The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy (Rhetoric Culture and Social Critique)

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The Prettier Doll

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R h e tor i c, C u lt u r e, a n d S o c i a l C r i t i qu e Series Editor John Louis Lucaites Editorial Board Richard Bauman Barbara Biesecker Carole Blair Dilip Gaonkar Robert Hariman Steven Mailloux Raymie E. McKerrow Toby Miller Austin Sarat Janet Staiger Barbie Zelizer


The Prettier Doll Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy

Edited by Karen Tracy, James P. McDaniel, and Bruce E. Gronbeck

The U nive rsity o f Al a b a ma Pres s Tuscaloosa


Copyright © 2007 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Typeface: Perpetua ∞ The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The prettier doll : rhetoric, discourse, and ordinary democracy / edited by Karen Tracy, James P. McDaniel, and Bruce E. Gronbeck. p. cm. — (Rhetoric, culture and social critique) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-1575-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8173-1575-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-5439-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8173-5439-5 1. Communication in politics—United States. 2. Rhetoric—United States. 3. Democracy—United States. I. Tracy, Karen. II. McDaniel, James P. III. Gronbeck, Bruce E. JA85.2.U6P74 2007 320.97301′4—dc22 2007004146


In Memoriam James P. McDaniel 1965–2004

At the Very Start, One’s Terms Jump to Conclusions —Kenneth Burke, Collected Poems, 1915–1967



Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS 1. Introduction: A Moment of Ordinary Democracy Karen Tracy 3 2. Through the Looking Glass and Back: Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate James P. McDaniel and Bruce E. Gronbeck 22 II. THE BARBIEGATE DISCOURSE 3. Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse: A Dilemma-Centered Rhetorical Analysis HerbertW. Simons 45 4. Political Performances in Public Proceedings: The Social Dramas of Barbiegate Bruce E. Gronbeck 70 5. Darkness on the Edge of Town: On the Interface between Communicational and Racial Ideologies Darrin Hicks 103 6. Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand: Discursive Moves of Ordinary Democracy Kathleen Haspel and Karen Tracy 142


viii / Contents 7. Chairing Democracy: Psychology, Time, and Negotiating the Institution Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn 176 III. AFTER WORDS 8. Understanding Ordinary Democracy: The Intersection of Discourse and Rhetorical Analysis Mark Aakhus 205 9. Amateur Hour: Knowing What to Love in Ordinary Democracy Robert Hariman 218 Appendix A: Transcripts of BVSD Speeches

251

Appendix B: Newspaper and School District Documents Contributors Index

289

293

297


Acknowledgments

Coffee and conversation were the spawning ground for this book. James McDaniel, my colleague at the time, and I would take stray hours here and there to talk about what we were reading or writing. As I was—and still am—in the midst of a project examining a three-year case study of school board meetings and ordinary democracy, I talked incessantly about the interesting, weird, and amusing happenings at these meetings. When the science fair controversy erupted in the winter of 2001 in Boulder, James and I saw its possibility as an event that could aid us in reflecting more complexly on how rhetoricians and discourse analysts approach texts. The following November at the annual conference of the National Communication Association (NCA) we organized a one-day workshop that brought discourse analysts and rhetoricians together to discuss the science fair speeches and the issues they foregrounded. Out of the NCA session came plans for this volume. Well on his way to becoming an academic star in rhetorical studies, James died a tragic death soon after work on the volume had begun. Ordinary Democracy is dedicated to him. With his death, we lost an exceptional and charismatic colleague. James’s essay for the volume had been partially drafted but had not been completed. Bruce Gronbeck, one of James’s teachers during his PhD years and an NCA seminar participant, stepped in to revise and complete the essay. “Through the Looking Glass and Back: Democratic


x / Acknowledgments Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate” is now the second chapter of the volume’s introductory section. With James’s death, a number of changes in the volume were called for. As a discourse analyst, I was on unfamiliar ground developing a book in an established rhetoric series. In figuring out what adaptations were needed, Bruce Gronbeck became my main sounding board, offering advice about design decisions and giving feedback on various chapters. My deep thanks to him for his willingness to add these responsibilities to his many others. The magnitude of his contributions was significant. In recognition of this fact, Bruce Gronbeck became a volume coeditor. Three additional parties deserve thanks.The first is The University of Alabama Press series editor, John Lucaites, who gave multiple rounds of feedback. Not only did his comments help make the volume’s central argument clearer, but his suggestions about language use in the opening essay enabled me to write in a livelier, more engaging style. The second party is Paula Dufour and the TAC (technology across the curriculum) staff in the communication department at the University of Colorado. Paula tracked down multiple pieces of information related to James, and the TAC staff converted the fourteen speeches that are the volume’s focus into streaming video files that are publicly available on the Internet with this book (http://comm. colorado.edu/rdod). Finally, thanks to Bob Craig, my most valued conversational partner. His interest and support helped me keep the volume rolling along when it encountered more than the usual share of snags. Karen Tracy Boulder, Colorado


The Prettier Doll



i Introductory Remarks



1 Introduction A Moment of Ordinary Democracy Karen Tracy

In February of 2001 in an affluent, predominately white Colorado community, a third-grade girl conducted an experiment as part of her school’s annual science fair requirement. The girl had presented both black and white Barbie dolls in dresses of two colors to thirty adults and thirty fifth graders. Her question: Which doll was prettier? Among the adults, all selected the doll in the purple dress whatever the doll’s skin color; among the fifth graders, most picked the white doll whatever the dress color. Upon seeing the girl’s science fair project—a poster board with results accompanied by pasted pictures of black and white Barbies—the school staff informed the girl and her parents that the Barbie doll experiment would not be included in the public display of science fair projects. Her project, school officials said, violated the district’s nondiscrimination policy because it displayed “visual or written material with the purpose, or depending upon the circumstances and context, [that have the] effect of demeaning the race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, or religion of any individual or group.”1 At the district’s board meeting following the school’s action, the girl’s father, David Thielen, denounced the decision, arguing that removing the project had violated his daughter’s civil liberties and was inconsistent with several existing policies in the district. His speech was given attention by the local newspaper, and soon after a columnist, Clint Talbout, weighed in with


4 / Tracy an editorial that took the school district to task for their decision. Talbout concluded by saying: “School teachers and administrators might, in fact, have unimpeachable intentions. But from time to time, they seem hypersensitive and altogether asinine. From time to time, analytical children make them look like blockheads . . . there’s a tremendous difference between the censored girl and the censoring teachers. She was right. They were wrong. She has suffered. They should learn.”2 The event was picked up by the Associated Press and it appeared as a news story in newspapers nationally. As a result, Mesa Elementary and the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) more generally received a barrage of critical e-mails and telephone calls from as far away as South Africa.3 In addition, the removal of the science project became a focus in the local community, leading to a large outpouring of letters to the editor and editorials by the local newspaper. Consider but one response to the initial editorial: Racism and race relations are too often ignored—sometimes in the schools, and certainly in our homes (how did we get to the place where we expect our teachers to be responsible for all morality issues?). No these subjects should not be taboo in classrooms. But a third-grade classmate should not be delivering such lessons. What good will come of presenting these blunt findings? What will the students who chose the white doll feel? Confusion, perhaps. Resentment, maybe. Shame, quite likely. . . . Racism and inequality are far too complex and important subjects to be handled in a “science experiment” that would make a statistician wince. We don’t need an experiment to show that skin color makes far too much of a difference. The facts reveal it. And it’s not “censoring” a child to prevent her from pointing fingers at her classmates. Each and every one of us must stop pointing those fingers outward, and begin turning them back on ourselves, both to look for the roots of racism and to search for solutions.4 At the next meeting of the BVSD board, other citizens came to speak about the science fair decision. In this meeting, occurring two weeks after his initial speech, Thielen spoke again; additional speakers included two attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a leader of the Million Man March from the nearby city of Denver, a representative of the


Introduction / 5 teachers at Mesa Elementary School, the head of Mesa’s parent-teacher organization, and another Mesa parent. After the district superintendent made comments in which he problematized social science as an option for elementary school science projects, all six of the board members who were present at that meeting offered their views. The first board member to speak referred to the swirl of events as “Barbiegate.”5 This label was picked up by other board members, was used in some newspaper commentaries, and is the one we use in this book. This elementary school science fair controversy was a smaller crisis than its namesake, and many shades paler, yet like Watergate it raised a tangled swath of touchy issues.6 Barbiegate reflects an intersection of concerns about education, censorship, science, the sources and attributions of racism, foundational tensions between democratic values such as liberty and equality, public participation in the steering of society, and more. This moment of “ordinary democracy,” one concrete occasion in which local and larger issues intersected, is the focus of this volume. “Ordinary democracy” is the name I give to the discursive actions, decisionmaking practices, and participation frames that occur in public meetings of local governance groups. Ordinary democracy is about mundane meeting exchanges; it is what goes on when local governance groups talk. Ordinary democracy involves the actions of praising and blaming others as a group makes, avoids, and reshapes its decisions. Democracy as a term rarely occurs without a modifier that qualifies its particular variety. For instance, there’s “middle,” “participative,” and “real democracy,” “representative” versus “direct,” “strong” versus “thin,” “democracy by poll” versus “discursive democracy,” “aggregative, voting-based” versus “deliberative,” “unitary” versus “adversarial,” and “deliberative” versus “communicative.”7 Is there a need, one might ask, to differentiate one more kind of democracy? Does ordinary democracy give us anything of value that these other terms do not?

ORDINARY DEMOCRACY For too long, discussions about the meaning of democracy have been conducted in an idealized key, shorn of contextual particulars. There is little understanding of what goes on as elected officials and citizens seek to be democratic in community-level public meetings. Very few deliberative democrats,


6 / Tracy David Ryfe comments, “have sought to apply their principles to the real world.”8 Democracy as a practice and democracy as a principle have had little to do with each other. This chasm is problematic. Ideals formed without attention to the communicative actions that would enact them are inherently limited.9 There needs to be traffic between observations concerning what is democratic governance and prescriptions about what such governance ought to be. Ordinary democracy foregrounds democracy’s empirical face. Democratic governance, argue James March and James Olsen, is “an accumulation of concrete institutional practices, rules and procedures that are tied to democratic ideals.”10 In contrast to alternative characterizations of the project of democracy, ordinary democracy focuses on how citizens and elected officials speak in public meetings within actual sites of local governance. Foregrounding talk in definitions of democracy is an important move deliberative democrats have made. Benjamin Barber, for instance, distinguishes “thin” democracy, which equated democracy with expression of individual interests assessed through voting, from “strong democracy” in which engaged discussion of issues is central. Talk is important to deliberative democrats, yet many commentators specify a highly constrained view of what the talk must look like if it is to warrant being called democratic deliberation. Relative equality of speaking rights, for instance, is often assumed. Michael Delli Carpini and his colleagues explicitly rule out citizen-to-elite communicative forms, such as school board meetings, as instances of deliberative democracy. Others, such as Joseph Bessette and Iris Marion Young, are more expansive in definition.11 Arguing against the tendency to restrict definitions of democratic deliberation to exchanges in face-to-face groups outside of state-linked organizations, Young suggests that “democracy is better thought of as a process that connects ‘the people’ and the powerful, and through which people are able to significantly influence their actions.”12 It is the strength of the connections and the ability to influence that is most important, she argues, not a small group format or an occasion’s occurrence outside the state. Young also expands the kind of talk that should count as doing democracy. Theorists of deliberative democracy, whether scholars align with Jürgen Habermas or John Rawls, have tended to restrict democratic talk to reasongiving argument. But democratic talk,Young argues, also involves narratives, language choice and tropes, and what she calls “greetings,” the small commu-


