Reading Rhetoric Outside and In: Theory, Pedagogy, and Politics in Race, Rhetoric, and Composition

JT or the second time in two weeks, I tried writing a straight academic review of Keith Gilyard's Race, Rhetoric, and Composition. I don't understand the impulse really. Maybe it's the compulsion to belong, to assimilate, to accommodate, to deny that in some sense I still don't belong, despite the successes. Even though I no longer feel any of that old insecurity?at least not consciously?it still must be operating some where within me. And it's that consciousness of my own contradictions, a consciousness of my difference, of never not being the Other, that compels me to understand more of the nature of racism. Gilyard's book helps my understanding a great deal. Straight up: I've already adopted it for a graduate seminar in composition. It seems that we've danced around racism in this business, speaking more often of multiculturalism. We seem to hang on to an old idea of cultural pluralism that sounds nice until one remembers its use in the 1960s to justify the melting pot mentality of Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and its concomitant, the bootstraps mentality (Omi and Winant 17-21). Here, in Gilyard's book, we have some clear discussion, centered on the business we rhetoricians and compositionists do on anti-racism. I'm glad for a book that takes me further in my effort to understand the workings of something so obviously irrational. Yale's Sterling Profes sor of History, David Brion Davis, puts it this way: "Although political rhetoric often conceals this truth, as we complete the twentieth century and prepare to enter a new millennium, no issue in America is as sensitive,