Epideictic Rhetoric as Acknowledgement: Rhetorical Heroism and Barack Obama’s Speech on Race

My presentation at this weekend's Pennsylvania Communication Association Conference at The Pennsylvania State University, Lehigh Valley.

Writing about a presidential campaign that is still unfolding is a risky business; every word can be construed as an endorsement of one kind or another. From the outset, let me say that this presentation’s interest in Barack Obama’s speech on race in America should not be taken as an endorsement of his candidacy. Rather, its interest emerges from the simple recognition that Obama’s rhetorical gifts—the likes of which American public discourse has not seen for decades—have drawn attention of many, and that this attention, as well as the considerable disagreement as to what those gifts mean, calls for critical assessment.

The day after Obama spoke in Philadelphia, the editorial board of the New York Times recognized his speech not only for its eloquence but also for its ability to acknowledge the complex reality of race in America. But how should we, as rhetorical scholars, regard his speech? What can it teach us?

This presentation is not a line-by-line analysis of the speech but a reflection on its philosophical and ethical significance, the work it does—or perhaps could be doing—to respond to the ethical call of the public sphere. Its work begins by categorizing Obama’s speech on race in terms of what Aristotle describes as epideictic, the ceremonial rhetoric of praise and blame. Such a categorization seems at first glance to be a strange one, since we are accustomed to seeing epideictic as a sort of catch-all category that deals with the fancy—and often empty—words spoken at ceremonial occasions.

Yet, in many ways, Obama’s speech, occasioned by the remarks of Geraldine Ferraro and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who in their various ways brought race to the foreground of his campaign, is indeed an example of epideictic rhetoric. While he certainly mentions his association with Wright and distances himself from his pastor’s controversial comments, Obama’s objective seems to be understanding and expanding the moral dwelling of American public life—what the Greeks would call its ethos—in light of the question of race. Obama seems less interested in exonerating himself or in offering policies to span the racial divide—activities that we would associate with forensic and legislative rhetoric, respectively—than he is in inviting both his critics and his supporters to a new and more constructive public conversation about an issue that continues to divide American public life.

In The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgement, Michael Hyde places this sort of communicative labor—what he describes as rhetorical home-making—under the category of epideictic. Epideictic, he contends, invites a community to participate in a new understanding of the world rewoven from its public traditions, sense of identity, and moral texture. Because of its capacity to broaden this public moral texture to include those who have been marginalized, Hyde places epideictic at the center of what he calls rhetorical acknowledgment.

Drawing both from the tradition of the Old Testament and from the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, rhetorical acknowledgement emerges from an existential, pre-communicative awareness of the suffering other: that in eating there are always those who go hungry, that when we belong there are those who will never “belong,” and that we are always our brother and sister’s keeper. To those who call “Where art thou?” in the dark, rhetorical acknowledgment, through the power of epideictic, constantly responds: “Here I am!”

Hyde believes that this epideictic of acknowledgement is a difficult road, carrying the constant risk of contradiction, conflict, and futility. He describes the willingness to embrace this risk as rhetorical heroism. A society without rhetorical heroes is for Hyde a society without an ethos, and a society without an ethos is a society without a home, unable to acknowledge its interconnectedness or articulate the moral obligations of its people to each other. As postmodern American society contends with the very homelessness that Hyde describes, his work encourages us to look for rhetorical heroes, not only in our politicians but also in ourselves.

Hyde’s emphasis on rhetorical acknowledgement and rhetorical heroism is important because it encourages us to encounter Obama’s speech on race on deeper philosophical ground, recognizing race as perhaps the greatest struggle for rhetorical acknowledgement in American history. W. E. B. Du Bois reminds us of how white Americans have struggled (and often failed) to recognize not only the humanity but also the very existence of persons who have lived behind the veil of their black skin, and how black Americans have struggled to articulate what this lack of acknowledgement, this invisibility, has meant.

In interesting ways, Obama enters—one might say embodies—this very crisis throughout his address. As someone with black skin, he identifies with those like Rev. Wright, who are frustrated and angry with American society’s inability to acknowledge America’s racial past. But as someone with a white grandmother who used racial slurs to condemn those who look exactly as he does, he recognizes that he cannot reject those who are frustrated with their own diminishing prospects in a globalized economy. In a Levinasian move, he embraces the contradiction inherent in this experience and, more important, refuses to resolve it. “These people are a part of me,” he says. “And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

Here, Obama’s understanding of race in America (and, perhaps, America itself) is embedded in the acknowledgment of the existential contradictions inherent within the American experience: between black and white, individual and whole, freedom and responsibilty, self and other. In embracing these burdens, he invites a new political space defined not by cynicism and despair but by the audacity of hope, in which which our engagement with difference and the American Revolution are acknowledged as being one in the same. With Hyde as a guide, we might read the audacity of hope as the audacity of acknowledgement, a politics that begins in the heroic recognition of the contradictions inherent in a homeless world.

Obama’s speech did not, could not, “fix” American race relations, any more than it could lay the issue of race to rest within his own campaign. Yet, Hyde reminds us that to demand such results from rhetorical acknowledgement—or of epideictic, for that matter—is unrealistic. Rhetorical acknowledgement exists merely to open public spaces, and the glory of rhetorical heroism is not applause for the individual but for the tradition that is presented anew. Public life still requires us to enter those public spaces and engage that tradition in constructive ways. That is what forensic and legislative rhetoric are for, and it is unclear whether, for all Obama’s epideictic grandeur, he would be able to marshal those rhetorical resources as president. Yet, while people may disagree as to his candidacy, his speech on race shows the possibilities of epideictic for American public life. When the ethical call of the public sphere is one of homelessness and division, the epideictic of acknowledgement may invite a new beginning.