Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground (NCTE-Routledge Research Series)
Adam J. Banks
Language: English
Pages: 186
ISBN: 0805853138
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this book Adam Banks uses the concept of the Digital Divide as a metonym for America's larger racial divide, in an attempt to figure out what meaningful access for African Americans to technologies and the larger American society can or should mean. He argues that African American rhetorical traditions--the traditions of struggle for justice and equitable participation in American society--exhibit complex and nuanced ways of understanding the difficulties inherent in the attempt to navigate through the seemingly impossible contradictions of gaining meaningful access to technological systems with the good they seem to make possible, and at the same time resisting the exploitative impulses that such systems always seem to present.
Banks examines moments in these rhetorical traditions of appeals, warnings, demands, and debates to make explicit the connections between technological issues and African Americans' equal and just participation in American society. He shows that the big questions we must ask of our technologies are exactly the same questions leaders and lay people from Martin Luther King to Malcolm X to slave quilters to Critical Race Theorists to pseudonymous chatters across cyberspace have been asking all along. According to Banks the central ethical questions for the field of rhetoric and composition are technology access and the ability to address questions of race and racism. He uses this book to imagine what writing instruction, technology theory, literacy instruction, and rhetorical education can look like for all of us in a new century.
Just as Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground is a call for a new orientation among those who study and profess African American rhetoric, it is also a call for those in the fields that make up mainstream English Studies to change their perspectives as well. This volume is intended for researchers, professionals, and students in Rhetoric and Composition, Technical Communication, the History of Science and Society, and African American Studies.
widen. It’s already wide, but it’s going to get worse. (1999, p. 98) Lois Powell (1990) begins an article in the Journal of Negro Education with the heading “The Black Scientist, a Rare Species.” Some claim that there is no real problem with access to science and technology fields, but as recently as 2000, the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME), a consortium of fellowship programs, faculty, foundation members, and National Science Foundation representatives working to
spaces that, whether initially created as ways of resisting the segregation and racism that prevented Black people from participating in mainstream American society (and usually punished them for trying), or as refuges from the constant struggle in trying to swim that stream, are dominated by Black cultural norms, Black worldviews, and Black language practices. The most well-known of these sites, and the source of the concept of a Black underground is the Underground Railroad, a network of
uncensored versions, which really frustrated the staff), and viewing music-related Web sites. Some branches specifically prohibited chatting and downloading music lyrics, and some branches have policies banning these activities at certain hours. The Cleveland Public Library employee’s comment points to several issues, from cultural nostalgia to the frustration librarians and library staff feel about not being able to do more to help young people, to the potential uses students and others might
really be. I was out. Back to the counselor’s office, and stuck in Geography, a class evenly split between ninth and twelfth graders repeating lessons I felt like I had in general conversations in the fifth and sixth grades xx PROLOGUE when we were talking about the electoral map and John Anderson’s third party chances and the Soviets in Afghanistan. The point of the story is that, in spite of the fact that I never took to the computers I had exposure to, it took the extraordinary commitment
television interviews, anonymous slave quilters, recreational chat users, critical race theorists, and millions of unnamed leaders, laypeople, teachers, poets, politicians, preachers, parents, students, designers, journalists, entertainers, and others is the search for higher ground. Despite our common sense of the importance of Parliament/ Funkadelic’s conception of Funk—especially as it is expressed in the ideas of the Mothership and “The One,” I do not share Robin Kelley’s belief that PFunk