Double-Consciousness and the Rhetoric of Barack Obama: The Price and Promise of Citizenship by Robert E. Terrill

Author:Robert E. Terrill [Terrill, Robert E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Civil Rights, Language Arts & Disciplines, Political Science, Rhetoric
ISBN: 9781611175325
Google: JoU-CgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 26526801
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Published: 2015-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

Obama’s dedication of the King memorial displays the inventional resources of democratic double-consciousness far more richly than the other addresses analyzed in this chapter. One factor that contributes to this difference is audience. When he is dedicating the memorial, the speech is imagined to be addressed to the entire nation, in all of its diversity, about a subject that is potentially divisive.56 This is a situation that calls for the broadened scope fostered through doubled tropes and dual perspectives; in a speech delivered on the National Mall and nationally televised, addressing the whole polity and multiple perspectives on King and the civil rights movement, the evocation of double-consciousness provides an unusually productive and flexible rhetorical adaptation. Though this emphasizes the extent to which Obama was addressing his African American audiences as though they were homogeneous, it also suggests that a democratic discourse is perhaps best imagined as addressing a diverse plurality. It should invite an acknowledgment of the various points of view that characterize the public and model a way of speaking through which those points of view can be acknowledged without becoming obstacles to further discourse. While this speech does not do all of those things as copiously as “A More Perfect Union,” it does do some of them, and the particular rhetorical situation it was crafted to address accounts, in part, for that.

These analyses, then, emphasize the nature of democratic double-consciousness as addressed; it is a rhetoric, a verbal performance drawing upon the inventional resources available in specific situations and directed to specific audiences, with the purpose of equipping citizens for productive public engagement. Obama, like Du Bois, is describing not a state of being but a mode of action, and particularly a mode of speech. The self-consciousness that characterizes this mode of speech becomes most salient when it is practiced within a public addressed as diverse, when the “second persona” of citizenly address, the imagined or implied audience, is representative of the entire polity. It is then that the gaze of multiple others is most intense, and it is then that the motive to acknowledge division without calling for homogeneity is most appropriate. Where the resources of democratic double-consciousness are most fully manifest, as in “A More Perfect Union,” they provide an unusually powerful store of deeply democratic rhetorical possibility, animated by an obligation to shuck off the limitations of an unencumbered self and instead to view oneself from the point of view of another, not only to appreciate but also to participate in a networked ethic of reciprocity and sacrifice, to become engaged in the most radical and transformative sense.

These analyses also illustrate both the severe limitations on race talk in contemporary U.S. culture and the effects of those constraints on the articulation of democratic double-consciousness. All of these discourses address U.S. race relations, but with the exception of the remarks at the dedication of the King memorial they are almost completely devoid of inventional resources that might foster double-consciousness, and even the articulation of double-consciousness in the dedicatory remarks is incomplete.

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