Introduction / 7 nicative moves that people use to recognize others as persons.13 “Communicative” democracy, the ideal she puts forth, is a better and more inclusive norm than “deliberative” democracy. As an ideal, communicative democracy more closely connects to how people actually talk. Nonetheless, it is based on an armchair view of talk, giving little thought to a host of actions that are part of ordinary expression. Should anything other than what Young noted be outside of the ideal of communicative democracy? Or, should other conversational actions be added to this normative portrait? To make that judgment well, we need a richer sense of ordinary democratic talk. As an idea, ordinary democracy directs our gaze toward just these communicative particulars. In addition to its talk-centric character, ordinary democracy focuses on local governance: school boards, municipal governments, and city councils. Barber distinguished two main sites of democracy in the United States. A first, and the dominant one, focuses attention on presidential politics and national issues. The second, the ignored site, is that of local neighborhood and governance groups. “We wax exuberant” about these groups, he notes, “though we scarcely associate it [what they do] with politics or democracy at all.”14 In directing attention to local governance groups, ordinary democracy also contrasts with “participatory democracy,” a kind of democracy that typically highlights decision making in workplaces, religious groups, and social movements.15 Of all the varieties of democracy, ordinary democracy is most similar to “real democracy.” Real democracy, a term coined by Frank Bryan, refers to the actual conduct of citizens in town meetings. Town meetings, loosely organized by Roberts’ Rules of Order, are places in which all citizens in a community vote on decisions of relevance to the town, usually following public discussion. One might see town meetings with their commitment to direct democracy as more “real” than representational governance forms such as those of most school boards. It is important to realize, however, the rarity of such formats. Real democracy is largely restricted to small communities in New England. Ordinary democracy is what occurs in most places in the United States: the routine communicative practices in communities that elect officials. Ordinary democracy highlights the talk in regular public meetings where officials listen, or at least act like they are listening, to citizens. It is the discussion that officials do with one another and selected ex-


8 / Tracy perts in front of a viewing public. Ordinary democracy concerns how officials vote and how they justify their votes. Finally, although ordinary democracy is an empirical notion, it is tethered to U.S. beliefs about what democratic conduct should look like. What local governance groups actually do will be shaped by the normative ideals about what it means to act democratically that permeate public life. At the same time, ordinary democracy is shaped by the aims and purposes that are routine parts of doing any public meeting. Ordinary democracy is the coming together of practical meeting concerns, ideals of democratic decision making, and the myriad of concerns, both self-serving and legitimate, that participating individuals bring. Ordinary democracy is about communicative actions that uphold the ideal(s) of democracy, as well as the actions that subvert, appeal to, or challenge the ideal. In sum, we need the concept of ordinary democracy if we are to understand an important, overlooked facet of democracy—what people actually say and do in representative, local governance groups. Ordinary democracy directs us toward the talking, participation-structuring, and agenda-setting practices of actual groups. In the next chapter James McDaniel and Bruce Gronbeck develop a complementary view of ordinary democracy, extending what has been articulated here to make visible ordinary democracy’s imperatives of time, place, and performance.

SCHOOL GOVERNANCE Public meetings, where elected school board officials meet with their community’s citizens and the district staff, are an especially contentious site of ordinary democracy. According to Jennifer Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick, education “is a deeply political enterprise, regardless of how much people try to hide the point behind professionalism, nonpartisanship, or abdication to the market. How could it be otherwise? One of our nation’s most important tasks is to teach the members of the next generation how to maintain a democracy while pursuing their own life goals, and the schools are our only collective way of doing it.”16 Up until about the mid-1970s, school board meetings were usually boring events, a kind of meeting where “politics” was expected to be left at the door. Since then school governance meetings have become battlegrounds for the most difficult and divisive issues in


Introduction / 9 American society. The reasons for this greater politicization are many; two important ones are the structure of education governance and the increased racial-ethnic and value diversity of U.S. society. Unlike most Western countries in which education decisions are considered matters of professional expertise, important decisions about education are made locally and democratically in the United States. To be sure, educational governance is a hybrid form, shaped by a belief about the reasonableness of “leaving it to the experts,” alongside of the equally strong belief that local communities have a right to decide how their children are to be educated. The local structures for U.S. school governance were shaped by the “apolitical” philosophy championed in the Progressive Era. As Frederick Hess notes, “Progressives argued that there was ‘no Democratic or Republican way to pave a road’ or run a school and sought to drain any partisan fever from the electoral process.”17 As a result, elections for school board offices were made nonpartisan, with school-related elections set for different times of the year than elections for other offices. There is little uniformity among school governance practices in the United States: fifty-four unique governance structures exist.18 School boards vary in terms of whether members are elected, appointed, or some combination of the two. If elected, districts vary with regard to whether elections are partisan or nonpartisan, and whether they are conducted at-large or within wards.Yet although the diversity of structures is large, there exists a strongly preferred format. Ninety-three percent of boards elect all members. The vast majority of these hold nonpartisan elections, with candidates running at-large rather than in wards. In addition, most board positions are either entirely unpaid or include only a small token salary. In only 3.4 percent of districts, mostly the largest ones, do board members receive salaries of even as much as $10,000.19 School districts, and the boards that govern them, comprise roughly one-sixth of the 87,525 local governance bodies identified in the 2002 Census.20

THE BVSD BOARD MEETINGS School board meetings in Boulder Valley School District have the most common format found in communities throughout the nation.21 An unpaid volunteer board, elected through nonpartisan elections, is officially responsible


10 / Tracy for oversight of the school district. The board meets in public with its citizens, the district superintendent, and school staff to do the business of the district. The BVSD bimonthly meetings occur in the district’s administration building in order to facilitate the taping and broadcasting of the meetings over a local cable channel. Because the district is a large one—more than 25,000 students and fifty+ schools—public meetings are relatively formal. The seven elected board members and the superintendent are seated on an elevated dais that faces a podium for public presenters, and the room has several tables in the front where district administrators or invited experts sit when they present information to the board. Rows of chairs facing the dais provide seating for the public. Citizen participation is limited to speaking during “public participation,” the phase of the meeting that occurs immediately after a roll call of board members and the community’s flag-pledging ceremony. After signing up before the start of a meeting, citizen speakers address the board. Public participation typically consists of two kinds: speakers who want to comment about agenda items and those raising a concern not on the agenda. Following repeated complaints from citizens about waiting long hours before being able to speak, the meeting structure was changed to bundle together the two kinds of participation. Official rules limit citizen comments to two minutes, but adherence to the rule varies considerably. Following opening activities that typically take about an hour, each board member has an opportunity to make comments, a phase of the meeting referred to as “board communications.” During board communications, members may offer comments about any issues that are not part of the day’s meeting agenda. Following these opening activities, the board turns its attention to the business of the day: discussion of and voting on issues that are part of the publicly posted agenda. The science fair controversy occurred in the opening public participation and board communications phases of the BVSD meeting. It was not an issue on the day’s agenda. This fact highlights a feature of ordinary democracy. Ordinary democratic talk occurs within meetings that have multiple purposes and phases in which different categories of participants (i.e., ordinary citizens, those designated as “experts,” district administrative staff, elected officials) are granted different speaking rights. Whether this state


Introduction / 11 of affairs is reasonable is an issue that occupies a number of authors in this volume.

BARBIEGATE’S AFTERMATH After the two regular board meetings that are the primary focus of analysis in this volume, the BVSD board and its community moved on to other issues; Barbiegate appeared to be over. But as it turned out, this was not the end of the story. The next year the district returned to deliberate on two issues formulated as problematic by Barbiegate speakers. The first matter concerned the character of science fair projects. In the year following Barbiegate the district created a “Science Fair Handbook for Elementary Grade Levels” that spelled out the purpose, scope, and procedures for the science fair.22 These new procedures instituted a requirement that students gain school approval before moving forward with a project. In addition, elaborate rules were put in place for “behavioral and social science” projects that largely paralleled the procedures used by universities to oversee research with human subjects. Such rules required, for instance, survey questions to be approved by school authorities before students administered them, students to inform participants of the purpose of their research before beginning, and permission to be obtained from parents for any project involving minors. In addition to developing a science fair handbook, the board revisited and revised its policy on nondiscrimination. The main change consisted of rewording the contested bullet in the section that spelled out the kinds of actions that would count as instances of discrimination. The bullet, quoted at the chapter’s start, had originally stated that displays of visual material deemed to “demean” a person’s race, ethnicity, religion, and so forth were violations of the policy. It was this particular section of the policy that led the elementary school, as the local newspaper had labeled it, to “yank” the girl’s science fair project.23 The document’s new language raised the bar for what would count as discrimination, shifting the focus from the somewhat vague, adjectival “demeaning” to more specific acts that created “ill will or hatred.” According to this revision, discrimination would be judged as occurring if a district employee or student “harasses or intimidates another individual or


12 / Tracy individuals by name calling, using derogatory slurs, or wearing or displaying items or images that, depending upon the facts, circumstances, and context, are reasonably likely to or do create ill will or hatred toward the individual or individuals, on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or religion.”24 Whether the district saw this as a “mere” wording change to better express the group’s intended meaning (as the ACLU speakers argued was needed) or as an explicit change in policy is open to question. What can be said is that the revision created a different solution to the school’s dilemma of how to honor both the First and Fourteenth Amendments. In the district’s commitments to insure freedom of expression and to create a safe, nonhostile environment for all, the language in the revised document tilted policy toward the First Amendment. The effect of BVSD policy changes was to make a repeat of Barbiegate unlikely. Not only were the district’s children less likely to tackle a social science project—the work to do so is now college-level onerous—but should they do so, the project would be inspected through a nondiscrimination policy that gives weight to students’ expressive rights. Developing and revising policies and the document language that instantiates them is what governing groups do when troubling events occur.25 If democracy is to be found in the details of how groups govern themselves, then the language that enacts rules and shades their interpretive possibilities is the biggest detail of all. Events such as Barbiegate are what motivate governing groups to deliberate and act. The outcome of a group’s deliberation frequently has unintended consequences, sowing seeds for subsequent political “- - - - gates.” These new Barbiegates, in turn, generate the need for more rounds of decision making that lead to yet a differently flavored Barbiegate with its accompanying issues that demand attention. That’s what ordinary democracy is all about.

ENHANCING ANALYSIS OF ORDINARY DEMOCRACY This volume brings together discourse analysts and rhetorical critics to explore meanings of this particular moment of ordinary democratic discourse. In interweaving essays from two intellectual communities, the volume seeks


Introduction / 13 to build an understanding of ordinary democracy that goes beyond what either discipline could accomplish alone. Through the complementary differences of rhetoric and discourse analysis, ordinary democracy’s intriguing character is animated. Four complementary differences deserve mention. First, although rhetoric is a humanistic discipline and discourse analysis an enterprise of the social sciences, scholars in both traditions share a conviction that how individuals and societies go about constructing representations matters and requires focused analysis. Both believe that looking at texts carefully, taking account of what exactly is said or written is consequential. Both believe that how impressions of literality or factuality (or their reverses) are stylistically constructed and enacted is an important matter. “Part of the job of the rhetorical critic,” Herbert Simons espouses, “is to determine how constructions of ‘the real’ are made persuasive.”26 And, as discourse analysts, Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter state, “One of the features of description or reports being proffered in situations of dispute is that they are typically contrasting versions, that is, they are typically organized to undermine or reject an alternative that may be either implicit or explicit.”27 Second, both discourse analysts and rhetoricians work with “texts” in which creators, whether subtly or obviously, artfully or crudely, attempt to generate knowledge and opinion, motivate action and attitude, and overall induce others to cooperate. To analyze texts, then, is to analyze layers of persuasive action. In other words, rhetoricians and discourse analysts take “texts” to perform actions in a manner that reflects preferred ends of persuasion as well as their means. To motivate action is to evoke notions of what is good and ought to happen, and its reverse: what is bad or wrong. Scenes in which speakers devise and deploy talk are not merely for expression, but to shape action and decision; this is a shared concern among rhetoricians and discourse analysts. Although both traditions are textually tied, the kinds of texts that each tradition typically examines differ. An interest in public moments and culturally significant symbols leads rhetoricians toward oral texts that have been written down, away from oral texts that are rarely inscribed, as is the case with speeches at local school board meetings. For discourse analysts, the commitment to study talk in ordinary places leads them toward meetings, but away from formal, speech-giving occasions that have relatively little back-and-


