quoting Lennard Davis's Bodies of Difference writes, "language usage, which is as much a physical function as any other somatic activity, has become subject to an enforcement of normalcy" (116).  I appreciate it when Dolmage  (Writing Against Normal) reinforces that the essay composing process is messy.  It is such a simple but vital reminder. There is no standardized or tidy process for composing (creating) anything.  We might expect standard products for standard purposes, but when it comes to creating things (like writing our own lives) there are few standard processes, and fewer standard purposes. Perhaps the more divergent we are, the better. (See Veronica's Roth's awesome book of this same name.) :-)

"The normate subject is white, male, straight, upper middle class;"... "The subject and his body translate as error-free, straight and logical prose; as a writing process this is a portfolio of progression towards perfection and away from all evidence of struggle and labor" (Dolmage 115).  Ah, yes, never let them see you sweat--got to make sure that disorderly body gets hidden.  I find it fascinating that Dolmage makes the connection that the enforcement of writing standards happens at about the same time that body standards become an issue (I am thinking that this is junior high school). 

Dolmage writes, "We see normalcy imposed multitudinously through 'surface features' like page layout and sentence length. We see normalcy interpellated through nebulous ideas like 'clarity,' which Trinh T. Minh Ha suggests 'is a means of subjection' and 'conformity to the norms of well-behaved writing'" (116).  

Yes! And we wonder why students act in such rebellion to this enforced conformity. It's not that they can't write, it's that they reject its rigid forms like teenagers reject controlling parents.

"Make it your first priority to design for people with disabilities" (Slatin 2).  Spaces that acknowledge the unique needs of all students challenge the control paradigm in favor of a compassion paradigm.  We can be in charge without being in control.

In recent years composition studies has offered us conversations in consideration of race, class, sexual orientation, SRTOL, and for the rich textures of difference. Unfortunately, these conversations are largely relegated to composition courses, publications and conferences with little reverberating out into the disciplines where error-free, straight and logical prose are still the order of the day.  How can we get this loving voice to sing loud enough for the rest of the academy to hear? How do we create an "ethical infrastructure" in the American institution? 

(Personally I think WAC and WID work is where the reverberation of these conversations can best be facilitated.)

Ironies abound right now relative to conversations about disability.  While a text such as "Disability and Kairotic Spaces" suggests that real energy is moving to break down barriers to access, the physically embodied truth is that able-bodied students on this campus are so tuned out of their own bodies that they cannot respond to each other let alone to disabled bodies.  The feedback awareness required of a body to be sensitive to another body in space is removed by the hyper-attention to sounds piped in by ear bud.  I see it everyday, everywhere.  I am a victim of it.   I am the one who moves out of people's way because while my knee might be unstable, none of my senses is compromised.  So we not only have true disability in people to be conscious of (temporary or permanent), we have manufactured disability: self-imposed hearing impairments that result in a conscious withdrawal from social and physical proprioception. 

And here is what is unfortunate:  these people I am referring to are not imagining disability for any higher purpose; I am not even sure they know they are enacting disability, but in their oblivion to social and physical cues, they are compromised from making quick and effective decisions.  Walking and i-podding is safer than texting and driving, but it is still a state of dis-ability.

"I become more convinced each day that practicing accessibility means closing the imagination gap that separates most people from people with disabilities. It means imagining disability, and working at it long enough to get over the first shock of being unable to do what you're accustomed to doing in the way you're accustomed to doing it--long enough so that you begin to find solutions and workarounds, long enough so that you can begin to tell the difference between good design and bad design, between things that you can't do because you haven't learned how to do them yet and things that you can't do because there's no way for a person in your (imagined) circumstances to do them" (Slatin, John. The Imagination Gap.)

Besides the work we can do as individual educators in our classrooms, how can we link up the conversations we are having in Comp and Rhet to the real world?  And here is perhaps the biggest irony of all: We could do this as writers, but what is deemed good writing in the academy is not something that ordinary folk would want to read; and if we disavow our academic roots to write for the masses, then those texts leave us with no professional credibility. Victor says that the field of Composition suffers from "an anxiety of sophistication" (personal blurt 11/4/14)

On a narrative note. I am no stranger to disability:
I was born with a dislocated hip that was not discovered until it was too late to do anything about it (after my baby-cartilage had hardened into deformed bones).  I grew up with a pronounced limp and  physical limitations that made me have to work twice as hard to physically catch up with other active kids. It also required me to have surgeries at inopportune times, and to wear uncomfortable casts,  braces and shoes for way too much of my youth. My family did not acknowledge this as a disability (except to tease me).  My "disability" was an obstacle to overcome and not an excuse for care.

While recuperating from surgery in the Wiesbaden Army hospital where I lived for over a month as a child, I was given a tour of the "discarded" children's ward (a subset of the children's ward where I had my bed). Abandoned children waiting to die of their deformities were stored in that ward. Suffice it to say that I learned more from that little tour (given late one night by a young Army Corpsman who should have known better) than I was ready at 10 years old to know.  It still haunts me.
Someday I will write about this.

These experiences are the fire my able self was forged in.

So when I read about disability, I appreciate the need to think beyond normal and to experience the world from the perspective of others who don't "fit in" even if they can "get in." But more than anything, I appreciate that disability does not just mean socially different.  It often means living with great physical pain.  So when Slatin, quoting Alan Cantor, writes: "People are not 'disabled,' rather disability is what we call it when functional limitations (of sight, hearing, for example; or of movement, speech or cognition) encounter design flaws in the environment" (6), I would offer that sometimes the design flaw in the body creates pain that can not be easily mitigated by the external environment, and that's no one's design fault.

In an effort to re-think normal, it is important that we don't make the category more inclusive.  Re-thinking normal means "retrofitting" our minds to see all individuals and their suffering (physical, social, emotional, intellectual) as worthy of personal and unique support.

So the questions remain:
What does accessible education look like?  How can it be tailored to each individual?  What are the lines between honoring dis-ability, accommodating it, and enabling it?