14 / Tracy forth interaction, as is frequently the case in school board meetings. For different reasons, then, the texts that comprise Barbiegate have been atypical objects for both rhetoricians and discourse analysts. Related to preference about types of texts is an additional difference in defining what counts as “the text.” Pauses, repetitions, repairs, and audience interjections are not part of a rhetorician’s text. Discourse analysts, in contrast, include all of those particulars and have serious arguments among themselves as to whether it is reasonable to leave any of them out of a transcript of a speech. From a discourse scholar’s point of view, the texts that rhetoricians study are untethered to social life. From a rhetorician’s viewpoint, discourse analyses are overly quirky, full of trivial, inconsequential irritants. These differences in textual orientation will become apparent as authors forward their arguments. The third difference between the two traditions concerns whether a normative or descriptive vocabulary is dominant. By and large rhetoricians assume a critical, evaluative stance in relation to their object of study, whereas discourse analysts give greater weight to description. From the rhetorical point of view, the evaluation in discourse traditions may seem so “lite” as to make it hard to taste. For discourse analysts a carefully worked up description is essential before moving to critique. From the discourse analytic point of view, rhetoricians are prone to rush to judgment, often inattentive to important particulars of the scene. Finally, both traditions are committed to analyzing “discourse,” but how the term is understood is strikingly different. James Gee distinguishes two meanings of “discourse,” what he refers to as the Big-D and little-d meanings. John Conley and William O’Barr use the terms “macro-” and “micro-” to capture a similar meaning of difference.28 Microdiscourse (discourse) refers to actual instances of talk or writing: texts that can be pointed to, named, counted, analyzed. This meaning, in fact, is the dominant one among discourse analysts. The second meaning for discourse, macrodiscourse (Discourse), builds on Michel Foucault’s work and is the more common meaning for rhetoricians. Discourse for Foucault is about meanings within texts and social practices. His interest is in meanings that go beyond single texts, that are bigger and more enduring and that arise from “an ensemble of discursive events.”29 “In short,” as Foucault puts it, discourse is that “which is spoken and remains spoken indefinitely.”30


Introduction / 15 This volume’s analysis of ordinary democracy seeks to build a bridge between these two senses of discourse. In this bridge building, rhetoricians and discourse scholars analyze the Barbiegate materials, with authors in each tradition beginning construction from their big-D or little-d side of the river. Textual materials supplied to authors for developing their analyses, available in Appendix A, included videotapes and transcripts of David Thielen’s initial speech and the thirteen speakers (seven citizens, six board members) who spoke in the second BVSD meeting. Authors were also given a copy of the district’s nondiscrimination policy and a set of articles, editorials, and letters that appeared in local newspapers (see Appendix B). For readers who have no experience in looking at transcripts, I need to offer a caution. When a written record is made of speech, even for articulate speakers, there will be a large number of repairs, repetitions, and uhs and ums. These conversational perturbations, a normal part of speaking, fly by unnoticed when a person is simply listening. When transcripts are read, however, unless readers are consciously working to avoid doing so, they will apply standards of writing. Talk is not writing; it is an activity in which people edit and fix as they go. Admittedly, the talk in public meetings is more similar to writing than what occurs among friends who gather for coffee and conversation. Even so, public meetings are moments of talk. Keeping this in mind is essential if one is to make fair judgments about ordinary democracy.

THE ESSAYS In chapter 2 James McDaniel and Bruce Gronbeck set the theoretical stage for looking at Barbiegate. How has democratic expression been studied by rhetoricians? Why have the dramas that occur in local school board meetings previously been ignored? The rhetorical preference for BIG ideas and BIG communicative sites over small ones, they answer, is why. A preference for the BIG, McDaniel and Gronbeck suggest, is misguided. Rhetoricians have much to gain by looking at sites of ordinary democracy, or to use their vocabulary, by studying vernacular political communities. Situating their discussion of the valuing of the BIG and the small within bumper stickers and grassroots aphorisms; Poe and Rousseau; Habermas and Foucault; Cicero, Sartre, Marcuse, and Derrida; and the sparring partners John Dewey and


16 / Tracy Walter Lippman, readers are led through the looking glass and back. Studying social interaction in mundane forums, McDaniel and Gronbeck propose, will better help us understand ourselves. The next five chapters comprise the volume’s analytic heart. Drawing on one or another of the focal texts, each author analyzes the school board “Discourse/discourse” to shed light on ordinary democracy. Chapter 3 by Herbert Simons offers a dilemma-centered analysis of Barbiegate discourse writ large. Barbiegate occurred in Boulder, Colorado, a community that unlike much of the state prides itself on taking a progressively liberal stance. Because of Boulder’s commitment to liberal values, its affluence, and the whiteness of its residents, multiple paradoxes were created for community members as they expressed opinions about race. Focusing especially on the father, the teacher who represented the elementary school, and the Latino vice president, Simons makes visible the different dilemmas each speaker faced, and, as a result, the partly contradictory positions that each person espoused. The chapter concludes with a list of lessons to be learned about ordinary democratic discourse. In chapter 4, “Political Performances in Public Proceedings,” Bruce Gronbeck examines the Barbiegate meetings as a hybrid rhetorical genre that combines actual decision makers with citizen-spectators. Using Aristotle’s Poetics as a frame, with its concerns about ethos, dianoia, and mythos, the ideological and emotional tenor of the Barbiegate drama is unpacked. Examining the event as a chronological sequence of fourteen speeches, we are given a sense of the social drama and are shown how participants, themselves, framed the issues about which they spoke. Citizens and elected officials treated the science fair controversy as a sociopolitical, educational, procedural matter, or some combination, while bathing what they said in a rich stream of feelings. In concluding, Gronbeck addresses the evaluative question called forth by his characterization of Barbiegate, showing how this hybrid, multipurpose, often chaotic, community-level public proceeding has both promise and danger. Chapter 5 by Darrin Hicks focuses on the speech of Clare Schoolmaster, the teacher-spokesperson for Mesa Elementary. Hicks considers how ideologies of communication and race interfaced in the larger interaction moment. Schoolmaster’s speech, Hicks suggests, points a way out of a diffi-


Introduction / 17 cult doctrinal dilemma that American courts face as they seek to adjudicate speech-related antidiscrimination policies. Simply put, how can the importance of promoting civility in interaction be reconciled with a societal commitment to freedom of speech? As Schoolmaster argues, elementary school science fairs are a particular kind of communicative event, designed for disseminating “information” rather than promoting dialogue. This feature of the communicative environment, in conjunction with the content of the girl’s project, is what made the Barbie poster unacceptable for display. The implications of Schoolmaster’s speech, Hicks argues, offer a novel principle for regulating speech. In situating judgments of inappropriate speech neither in the realm of bad speaker motives nor in potential recipient harm, it offers a way out of a dilemma. At the same time, this novel and useful strategy of dilemma management comes at a price. Hicks’s chapter makes clear the costs, as well as the possibilities. In chapter 6, Kathleen Haspel and Karen Tracy compare David Thielen’s second speech with that of Alvertis Simmons, the representative of the Denver chapter of the Million Man March. From openings to conclusions, the white father and the black speaker representing the local African American community marked race as a sensitive topic for talk. Haspel and Tracy’s chapter describes the discursive moves that these different-raced speakers used to manage this sensitivity. Both speakers sought to unify those present at the meeting and, at the same time, to demarcate difference with some of them. Through inclusive category terms; time and place references; and repetition, lists, and contrast, each speaker invited collective sentiment and encouraged action. Looking closely at the talk of ordinary citizen speakers, Haspel and Tracy conclude, revitalizes theoretical discussions of democracy and provides a map for the “conjoint and interacting” behavior that John Dewey regarded as so crucial to democratic action.31 Chapter 7, by Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn, shows how democracy’s enactment draws upon delicate and indirect discursive means. The delicacy of speakers’ moves, Potter and Hepburn argue, arises from the ideological dilemmas that institutions face: Institutions want to control what can happen and they need to insure freedom; they value formality and also seek to foster informality. As a result, speakers frequently use conversational moves whose functions are not immediately apparent to tack back


18 / Tracy and forth between ideological poles. Examining the board president’s initial comments about public participation and two exchanges between the father and the president, the chapter makes visible the delicacy of the maneuvers to support democracy. Then, through analyzing David Thielen’s speech, the chapter makes vivid a second dilemma inherent in democracy. Passion, a desired quality for public talk, invariably, has prejudice as its accompanying danger. As the father’s speech became passionate, he was also employing multiple discursive moves to disarm prejudice. Big ideas, such as democracy, Potter and Hepburn conclude, should and can be rooted in discourse particulars. In the volume’s final section, “After Words,” scholars Mark Aakhus and Robert Hariman step back from Barbiegate to comment on the chapters and their larger implications for discussions about ordinary democracy. In chapter 8 Aakhus focuses methodologically, identifying similarities in how discourse scholars and rhetoricians analyzed ordinary democracy. The analyses of Barbiegate in chapters 3 to 7, Aakhus notes, intersected each other in interesting and unexpected ways. In particular, rhetoricians paid more attention to little-d discourse features and discourse scholars became more rhetorical and big-D sensitive. Not only were dilemmas a key focus within both communities, but also each tradition analyzed language choices and their consequences. If discourse analysts are to construct scholarly ideas that help citizens and deliberative groups develop situated civic judgment abilities—a goal Aakhus argues discourse scholars should be pursuing—then a melding of the critical and normative impulse of rhetoric with the empirically attentive gaze of discourse analysis is needed. The analyses of Barbiegate, Aakhus concludes, provide rhetorical-discourse hybrids that model different ways to create richer portraits of ordinary democracy. In the final commentary, chapter 9, Hariman argues for what should (and shouldn’t) be loved in this Barbiegate moment of ordinary democracy. Exactly what features of this meeting scene should be held up as practices to be cultivated? What should not? Coming to an answer, Hariman suggests, is difficult because talk in local public meetings requires that speakers give attention to their relationships with the occasion’s people. At the same time, speech in local political meetings, as is true for other political arenas, should be judged by how clear, well reasoned, and emotionally powerful it is. Exactly how social and political concerns should be melded together is far from


Introduction / 19 transparent, but American society, Hariman argues, needs to be seriously thinking and arguing about this question.

NOTES 1. Appendix B, no. 21. 2. Appendix B, no. 1. 3. See the Board vice president’s comment in Appendix A, N. 4. Appendix B, no. 2. 5. Appendix A, I. 6. In December of every year the newspaper in Boulder County invites readers to vote for the stories they see as the top local news for the year. Barbiegate was rated no. 4 for 2001. Amy Bounds, “Mesa Elementary Removes Experiment at Science Fair,” Daily Camera, December 28, 2001, B1. 7. Uses of the terms participatory and deliberative are especially widespread. Although meanings vary, participatory usually cues a group that uses some version of consensus decision making, usually outside of a governance body; deliberative highlights reason-giving talk that may or may not be concluded with a vote. For discussion of deliberative democracy, see Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and David M. Ryfe, “The Practice of Deliberative Democracy: A Study of 16 Deliberative Organizations,” Political Communication 19 (2002): 359–77. Participatory has commonalties, although not identical, with unitary and strong democracy. For an elaboration of unitary and a distinction from adversarial democracy, see Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1980). For a discussion of strong democracy and a contrast with “thin” democracy, see Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). The notion of discursive democracy has much in common with participative notions but focuses on the contrast with democracy that is equated with determining opinions by polls. See John S. Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). In a recent book, Frank Bryan coins the term descriptor “real democracy” to refer to direct democracy in government bodies that contrasts with representative governance groups. Direct democracy in voluntary groups or workplaces would not be included in the notion of real democracy. See Frank M. Bryan, Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). For an earlier formulation that used the term “direct democracy,” see “Direct Democracy and Civic Competence: The Town Meeting” in Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions, ed. Stephen L. Elkin


20 / Tracy and Karol Edward Solan, 195–223 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). Finally, for a discussion that compares deliberative and communicative democracy, see Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 8. See Ryfe, “Practice of Deliberative Democracy,” 360. 9. This sentiment is one that John Dewey espoused in The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927), 141. 10. See James G. March and James P. Olsen, Democratic Governance (New York: Free Press, 1995), 2. 11. See James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996); Michael X. Delli Carpini, Fay Lomax Cook, and Lawrence R. Jacobs, “Public Deliberation, Discursive Participation, and Citizen Engagement: A Review of the Empirical Literature,” American Review of Political Science 7 (2004): 315–44; Joseph M. Bessette, The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 12.Young, Inclusion and Democracy, 173. 13. Ibid., chap. 2. 14. See Barber, Strong Democracy, xi. 15. In her study of social movement groups, Francesca Polletta uses the term “participatory democracy”; see Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 16. See Jennifer L. Hochschild and Nathan Scovronick, The American Dream and the Public Schools (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), x. 17. Frederick M. Hess, School Boards at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Conditions and Challenges of District Governance (Washington, DC: National School Board Association, 2002), 33. 18. Richard Briffault, “The Local School District in American Law,” in Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics, ed. William G. Howell (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2005). 19. Hess, School Boards at the Dawn. 20. Briffault, “Local School District.” 21. See Hess, School Boards at the Dawn, for an overview of basic facts about school boards in the United States. To mention but a few, the number of school districts in the United States is about 15,000. Although most board members are elected (93 percent), a few big cities have begun to appoint boards; of boards with elections, 89 percent are nonpartisan. Most boards are composed of between five and eight members. In terms of a profile, board members are generally more edu-


Introduction / 21 cated, affluent, and slightly more conservative than the average citizen. In addition, board members over-represent certain professional backgrounds, with retired people and homemakers comprising 26 percent of positions nationally. In 67 percent of boards, members receive no salary for serving; in 10 percent, members receive less than $2,000; in 20 percent—usually the largest school districts— members receive between $10,000 and $20,000. 22. “Science Fair Handbook for Elementary Grade Levels,” 2001–2 ed. (Boulder, CO: Boulder Valley School District, available through http://www.bvsd.org/ default.aspx. 23. Appendix B, no. 16. 24. See Boulder Valley School District Nondiscrimination Policy (File AC-R), available through http://www.bvsd.org/default.aspx. 25. Karen Tracy and Catherine Ashcraft, “Crafting Policies about Controversial Values: How Wording Disputes Manage a Group Dilemma,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 29 (2001): 297–316, provides a discussion of the links between a policy and the document’s language. 26. Herbert W. Simons, “Introduction: The Rhetoric of Inquiry as an Intellectual Movement,” in The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry, ed. Herbert W. Simons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 11. 27. Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, Discursive Psychology (London: Sage, 1992), 3. 28. See James P. Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (London: Routledge, 1999); John M. Conley and William M. O’Barr, JustWords: Law, Language, and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 29. See Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language (New York: Harper Colophon, 1971), 231. 30. Foucault, Discourse on Language, 220. 31. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 23.


2 Through the Looking Glass and Back Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate James P. McDaniel and Bruce E. Gronbeck

OF MACROSCOPY AND MICROSCOPY To the democratic imagination no transgression of individual dignity or rights is in principle too small for contemplation and no social code is too magnificent for interrogation, revision, or erasure. Democracy depends on details, or else remains a formal abstraction. For concreteness and visibility, for “publicity,” if you will, even the largest-scale social movements rely on localized sites of struggle. In these, the connective tissues between publicity, passion, and reason flare up. However immense the body politic becomes or is thought to be, it probably will always remain most intelligible and palpable in its parts, and we can continue to expect these to grow most vividly in what Walter Benjamin called, in his sixth thesis on the philosophy of history, “moments of danger.”1 What ultimately counts as dangerous moments depend on where and how we look; it is the intensity of political engagements in dangerous moments that lights up their institutional and rhetorical features. A priori categorical distinctions between mountains and molehills of political life do not apply. Democratic understandings emerge from places and perspectives, tempestuous teapots and coordinated agitations spread across the globe and across magnitudes of scale, macroscopic and microscopic, thus undermining easy differences between categories of political performances.


Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate / 23 The bumper sticker aphorism to “Think Globally” can have a variety of consequences, but among the more problematic of these may be the link suggested between Big and Important, which in turn discounts the Small and (thus) Trivial. The demand for Big Thinking implies the need for Big Thinkers, with socially intensified senses of anxiety about complexity, speed, vastness, essences, mythic vision, high stakes, and technicality, and the concentration of mass spectators and diversified actors into closely defined cultures of expertise. A cynical stance toward public affairs, though bemoaned from all spokes on the political wheel, seems not only sensible but in fact appears the desired by-product and likely consequence of Thinking and Acting Big. Individual stars seem mundane and insignificant when you’re gazing at the whole sky. The citizen-cynic enjoys immense resources for justifying detachment, apathy, and remoteness from worldly affairs when operating beyond the human scale. The gap between leaders and the led that greets us at national and transnational sites of politics convinced Murray Edelman early in his career that mere “political arousal and quiescence” were the primary outputs of political institutions and their processing of societal concerns.2

Reflections of Democratic Processes At the grassroots, claim Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, such attitudes lose traction when subjects of local communities relearn how to “think small.” Because even humungous global institutions “have to locate their transnational operations in actions that are always necessarily local,” Esteva and Prakash argue, “it is only there—at the local grassroots—that they can most effectively and wisely be opposed.”3 There, on the ground, close inspection of social interaction as well as strategic discourse in somewhat more regulated or ritualized spaces within which community decisions arise may begin to reveal the vernacular rhetorical resources of what Esteva and Prakash term the “organic memory” of peoples making decisions with what they have intimately shared in daily life.4 Such a language already exists, they assert, yet remains relatively understudied or undervalued if studied because of the fetish for the grandiose that typifies much social thought, academic and popular, today. Although we all know the outcome of the match between David and Goliath, Esteva and Prakash shrewdly recall, strangely enough the


24 / McDaniel and Gronbeck greater share of attention and reverence—or rather fear—continues to be granted the giant. More broadly still, this volume reflects concerns for and attempts to recuperate a conception of civic judgment, on which Ronald Beiner offers the following reflections: The purpose of inquiring into the nature of judgment is to disclose a mental faculty by which we situate ourselves in the political world without relying upon explicit rules and methods, and thus to open up a space for deliberation that is being closed ever more tightly in technocratic societies. In respect of this faculty, the dignity of the common citizen suffers no derogation. Here the expert can lay claim to no special privileges. If the faculty of judging is a general aptitude that is shared by all citizens, and if the exercise of this faculty is a sufficient qualification for active participation in political life, we have a basis for reclaiming the privilege of responsibility that has been prized by us on the grounds of specialized competence.5 In analyzing how citizens attempt to assess their own political interests and to sway others toward specific decisions, then, judgment is part and parcel of what is being analyzed. The judicationes, the points of decision, of which Cicero spoke in De inventione, reflected not simply rational assessments of problem and solution, but also of those grounds—whether scientistically analytical or perspectivally moral—upon which actual citizens made specific decisions. Like all other human faculties, judgment functions within a social world, marked, limited, and legitimated (or not) by collective values, and hence its shaping and appearing in discourse characteristically reflects intermediacy: it is not either entirely subjective or objective, an operation of mind or matter, but something of each and both. Exploring politics at the local level, within a particular institutional forum and in response to a relatively specific controversy, we can expect the character of civic judgment in the discourses about Barbiegate to reveal significant dimensions of the context in which they were addressed. So it is that specific embodiments of civic judgment may be easily ignored or caricatured for their partiality, impermanence, relativity, and triviality when viewed from on high. Equally maddeningly, among some political


Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate / 25 scientists judgment often is reduced to the abstracted notion of a political cognition—more than that, a person’s cognition that can and usually is aggregated with those of others to map the collective mind of a citizenry, that is, “public opinion.” The idea of political judgment lacks those qualities of generality or even universality that seem to attract many contemporary social theorists, for whom any given instance of civic judgment could serve as an example of broader data patterns but would seem enigmatic or, more to the point, too particular to be of general interest on its own terms. Yet, as Cristina Alsina, Philip John Davies, and Bruce Gronbeck argue, making citizens “speak as a segment of [a social] mass is to destroy the idea of public voices participating in a public conversation”—and, consequently, to destroy the idea of individualized citizen judgment as well.6 Other resistances to talk of judgment stem from transformations of programs of inquiry over the past several decades. In the aftermath of the ascendancy of poststructuralism in the human sciences, the structuring of civic judgment by local material pressures and constraints renders it either uninteresting or too problematic for analysis. As well, as Benjamin Gregg notes, postmodern thought tends to “aestheticize away any notion of political activity” in its focus on “precious interiority.”7 From a somewhat different angle, with the rise of global thinking, the practice of ordinary judgment simply appears too small to be of consequence. Either of these lines of resistance can be sustained and indeed fortified with reference to the contextual strictures of social performance operative in the case at hand. With democracy, the devil lies in the details.

Distorted Reflections? Nonetheless: Seen in the mirror of traditional political philosophy, ordinary persons representing their positions and others on the grade school controversy dubbed Barbiegate would probably appear at best the unruly burlesque of democratic idealizations of the agora—the public place of speech—as well as of that notional figure hailed by the name of Citizen. Specifically, the liberal tradition’s gaze into the looking glass reflecting its ideals—and their perversions—is a priori framed by the desire, even the demand, “that public life should be free but rational, diverse but disciplined.”8 Further, these imperatives for the agora hinge on reasonably skillful and virtuous political sub-


26 / McDaniel and Gronbeck jects: “Citizens must have character. They must possess virtues such as the ability to rise above the battle, to discern arguments on the basis of merit rather than personal preference, and to take the perspective of the other.”9 Finally, these virtues framing the mirror and the gaze of liberal democratic theory culminate in the paradoxical requirement that “the liberal citizen must possess the art of self-abstraction.”10 In short, they must step outside of themselves in order to participate democratically with others in the formation of public interest and policy. This, according to Joan Copjec, is the “peculiar logic of democracy” in America: “Democracy is the universal quantifier by which America—the ‘melting pot,’ the ‘nation of immigrants’— constitutes itself as a nation. If all our citizens can be said to be Americans, this is not because we share any positive characteristics but rather because we have all been given the right to shed these characteristics, to present ourselves as disembodied before the law. I divest myself of positive identity, therefore I am a citizen.”11 When this authentic citizen looks into the mirror of liberal polity before entering into the agora to participate with others in steering society, he or she ought to see perfection: an impartial, dispassionate, self-abstracted, virtuous no-body. No wonder Barbiegate would probably seem a burlesque of certain democratic communication ideals. Let us begin to detail why, with a series of loosely tethered empirical observations from the kind of liberal gaze just illustrated, suggesting only some broad patterns that could guide analyses that are more specific. For instance, we would have you notice that the speakers almost invariably invoke their own particularity or personal perspective, though through various strategies, yet also they recurrently employ the voice of universality. A similar fluctuation typifies the fields of reference activated in any given discourse: Factuality and fancy, material events and human hopes for them combine and collide, becoming increasingly indiscernible from one speaker to the next in a chorus line of hundred-andtwenty-second orations. Despite such rapid, comprehensive, and virtually unpredictable alterations, discernible patterns emerge out of the swirl of rhetorical performances. Chief among these is the prevalence of appeals to relatively unchecked self-interest or group loyalty. No clear (or even hazy) criteria for what counts as a “good move” in the language-game seem evident in the civics version of solitaire. Perhaps time constraints can typically be expected to


Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate / 27 increase the proliferation of such appeals, but whatever the causes, the frenzied scramble for advantage subordinates the patient trek of mutual understanding and agreement to the hope that all possible positions can be sprayed into the environment for consideration and effect. Nonetheless, the paraphernalia of civility and the desire for mutual recognition come into play: Greetings, threats, strained historical analogies, personal narratives, mythic reconstructions of history, appeals to authority, formal yet immensely attenuated gestures of having heard and understood another speaker, and other such rhetorical flourishes abound. Overall, a norm of self-expression rather than reflection or deliberation holds sway. The chances that any given individual will persuade or be persuaded by others seem enormously slim and the Judges—members of the school board who hold the power to make policy—often seem by turns tired, bored, and convinced that all this “civic participation” has somehow missed the obvious. “Well,” the first board member to speak, following on the heels of the orations by “the people,” says with mock approval, “I’m very pleased that people are agreeing with the board, but we’ve never discussed this issue, so I don’t know what you’re agreeing with.” The agora thus revealed in the “vernacular voices”12 of Barbiegate seems a phantasmagoria, a fantastical version of public life wildly transgressed and distorted in reality, and the figure of the Citizen embodied in these public addresses a caricature of itself. So goes the liberal lamentation. For a cynical peeper into the looking glass, though not one necessarily inconsistent with the liberal vision, these public performances may reflect merely the simulacra of democratic representation. More cynically still, they may embody poor simulations at that: To the degree that each citizen believes his or her own moralizing representations, equally each plays the role of Narcissus. The Judges have every interest in plumping up citizens’ self-assurance, piety, and feeling that they’ve spoken their heart. To darken the appearance of these cynical impieties, one even might invoke an analytic of “repressive tolerance” to characterize the discourses.13 A key concept to Herbert Marcuse’s critical social theory, repressive tolerance names the full variety of institutional strategies that work to satisfy the desire to express political sentiments while proportionately diminishing the capacity of those sentiments to transform public opinion. Herein lies one version of the rhetorical mechanisms by which Edelman’s sense of acquiescence is engen-


28 / McDaniel and Gronbeck dered. Repressive tolerance makes the appearance and produces the feeling of democratic representation, yet in this very catharsis of image and passion it relieves the tensions requisite for wielding practical, institutionalized power in any given case. Having already burlesqued the character of the speech and speakers, let us exercise the analytic of repression with primary reference to the socioaesthetic configuration of the public space. The forum in which citizens deliver their discourses spotlights individuals.Whom and for whatever a person presumably “stands” or represents, each speaker literally stands alone. Opposed to such isolation, “the Board” as civic institution appears an organic social-political body with interacting, interdependent parts, the most evident of which is a “head,” a “president.”14 More abstractly yet quite obviously, board members possess that quality of togetherness called “history,” or what Jean-Paul Sartre termed “fusion”: a group identity developed over time, across tasks, with collective goals and a written “constitution” that binds them together in a single script common to all.15 Accountability to public opinion, a frequently invoked principle, is but a loosely tethered practice that exists in contradistinction to the organizational accountability board members owe one another. And so, able to express themselves and their positions within the allotted time, citizens enjoy considerable freedom, but to what end? The aesthetic configuration of public space furthers a mystification of citizen speech and its consequence. When speaking, citizens face members of the board, turning their backs to those who were a moment before their equals. With television cameras in the arena, oratory is doubled spectacle, not an act of political solidarity, viewed from behind by their fellow citizens and as mediated personae by the folks back home. In Sartre’s analysis (he used a boxing match as his example), a dialectical relationship between combatants (including citizenspeakers in the case of Barbiegate) makes the other citizens in the room subjects of the clash in one sense, but part of the dialectic and hence likewise combatants for the virtual subjects (viewers) sitting at home.16 The on-site citizens become part of political spectacle while those at home are simply lumpen spectators, not political actors.17 And so a cynical diatribe against repressive tolerance could go on and on. So where are we? We have been complicating the great Massachusetts representative Tip O’Neill’s aphorism that “All [democratic] politics is lo-


Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate / 29 cal,” sometimes in process, always in foundation and application, resistance and acquiesence. And, at least since Aristotle’s Rhetoric, where politics was construed not simply as system or as collective redistribution of money and labor, but as deliberative process, the result or outcome of politics is judgment. To the Stagarite, citizen-spectators sat as kritês or judges of the expediency and the prudence of policies that flowed from the Assembly. The role of judge and the act of judging, however, in the democratic imagination have proved to be elusive, even paradoxical. Political advocacy is partial, based in personal experience and self-interest, yet the outcomes of politics must reflect collective experiences and apply to the interests of all, or else the citizen is not committed to the demos. And because it so often seems not to, the looking glass of deliberation shows us not our better selves but our own ugliness and delusions. The speculum, the mirror of civic spectatorship, may reflect the baseness of the opportunistically political, the nightmares of collective association.

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Although merely imaginary and radically incomplete, these sorts of analyses, liberal and cynical in turn, reflect from arguably distinctive angles a critical sensibility that has ascended among certain groups of political scientists and cultural studies scholars today. In part, this sensibility has been fashioned out of critiques of structural transformations of the public sphere, the title of Jürgen Habermas’s immensely influential book that became prominent in the post-Vietnam era. Central aspects of his argument on the degeneration of talk in the public sphere, however, were raised half a century earlier, in the post–World War I era. The disputes between and around John Dewey and Walter Lippmann produced analyses of the increasing scale and complexity of social composition in the United States. Their ripostes unearthed significant sources of fragmentation and challenged Americans to make better use of the public resources for democratic deliberation. Their engagement began when Dewey reviewed two of Lippmann’s books—Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925)—and took on more detail in Dewey’s 1927 book, The Public and Its Problems.18 To Dewey, the patterns of social fragmentation combined with empowerment of economic and political institutions to produce the “eclipse of the public,” and to counter


30 / McDaniel and Gronbeck them he imagined the cultivation of a social media apparatus that would perform time- and space-binding operations—bringing “the people” closer together and creating common resources of social knowledge—essential to constituting, maintaining, reproducing, and revising a large-scale democracy. Localist social-political engagement would be enlarged. With the aid of media (particularly newspapers in this period), Dewey imagined that citizens could possess shared stories, facts, and worries essential to their capacity for democratic deliberation. Such resources would permit them to weigh in substantially into political-economic processes. The attitude of Lippmann was far less optimistic. In Phantom Public, which marks the transition from agora to phantasmagoria that predominates much theoretical discussion today, Lippmann drew the picture of a society too vast and tangled for commoners to effectively think or talk about it in determinative ways. In a prelude to detailing arguments for an extraordinary democracy built around a cult of expertise, premised on delegation of “the people’s” power to technically competent decision makers, he remarked: “I have not happened to meet anyone, from a President of the United States to a professor of political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen.”19 If “the public” and indeed “the citizen” are phantoms that, in the words of contemporary French philosopher Jacques Derrida, are “present as such in any of the spaces” of the social—school board meetings for example, the House of Representatives and Senate, the European Parliament, panoramic media, and such—the question remains: “How then to open the avenue of great debates, accessible to the majority, while yet enriching the multiplicity and the quality of public discourses, of evaluating agencies, of ‘scenes’ or places of visibility?”20 Derrida’s way of framing the question privileges responses that obey the call of magnitude—large numbers of participants, “great debates,” maximum visibility or openness, and so forth—and thus displays the persistence of worries shared not only by the likes of Dewey, Lippmann, and Habermas, but moreover by a long line of political theorists tracing backward to Montesquieu and to Aristotle, for whom democracy, whatever else it would be, must remain small. If citizens are to participate in their own governance and in the making of policies that bind them to law and social order, they must remain reasonably familiar to one another.


Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate / 31 At precisely what point spatial extension and increases in population become destructive to such conditions, for this philosophical legacy, it’s hard to say, but in any case the steadfast resistance to the very idea of a large-scale democracy holds constant to this axiom: When the conditions of possibility for embodied, face-to-face communication among familiars disappear, so do those for an authentic democratic society. Dewey clung to interpersonal political encounter as that which will perpetuate democracy and cohere even a diversified society such as that of the United States: “Associated or joint activity is a condition of the creation of a community. But association itself is physical and organic, while communal life is moral, that is emotionally, intellectually, consciously sustained. Human beings combine in behavior as do atoms, stellar masses and cells; as directly and unknowingly as they divide and repel.”21 Often implicit in these enduring philosophical biases for communal proximity, familiarity, and opportunity, another cluster of desire dwells. Shared geopolitical space, civic recognition of others as fellow citizens of that space, and occasions for participation reflect minimal conditions for political association and action. A more amorphous set of qualities promises to augment and transform shared space into democratic political culture, a set of qualities that gather under the name of character, a term which, in the liberal tradition of theorizing democratic society at least, hinges on an account of communication skills deemed essential for civic conduct, participation, and decision making. Thus, at the center of democratic theory lies worries of decentering and dispersal, incompetence and apathy, scope and reduction, and at the core of these is a yearning for place, intimacy, and, if not shared values, then at least a culture of communication through which these may be negotiated. Then, in consequence of such characteristics of democratic distention, there is the problem of analytic magnitudes, the scales on which investigations of ordinary democracy can best be brought forth and the perspectives with which such mundane sociality can be illuminated. By and large, and not by coincidence, we believe, much of the scholarship emerging from the “public sphere” literatures concerns media—the time- and space-binding technologies, mediums, and genres that sustain the dreams of democracy as well as its nightmares—and texts of official political culture, Derrida’s “great debates,” which is to say, more often than not, great speeches or texts by great white


32 / McDaniel and Gronbeck men thinking aloud Big Thoughts. Although littered with pleas for investigations into the mundane worlds of ordinary social interactions, the “publics” literatures characteristically reserve these appeals for gestures toward work to be done—the favored genre of the academic apologist, the “call for future research.”22 In a short tale by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” the conflict of magnitudes enjoys elegant expression. Convalescing in London, the narrator of the story recounts how, looking out a coffeehouse window onto a crowded street, absorption in appearances passes from subjectivity to objectivity, from panorama to minutia: “At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.”23 Poe’s tale can be read as an allegory of transitions from one magnitude of social analysis to another, from the generalizing tendencies of theoretically driven work in rhetoric and cultural studies to the particularizing fetishes of social science, and however else it can be read the story embodies a socially significant description of, as well as attitude toward, nineteenthcentury urbanization. Paradoxically, in Poe, the centralizing of populations in concentrated social spaces renders more difficult the task of specific characterization: Aggregates are easier to see than particulars, patterns clearer than diversities, crowds commoner to the eye than individuals. In cities, the world becomes smaller but at a price: its dynamics of composition and constitution fade from intelligibility. Poe’s “solution” to the problem involves fixating on a single person, a “man of the crowd.” Yet, for all its detail, “Poe’s manner of presentation cannot be called realism,” Walter Benjamin asserts. “It shows a purposely distorting imagination at work,” he explains, “one that removes the text far from what is commonly advocated as the model of social realism.” Poe’s descriptions of tensions between the social and the individual, characteristic patterns of signification and aberrant mundane details that distinguish each subject as such from the rest, suggest to Benjamin “the absurd kind of uniformity with which Poe wants to saddle the crowd.”24 We are suggesting that the challenges to social science and social critique of ordinary democracy today may be more similar to those of the poet or storyteller than some would like to admit. The choice between “descent”


Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate / 33 into the infinite variety of details and abstraction or elevation above the minutia, to use Poe’s language, represents not only two possible perspectives but also two distinctive configurations of analysis and its subject matters. To take seriously the means by which ordinary citizens engage in civic dispute presupposes that details matter, but moreover it suggests that democratic theorizing requires grounding in the “mundane.” Telling the story of mundane details and vernacular strategies of conduct, however, can lead to Poe’s impasse: focus on the particular ultimately leads to the madness of unintelligibility. Some secrets are better left untold is the moral of his story. Incidentally, Benjamin’s criticism of Poe’s storytelling seems to miss the mark: “The Man of the Crowd” doesn’t aim to “saddle the crowd” with an “absurd kind of uniformity,” but rather it exposes the breakdown of uniformity at the level of individuality. Translated from poetic into analytic idiom, the problem here is one of part-whole or text-context or strategy-situation or individual-social or local-global or micro-macro ratios. Philosophically, here is the bugaboo: the proportions of freedom and determination as they appear in any given case or, metaphysically, in the Case of Cases that Hannah Arendt calls “the human condition.”25 Storytelling and philosophizing share a problem of perspective, in short. Between these, social science and social critique always run the risk of (unwittingly) committing to a specific politics or metaphysics or both. The liberal dream of civic participation turns on an instrumental conception of communication that wishes for the live speech of the public assembly to be transparent and tool-like. The assumption that all citizens can pick up language and use it equally to create their identities, to speak their minds, to argue their positions, and to have even say on matters of the state or community rests on a flawed conception of communication and a naïve understanding of the social. Public rhetoric, precisely because public, exposes speaking subjects to others who may see and hear differences as deficiencies. Further, even if the language of civic participation could be “neutralized” or “leveled” such that citizens would experience themselves and others transparently, as equals, still the sights of bodies and the sounds of voices, gestures and idioms, colors and dialectics, and shapes and dictions would remain. The very ideas of a “neutral” public sphere and a purified culture of communication reflect xenophobia. The problem with these socially and theoretically relevant worries, which


34 / McDaniel and Gronbeck one can observe in two contrasting types of analysis—Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault—is not that they are somehow wrong. Rather, the problem is that they are always right. Invoking the analytics of power (Foucault) or of a counterintuitive ideal speech situation (Habermas)—two sides of the same coin, we would argue—can aid in gauging systematic imperfections, asymmetries, and injustices embodied in any given case, but they typically do so at the price of underplaying the ways in which power produces resistances and nonideal situations evoke inventiveness. Civic judgment operates within social structures marked by uneven distributions of power or cultural capital—that much is clear. Citizens routinely violate norms of ideal speech situations that might make better worlds—that is clear as well. Yet, we suggest, these blemishes on ordinary democracy double as blessings: we can agree at once with Habermas as well as Foucault, arguing that ideals arise from practices imperfectly and that these imperfections may even serve as lures to further discussion, richer strategies, sharper ripostes, and more vivid exposure of social contradictions and antagonisms. As Foucault urges, power circulates and produces some unforeseen rhetorical opportunities. If Foucault underplays the normative requirements for a more just society, Habermas skimps on how strategic—and not necessarily or obviously “rational”—discursive action can work toward democratic ends. In any case, the uneven distribution of cultural capital makes the Habermasian discount unattractive just as it makes the Foucauldian analytics of power somehow redundant. How ordinary democracy depends on citizens inventively negotiating power asymmetries and developing norms in action becomes the more interesting question.

. . . AND BACK: PERFORMING ORDINARY DEMOCRACY Having traveled through a looking glass into the wonderland of strains of social-political thought that inform so much of contemporary work within media, cultural, and rhetorical studies especially, we should ask what remains invisible inside such visions of public participation in an actually existing, if always effervescent, civil society and multi-institutional order. Perhaps these repressed elements can be clarified by bringing alternative perspectives to bear on the norms of ordinary democratic culture and the rhetorical interactions that constitute it. We offer this volume not in order to discover or


Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate / 35 invent the ideal democratic citizen, sovereign and omnicompetent, nor to suggest techniques and ideals for remanufacturing the media apparatus, but rather to illuminate signs of the vernacular intelligence with which ordinary social-political actors perform democracy in their daily lives. For starters, we would suggest that four imperatives characterize ordinary democracy practiced within localist (sometimes just called vernacular) political communities: 1. The imperative of place. Localness should be understood both conceptually and materially as a marked or circumscribed place for political activity. Conceptually, the “Think Globally” bumper sticker, of course, is completed by a second kolon, “Act Locally.” An American citizen is an American citizen anywhere in the world; American democracy in general transcends place. But not ordinary democracy. Conceptually, “local” from the Latin locus is a concrete “here,” and that concreteness is materialized in the particular places within which local politics occurs. Iowa City politics does not happen in Boulder, despite the fact that their governmental institutions are parallel and both have residents inflected by the generally liberal ideology of university towns in America. Each municipality has a symbolic aura built out of its past and present. Barbiegate was an event very much driven and interpreted within the Boulder County, Colorado, environs of 2001. 2. The imperative of time. Yes, 2001. Ordinary democracy also is what rhetoricians these days call kairotic—marked by not only the hereness but also the nowness of a particular time-in-place. Kairos was a complicated concept out of especially the pre-Socratic philosophers, but for our purposes it implied that “the truth depended on a careful consideration of all factors surrounding an event, including factors such as time, opportunity, and circumstances.”26 While we need not wrangle over musings about “truth,” the idea that human controversies, the dissoi logoi of the preSocratics, occur within the thinking, worrying, and available generally accepted truths of a here-and-now is a marker of both traditional and poststructuralist rhetorical thought. 3. The imperative of performativity. To perform politically is to be engaged in a face-to-face encounter with an other, each proposing and/or attacking visions for a better (morally, pragmatically) tomorrow.Yet, as Judith Butler


36 / McDaniel and Gronbeck reminds us, speaking bodies in an important sense are inscribed by what they name.27 An important aspect of symbolizing processes in face-to-face dialogues/dialectics is the materiality of opponents, belly button to belly button, discursively reenacting duels to the death. Ordinary democracy thus has a physical presence and vitality simply unachievable when delegates to national or international parliaments puff and posture for radio, television, and QuickTime movies. 4. The imperative of the doxastic. And fourth, we need say more about generally received opinions, about doxa. While the doxastic, generally speaking, itemizes those pieces of conventional wisdom, prudential thinking, that mark a people and stand as valuative-conceptual—even when unstated— premises for public arguments, more specifically within the times and places of ordinary democracy they are radically localized. Within virtually any local community one can inventory histories of prudent and imprudent conduct, moments of pain and pleasure, heroes and villains, the turns of fate (e.g., natural disasters) and fortune (e.g., the highway or railroad that was or was not built) that impacted on community development and communal relationships. What Benjamin Gregg called “enlightened localist politics” permits “coherent interaction among diverse parts without requiring some all-embracing unity or universally valid norms” because coherence and comprehension are governed by a limited population working within the confines of a specific time-and-place.28 It is, ultimately, species of communal thought and values that must fill up the abstracted self of the citizen if he or she is going to have rhetorical efficacy in localist political environments. (A variety of such species will be seen in Barbiegate.) Circumscribed space, a particular break in the flow of time to allow for reflection and possibly the remanufacture of social and educational institutions, actors who embody and articulate the ideas they espouse, and pieces of thinking that are given their relevance and force by the degree to which they are embedded in local conditions—these four imperatives, at least, mark ordinary democratic process. They of course are not absent from societywide political engagements, at least most of the time—though they can be. Televised political controversy, on the one hand, can occur in the no-place we identify as a network studio, with journalists working seemingly without


Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate / 37 embodied commitments to anything; there is no sense of place and political persona, or so Joshua Meyrowitz argues, in televisual politics.29 Ordinary democracy, on the other hand, cannot occur without all four imperatives in view and in operation. It seems to us that efforts at grand theory no longer can afford to neglect or ignore the tenacious intrusions of the nonsovereign subject speaking to neighbors and the institutions of the village, town, and city. Indeed, perhaps the ascendant presumption of civic mediocrity dominant in current social thought goes too often unchallenged precisely because the desire for a “better,” “enlarged,” more representative democratic public culture seems so intrinsically appealing. Its favorite scapegoats—a monstrous media apparatus unleashed on an ever-fragmenting social body made up of damaged, increasingly disconnected, hence “incompetent” parts—serve to intensify this appeal. From the debates between Lippmann and Dewey in the early twentieth century to the characteristic disputes of today, many of which involve the work of critical theorist Habermas,30 the lofty dreams of civic participation have risen so high that we are encouraged to think of democracy in terms of a “mythic town square in the sky”—a utopia (literally, “no-place”) wherein citizens speak uniformly the language of Reason, or, if they can’t, the Cult of the Experts will speak it for them.31 But, if no-place is the site of politics, then perhaps no binding, mutually accounted-for relationships between the governed and their governors maintain civility. The notion of “ordinary democracy” commends rethinking such dreams as emergent not just from philosophical discourses but also from community-level controversies in which citizens openly voice their interests, participate in policy disputes as their own (as well as others’) representatives, invent and revise their identities, and motivate collective decision making. Such practices are shaped by an ideal and communicative forms that enact, appeal to, and subvert that very ideal in the process. This notion, which borders on the ultramundane and hence unsayable, obviously needs work. This volume reflects a process of friendship that in turn mirrors a certain condition of impossibility on which the very idea of democracy depends: a process and condition of familiarization, the premise of which is strangeness, unfamiliarity. Such paradoxes are commonplace in our everyday experiences of public life and in the enormous literature on democracy in


38 / McDaniel and Gronbeck America, the title of an 1835 book by a well-known stranger, France’s Alexis de Tocqueville, whose belonging to another land may have helped him to see the United States in ways the natives could not. When we engage Tocqueville “reading America,” we see it through other eyes and another wisdom.32 Perhaps such displacements or estrangements of the familiar self and society are far more routine than most of us may suspect. Jacques Derrida’s book, The Politics of Friendship, well captures the paradox in a wonderfully contradictory greeting: “O my friends, there is no friend.”33 A century and a half before Derrida, Ralph Waldo Emerson scored a similar point in favor of democracy’s stranger in his essay “Friendship”: “In strict sense, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness.”34 Whatever the theoretical divides between our time’s deconstruction and nineteenth-century transcendentalism as well as Poe’s and Benjamin’s descriptive phantasmagorias, Derrida and Emerson share a tendency to regard radical difference more as a source of delight than of despair. Ordinary democracy, like friendship, from their views, represents not the fusion of the Many into the One, the E pluribus unum that you carry around on nickels in your pocket, but the strategic negotiation of differences that more than occasionally bursts open from routine interaction among familiar citizens into the wonders and horrors of social and political estrangement. Yet, as Kenneth Burke puts it, when “different kinds of beings” try to communicate with one another, motives for “courtship” as well as conflict arise. Senses of mystery and mystification, wonder and horror, dwell in one and the same site: the social, which in turn lodges in discourse—the interaction between “different kinds of beings.”35 The core of civic friendship is not so much affection and amity; rather, a commitment to common rights and responsibilities holds a people together in spite of those things that separate them.

CIRCLING THE TOWN SQUARE Recalling our imaginary liberal looking glass, and drawing upon Robert Hariman,36 we might reconsider its communication norms or civic virtues in terms of performative pragmatics, or, to employ Hariman’s more elegant term, style, inquiring not in the first instance into whether these virtues reflect viable norms for the conduct of civic participation in an ordinary de-


Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate / 39 mocracy but rather about how they could be simulated in virtuoso social performance—and, in fact, how they already have been and are every day. Toggling from virtue to virtuosity, from political ends to performative action, from the figure of the citizen to that of the social actor, we believe this way of reframing the overall question of civic participation opens it more invitingly to rhetorical and discourse analysis. For example rather than asking as a primary question whether “rising above the battle” is a good thing to do or if it’s even possible at all, the foundational question to the rhetorician as we see it concerns how to do it—that is, convincingly to perform for others, wherein “rising above the battle” is understood as a particular rhetorical topos or even genre of politics. Likewise, rather than plumbing the depths of the concept of “selfabstraction” as characteristic of citizen, the rhetorician’s hermeneutical task involves surveying the surface features in search of discernible discursive patterns that reveal what citizenship looks like when done well by actual actors performing in actual situations. Whatever “taking the perspective of the other” might mean in any given case, the rhetorical analyst of political discourse explores the conventional methods by which social actors impress upon one another the notion that they have actually taken audients’ viewpoints. Furthermore, upon empirical examinations of communicative performance within an actually existing ordinary democracy, these privileged norms of rhetorical conduct may turn out to be among the least important or the most absent. Only by working through the details of public texts, performances, and activities carried out in particular political spaces can we begin to develop strong interpretations of what is actually present, what is absent, and what yet may need recovering or inventing. By selecting Barbiegate for a site of analytic and political reflection, we of course have displaced all other possible sites—for example, Watergate. The choice represents an attitude concerning the relative importance and theoretical richness of these public controversies: the Barbiegate materials allow for sustained reflections on how citizens perform ordinary democracy, whereas the Watergate materials would have tended us toward reflections on the construction of the political spectacle on a larger scale. Our point is not that Watergate was unimportant or uninteresting—quite the contrary (see Gronbeck’s use of it in the essay that follows)—nor is it that analyses


40 / McDaniel and Gronbeck of large-scale political performances and embarrassments should somehow be forsaken. Neither are we suggesting that localist politics has no spectacle; quite the contrary, Barbiegate was telecast through the local access outlet of Boulder County. Rather, it is that scholarly studies of ordinary citizens, strategically engaging in community concerns at the grassroots, may offer an important counterpoint, and even extension, to how we understand politics in the large. We can continue to take interest in how the discourses of official political culture shape perception and action, participation and decision. We also can continue to enjoy the insights of Cultural Studies and media critique into the uneven distribution of chances and the distorted representations of the social. Yet, the underlying hope of ordinary democracy and of rhetoric-inaction involves increasing the quantity and quality of public discourse. As even such apparently opposed figures as Derrida and Habermas can agree, perhaps one way to begin working toward these goals is to take social interactions in the mundane forums of local sites of struggle more seriously. In moving through the looking glass, we should better understand ourselves.

NOTES 1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken, 1968), 255. 2. Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence (New York: Academic Press, 1971), 11. 3. Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures (London: Zed Books, 1998), 25. 4. Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-Modernism, 71. 5. Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 3. 6. Cristina Alsina, Philip John Davies, and Bruce E. Gronbeck, “Preference Poll Stories in the Last 2 Weeks of Campaign 2000,” American Behavioral Scientist 44 (August 2001): 2288–305. 7. Benjamin Gregg, Coping in Politics with Indeterminate Norms: A Theory of Enlightened Localism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 165. 8. John Durham Peters, “Publicity and Pain: Self-Abstraction in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Public Culture 7 (1995): 657. 9. Peters, “Publicity and Pain,” 657.


Democratic Theory, Rhetoric, and Barbiegate / 41 10. Ibid., 658. 11. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 146. 12. The most detailed book on the topic of vernacular voices probably is Gerard Hauser, Vernacular Voices:The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999). 13. Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, ed. Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, 81–123 (1965; repr., Boston: Beacon Paperbacks, 1969). 14. An important circumstance of the night of speeches about Barbiegate during the open-mike portion of the school board meeting was that the president of the board was absent, meaning that the vice president—a Hispanic with a history of concerns over racism and diversity—could claim the position as last speaker that evening. His voice provided quite a different institutional inflection than had the board president’s sentiments in the previous meeting (see Gronbeck’s essay in this volume). 15. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume II (Unfinished), The Intelligibility of History, ed. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, trans. Quintin Hoare (1985; trans. New York: Verso, 1991). Briefly, Sartre saw “dialectical intelligibility” as depending upon the historical fusion of three factors: totalization, particularization, and contradiction. A central conceptual difficulty in social liberation and empowerment for Sartre lay in the requirement that centralized structural fusions must be resisted or broken even as fusion remains the central engine of collectivization. It is in managing those seemingly contrary social-political forces that historical intelligibility— and political praxis—must lie. 16. Sartre, Book III (“The Intelligibility of History”), Sec. 1 (“Is Struggle Intelligible?”), Sub. Sec. 1 (“Conflict, Moment of a Totalization or Irreducible Rift?”), 3–16. 17. In Roderick Hart’s analysis, viewing televised politics is an act that explicitly vitiates political participation. See his Seducing America: How Television Charms the ModernVoter (1st ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1994; rev. ed., Sage Publications, 1999). 18. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927). 19. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 20–21. 20. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael B. Naas, intro. Michael B. Naas (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), 87. 21. Dewey, The Public, 151. 22. For example, see all of the chapters in Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public


42 / McDaniel and Gronbeck Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), particularly the introduction (vii–xxvii) and Nancy Fraser’s crucial essay, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actual, Existing Democracy” (1–32). 23. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man in the Crowd,” 2004, available at http://poe. thefreelibrary.com/Man-of-the-Crowd. 24. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, 171, 175. 25. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). The central problematic of the human condition for Arendt is, of course, to justify the human right to have rights, or, in a similar formulation, the authority of “we” to constitute that “we.” 26. James A. Herrick, The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001), 36. 27. Judith P. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 28. Gregg, Coping in Politics, 168. 29. Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place:The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 30. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 31. The phrase “mythic town square in the sky” is attributed to Stanley Aronowitz by Bruce Robbins in his “Introduction: The Public as Phantom,” viii. 32. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1945; repr., New York: Knopf, 1989). 33. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 281. The sentence is actually attributed to Aristotle, though it is Derrida who devotes three hundred pages to understanding it. 34. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Friendship,” from Essays: First Series (originally published 1841), 2004, available at http://www.rwe.org/comm/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=129&Itemid=161. 35. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 115. 36. Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).


ii The Barbiegate Discourse



3 Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse A Dilemma-Centered Rhetorical Analysis Herbert W. Simons

Heading north from Denver on a suburban highway offering splendid views of the Rockies to the west, one soon comes upon Boulder, Colorado, and the nearby communities that together constitute the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD). Home to the University of Colorado’s flagship campus, Boulder is in many ways an idyllic city—affluent, cosmopolitan, blessed by climate and geography, a center for learning and research. A ring of open space surrounds the city and a creek bringing water from the mountains runs through it into the city center. Leading out from Boulder toward the Rockies are bikeways and hiking trails, along which the habituated local traveler moves easily through the thin mountain air while the visitor huffs and puffs.1 Proximity to the Rockies has brought tourism to Boulder, which, together with high tech start-ups and other university-related sources of purchasing power, insures an ample supply of good eateries, watering holes, and cultural amenities. The fast-growing suburban enclaves that border the city partake of its benefits, and they, like Boulder, are generous in support of their public institutions. Not incidentally, Boulder is a liberal mecca combining classical and progressive liberalism. The latter has lost favor in much of the United States but is nevertheless a source of civic pride. Colorado, like the rest of America, is classically liberal in the sense of being committed to such well-established liberal values as democratic decision making, good government, the rule of law, public education, respect for the individual, freedom of speech and of


46 / Simons the press, and a modicum of compassion for the less fortunate.2 These accoutrements of a centuries-old ideological tradition in Western Europe and America are so well entrenched as to be honored even by social and political conservatives.3 They are among the values of our Founding Fathers and of the British parliamentary tradition, from John Locke through Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and they have found their way into the workings of local communities and local institutions. But, as mentioned, Boulder is also progressively liberal,4 and thus is seen in some parts of Colorado as “ultraliberal” and even as “crazy” liberal. People of a progressively liberal bent migrate to the Boulder area, and they in turn help sustain its liberal ethos. As characterized by more conservative Coloradoans, Boulder sends “tax-and-spend” liberals to Congress and to the state legislature. Its morality, if it can be called that, is retrogressive, a throwback to the freewheeling, overly permissive values of the 1960s. Its Open Space regulations are hypocritical, defended in the name of environmental preservation, but providing a bonanza to homeowners in the form of skyrocketing real estate prices. In fact, Boulderites tolerate, and indeed celebrate, lifestyle diversity to a far greater degree than in such conservative enclaves as Colorado Springs.5 They place a far higher premium on social and economic equality, as illustrated by the emphasis placed at the February 27, 2001, BVSD meeting on closing the educational achievement gap. And, as was also manifested at the February 27 meeting, they are especially sensitive to issues of race. Into this progressively liberal environment came news that a committee of teachers at BSVD’s Mesa Elementary School, overseeing a science fair, had first permitted but then pulled a third grader’s “Barbie” experiment, one that reportedly provided scientific evidence of a preference by fifth graders for a white Barbie over a black Barbie, whatever the color of the Barbie’s dress. They did so, moreover, in the name of sensitivity to Mesa Elementary’s minority children, albeit at the risk of appearing insensitive to the girl who did the study and of seeming all too eager to cover over what may have been the fifth graders’ learned prejudices. The decision also called into question their commitment to other liberal values, including freedoms of speech and scientific inquiry. Thus l’affaire Barbiegate, including news of the experiment and of its removal from the science fair, exposed fissures in the community’s liberal ideology, made all the more embarrassing by the attention Barbiegate received well beyond the BVSD’s boundaries. You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse / 47 The Barbiegate saga is of interest to rhetoricians like myself for many of the same reasons that it garnered press attention nationwide. Here on a human scale was high comedy of great forensic complexity—a comedy in Kenneth Burke’s sense of the term6—featuring well-meaning citizens at loggerheads over what it meant to “do the right thing.” At one level, the drama was geographically confined, but other communities could identify with Barbiegate because, in a broader sense, its problems were their own. And indeed, the Barbiegaters seemed caught up in conflicts that were not entirely of their own making. The questions of justice and policy that circulated through the proceedings and press commentaries were given a distinctive cast by affluent Boulder’s distinctive mix of classical and progressive liberalism. Barbiegate was also symptomatic of larger conflicts between liberals and conservatives, and within liberalism since the early successes of the civil rights movement.7 Race figured prominently in Barbiegate discourse, and in much else that was raised at the February 27 school board meeting. Even as they differed over Barbiegate, those who addressed its racial implications bespoke commitments to one or another variant of liberal ideology. Ideologies are widely shared systems of belief that arise out of peoples’ needs to make sense of the world. They are the glue that binds ideas together, including ideas as seemingly disparate as capital punishment and the right to life, freedom of speech and freedom to have anal sex, and love thine enemy and fight a just war. In this sense, they are strategically adapted to our need for a unifying “common sense.” But because ideologies must square so many circles, serve so many masters, and be adapted to so many situations, they require a degree of flexibility—of meaning, of purpose, of logic—that may strain credulity and even appear contradictory. Thus the same ideology that draws us together may also divide us from one another and even from ourselves—hence the need to address these problems rhetorically.

A DILEMMA- CENTERED ANALYSIS OF BARBIEGATE RHETORIC In this essay I offer an analysis of Barbiegate discourse, taken as a whole. I also venture separate rhetorical assessments of textual fragments by some of Barbiegate’s principal actors: among them the complainant, David Thielen, the “defendants” and their supporters, and various school board members, including board vice president Bill de la Cruz. You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

48 / Simons I do so with a view toward gleaning larger lessons from Barbiegate, as it underscores the distinctive, local, situated character of the discourse itself. Likewise I bring a theoretical and historical framework to bear upon the textual fragments being examined, rather than treating them atomistically, or at a purely local level, as some discourse analysts are wont to do. As in much of my work, the approach that I take here to rhetorical analysis is dilemma-centered.8 I look for evidence of rhetorical dilemmas in the discourse being examined and in the larger currents of ideological opinion that swirl through Boulder and beyond. I look too for more mundane tensions. The “Barbiegaters” are enacting roles, representing agencies and institutions, speaking for constituencies, and, in so doing, confronting the usual run of rhetorical problems for people in their positions: How to appeal to multiple and diverse audiences, balance ethics against expediency, and weigh the long term against the short? How to contest while appearing cooperative, preserve one’s options while appearing wedded to principle, wield power while appearing to cede it to others, and serve one’s individual or group interests while also (perhaps) seeking to promote the greater good? Finding evidence of rhetorical dilemmas in the tape and transcripts made available to this volume’s contributors was not difficult. On opposing sides of various divides, the leading Barbiegaters trafficked in ambiguities, hid behind platitudes, dodged ultrasensitive issues, smoothed over other tough issues that could not be ignored, and came dangerously close in some cases to contradicting themselves. But these apparent defects of character or logic can be understood and perhaps even admired given the rhetorical predicaments the Barbiegaters confronted. One value of dilemma-centered analysis is that it renders explicable talk that might otherwise seem anomalous or immoral. Recurrent patterns of such talk also provide indicators of larger societal problems. And, as was repeatedly illustrated in Michael Billig et al.’s Ideological Dilemmas, talk of this kind is rhetorically interesting from artistic and theoretical perspectives.9 Skilled practitioners of the art often find ways to extricate themselves from dilemmas or to practice effective damage control. But even the best practitioners may compound their rhetorical problems in their efforts to manage them.10 Dilemma-centered analysis also reveals limitations in prescribed forms of talk. I find evidence of that in the inability of the school officials to mount their strongest case. Much that I have to offer in this essay in the way of conclusions from the


Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse / 49 evidence will be impressionistic. This is due in part to questions left unanswerable in the record made available to this book’s contributors. How, for example, did the Barbiegate story get press attention, and why did it take two weeks for it to break in the press? Besides ACLU representatives, who else within the community did Thielen talk to, and with what effect? What behind-the-scenes conversations took place between Thielen and BVSD officials in the period between the pulling of his daughter’s science project and the first BVSD meeting (February 13, 2001) at which he registered his complaint? Who were the various school and BVSD officials, what did they say to one another, and who carried the most weight? What strategies, if any, did they develop for responding to press reports? How did the story play on local radio and TV, or in the University of Colorado’s widely read daily newspaper? When did it become national and even international news, and how were those accounts read by the Boulder Valley community?11 I had related questions. Because Barbiegate took place in Boulder proper, did that lead residents of BVSD who lived outside the hub city to distance themselves from it—as a Boulder problem but not a Boulder Valley problem? Did Boulder liberalism produce tinges of liberal guilt over the way its fifth graders had voted? Was this a sign that Boulder’s children lacked the liberal zeal of their parents, and might even go over to the other side? Had anyone talked with the children who participated in the experiment or who learned about it secondhand? Then, too, one could raise legitimate questions about the competence and freedom from bias of this message analyst. Despite these limitations, I remain reasonably confident about the epistemological stance taken in the paper and about the impressions here recorded. Early on, in preparation for this essay, I decided against posing as a disinterested spectator while at the same time not claiming to bracket issues of truth or falsity, wisdom or folly—for example, by adopting the stance of the methodological or programmatic relativist.12 Neither stance seemed appropriate for a crisis of this sort, one that cried out for truth-claims that could not, however, be vouchsafed by appeal to some foundational court of last resort. I would be operating then in the contingent realm of judgment rather than certainty, required to own up to my own liberalism, while also making clear that I was not blinded to its problems. Would I also be obliged therefore to acknowledge that my own relativism


50 / Simons rendered me incapable of choosing between competing logics—those, for example, of Thielen and of the teachers who decided to remove his daughter’s science fair project? I don’t believe so. A choice is not always necessary, and even when one is called for, the choice can be defended on nonfoundationalist, contingent grounds, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith has argued.13 In his introduction to Ideological Dilemmas, Billig and his colleagues make precisely this point as regards the conventional wisdom of a dominant cultural ideology like classical liberalism. True, he says, it will contain a logoi and a dissoi logoi, as reflected in seemingly contradictory aphorisms. Do many hands make light work? They do, in some circumstances. But it may also be the case on occasion that too many cooks spoil the broth. To the person who is excessively cautious, it may be appropriate to say, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” To the excessively venturesome, a word of caution may be called for: “Look before you leap.” Smith and Billig make clear that one can argue relativistically and yet persuasively. What, then, will we be able to say about the reliability of this visitor’s Barbiegate analysis? Will the story I tell account for the discourse of Barbiegate, capture its essence, resolve its mysteries, vindicate my theoretical framework? Or will this (inadvertently? ultimately?) be a story of my liberalism, my affluence, my liberal guilt, my misimpressions of Boulder culture, my chutzpah in presuming to know what caused what, my rhetorical problems in attempting both to appear credible as a message analyst and at the same time both opinionated and modestly self-effacing? I may be the last to know.

PROPOSITIONAL CLAIMS The following observations and judgments about Barbiegate discourse are arrayed as numbered propositions.

Proposition I. Boulder (and Boulder Valley more generally) was embroiled in paradox by virtue of its mix of affluence and progressive liberalism. Boulder’s affluence made its progressive brand of liberalism affordable, and this is no small thing. But this also had the effect of keeping “Denver-like” problems like poverty and race conflict from Boulder’s doors, thus renYou are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse / 51 dering it vulnerable to charges that it was really a haven for white privilege, giving mere lip service to its concerns for the poor and the oppressed. A March 1, 2001, editorial in the Daily Camera took aim at Boulder liberalism. “Here in Boulder, this ocean of mostly white faces, we may use all of the politically correct labels . . . and we may yearn to be accepted as the tolerant, supportive people we believe we are, but we are not immune from the taint of prejudice.” The editorial goes on to provide a telling example. Based on self-acknowledged prejudicial “profiling” by a resident of an upscale Boulder neighborhood, Boulder police accosted two young Latinos, both innocent of an alleged robbery, and manhandled them before questioning them. Says the editorialist, “We live (by choice) in an environment where we seldom have to live our words. It’s easy ‘armchair’ philosophizing.”14 A mix of affluence and progressive liberalism also raises the bar for communities like Boulder, preventing them from ever appearing “good enough.” There are always larger problems to be solved (e.g., famine in Africa, mistreatment of animals) requiring larger expenditures of public resources. And conservatives are right when they express skepticism about how much government can do. Thus, affluent progressive liberalism is an easy target for criticism, even from those it seeks most to help. I believe Mesa PTA president Jordana Ash when she says that Mesa Elementary is “an incredible school, an award-winning school.”15 And I believe board members Teresa Steele and Jean Bonelli when they express particular concern for the needs of underperforming minority children. But that still leaves Boulder liberals vulnerable to verbal darts from those whose praise it most ardently seeks. Boulder may or may not have “a history of hating black folks,” as Million Man March representative Alvertis Simmons alleged at the February 27 school board meeting,16 but it would not be surprising if many black folks in cities like Denver hated Boulder, despite its good works and even better intentions.

Proposition II. L’affaire Barbiegate posed a series of rhetorical dilemmas, made especially vexing because the Boulder community is liberal, wellmeaning, and also vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy on the very sorts of issues it was forced to confront. Consider first the questions of whether and when one should conceal or reveal one’s prejudices. The adult white subjects in the Barbiegate experiment You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

52 / Simons seemed to be savvy enough to express a preference for the lavender dress, not the Barbie with a skin color similar to their own. Arguably, this is a good thing. Direct expressions of racist feelings and beliefs have become anathema in America, but owning up to prejudice can also be regarded as a good thing. The woman who mistakenly implicated the two Latinos in a robbery was congratulated for admitting to unconscious prejudices. Who among us, after all, is not prejudiced? But suppose that the adult white Barbie subjects had responded as the fifth graders had done? Board member Janusz Okolowicz speculated that they may have “lied.”17 True enough! But their honesty, normally considered a virtue, would not in this case have been rewarded.What’s the difference? Consider next the dilemmas confronting David Thielen. Should he have played the outraged St. George, eager to slay the dragon of racism? If so, whose racism? The fifth graders’? That would have alienated his adult audiences. And besides, he probably was sincere when he theorized on February 13 that the result of the experiment was “not necessarily a racist one.”18 Still, why on February 27 did Thielen bring up the Clark study of preferences by white children for white over black dolls, if not to suggest that these fifth graders had already acquired the seeds of prejudice? And why did he buttress this point with evidence that children start making distinctions about race at age three? How, then, should Thielen have framed his complaint? As an indictment of the kids’ parents, of Mesa school officials, of school board members? And for what? For having made the subject of current race problems taboo? For failure to prevent the seeds of prejudice from growing? For failure to seize upon a “teachable moment” with a full airing of the issues raised by his daughter’s research findings? Thielen himself seemed unclear about the import of those findings in his initial presentation to the board: “Um and i— it’s not a terribly surprising result, and in my view not a terrib—not necessarily a racist one either.”19 And perhaps he also feared that interpreting the findings as evidence of racist attitudes could add fuel to the argument that the experiment itself created racial animosities—in violation of BVSD antidiscrimination policy: “Um, the experiment was not derogatory, it was not racially discriminatory—it’s right there—did not create racial animosity. And its conclusion was incredibly innocuous.”20 Consider also the dilemmas confronting the school officials. Their pro-


Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse / 53 fessional judgments were at stake in what shaped up as a “sensitivity” contest with no clear rules. Janusz Okolowicz put the matter well when he said that “in Boulder Valley, sensitivity is the only commandment, that is a commandment, thou shall be sensitive to replace all the other commandments. But sensitivity does—doesn’t have a standard, it is in the eye of the beholder. Therefore, all kinds of fine, upstanding people, and we hear all of them around, feel incensed—try to show that they are also sensitive to something else. And, we have the real orgy of sensitivity.”21 Okolowicz comes down eventually on the side of “the little girl”22 who did the science experiment and on science itself, but not before he had indicated that there was a “logoi” and a “dissoi logoi” in the matter of the Barbiegate experiment, and that issues of racial sensitivity intersected with others, such as freedom of speech. L’affaire Barbiegate also prompted discussion of other issues of race and ethnicity. Were Boulderites who “profiled” guilty of racism? Had the BVSD done enough in its efforts to close the school achievement gap? Could school choice be reconciled with classical liberalism’s standard of equality of opportunity? Should BVSD set itself the more demanding goal of equality of results? Did its multiculturalism curriculum paper over race and ethnicity problems that needed to be confronted directly?

Proposition III. The race controversies that Boulderites confronted were not entirely of their own making. They were reflective of broader divisions of opinion within liberalism over the past fifty years. Of special interest were questions of meaning. Liberalism has never been just a political philosophy or program of action. It has also been a hermeneutic with none-too-clear rules of interpretation. On matters of race, what did it mean to be liberal? Too liberal? Not liberal enough? And what did it mean to be racist?23 Consider the following: a. Liberals entered the civil rights movement, as Martin Luther King Jr. did, with a clear-cut commitment to a color-blind society that would guarantee equality of opportunity. On balance, the civil rights movement was extremely successful. But as discrimination persisted and as massive government efforts to overcome the effects of past discrimination produced disappointing outcomes, liberals began to seek race-conscious remedies


54 / Simons the test of which would be equality of results. Thus liberal universities like my own that initially declared themselves to be “Equal Opportunity” employers now announced, much more ambiguously, that they were “Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action” employers. b. The civil rights movement fragmented in the mid-1960s, its steadfast commitments to nonviolence and racial integration giving way to calls for black nationalism and black power “by any means necessary.” Besides fueling a conservative backlash that is still with us today, the movement’s increasing militancy placed greater strains on liberalism’s self-definition. Did rejection of black nationalism and of black power mean that liberals had sold out? Did endorsement of black nationalism and of black power mean that they had abandoned their earlier commitments to racial integration and nonviolence? And what of the increasing lawlessness during the mid- to late 1960s? At what point, for example, did liberals need to stop explaining the ghetto riots as manifestations of white racism and begin blaming the rioters for their transgressions? c. Also increasingly uncertain were questions of who and what was racist. The frustrations experienced by the civil rights movement in the mid- to late 1960s convinced many liberals that racism was far more pervasive than had previously been thought and required expanded definitions and better radar detection. Government had not done enough to overcome institutional racism, covert racism, the naturalized racism of white privilege. But liberals became ensnared by their own rhetoric. The 1970s were marked by increased sensitivity to language and to signs of racism in nonverbal behavior. Hence the need, it was assumed, for diversity workshops at which unconscious racists, white liberals included, could learn to appreciate Otherness. This had something of the quality of a double bind in that to protest against being labeled as racist could be construed as further proof of one’s racism. d. The culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s exacerbated fears that what began as an effort to heighten sensitivities wound up stifling thought. With greater awareness of how prejudices were formed had come increased scrutiny of what was taught in the schools as well as “liberatory” efforts at rectification. Similar efforts were directed toward reforming the mass media and popular culture. Not incidentally, liberals pressed


Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse / 55 the Mattel Corporation to add black Barbies to its collection of curvaceous Caucasians. But liberals divided over what came to be called “political correctness,” the alleged substitution of dogma for critical inquiry. Typifying the larger conflict was the debate over the literary canon. Liberals responded enthusiastically to calls for an expansion of the literary canon, but many had difficulty with blanket repudiations of the old canon as the work of “dead white males.” Similarly, they endorsed multiculturalism but not necessarily at the price of repudiating Western culture’s (Eurocentric?) commitments to universal human rights. e. Liberals were at a loss to explain the persistence through the 1990s of race-related problems that had resisted their best efforts at ameliorating them. Some problems were largely confined to the inner city, but others knew no boundaries: the persistence, for example, of academic achievement gaps across socioeconomic classes and age levels, even in school districts like Boulder Valley’s that had worked hard to remove them. Some explanations were unthinkable to liberals: genetic inferiority, for one. Others were undiscussable: for example, the 1972 Moynihan Report on dysfunctional features of black inner city culture. That report was essentially shelved for many years with the blessing of liberals. And liberals were torn between employing victimage explanations and urging poor blacks not to think of themselves as victims, lest this become a selffulfilling prophecy. Meanwhile, conservatives were having little difficulty coming up with explanations. Too much government. It had stifled creativity, encouraged infantile dependence, become part of the problem. Too little choice, self-initiative, reliance on the wisdom of the free marketplace. This is not to say that conservative ideology was seamlessly coherent. Fiscal conservatives warred at times with social conservatives or maintained uneasy coalitions with them. Both groups vacillated between calls for judicial activism and judicial restraint on civil rights issues. Neither lived up to their expressions of compassion for the poor. The comfort religious conservatives took from consulting the Good Book became discomfiting when the Book seemed ambiguous or inconsistent. Fiscal conservatives who preached “free market economics” also used government to secure their own ends. Even as they lobbied for more and more favor-


56 / Simons able tax policies, agribusiness subsidies, and other such forms of corporate welfare, they railed at victims of those policies for an inability to compete. And not infrequently they had their hands in the till. But these problems were difficult for many Americans to comprehend. White collar crime may have had greater adverse consequences for average Americans than street crimes and welfare fraud, but Americans of nearly all income levels increasingly identified themselves with conservative versions of the American dream, which often included the pursuit of economic happiness at the expense of the already disadvantaged. f. At century’s end, liberals were in rhetorical disarray. Bill Clinton had succeeded to the presidency (the first Democrat in a little over a decade) by presenting himself as a centrist. He called for a “Dialogue on Race,” but had little to say himself in the way of proposals for new legislation specifically aimed at redressing problems of past and continuing discrimination. Rather, he essentially capitulated on conservative initiatives for welfare reform and longer prison terms for repeat offenders. His biggest accomplishment, from a liberal standpoint, was to stave off a conservative takeover of the Congress. Meanwhile, conservative think tanks were churning out new initiatives on race, many of them having to do with education. By February 2001, the time of Barbiegate, a conservative was back in the saddle, and liberals, despite all that they had done over a fifty-year period to rectify wrongs done to blacks, were now left licking their wounds.

Proposition IV. The Barbiegaters were, for the most, rhetorically astute, their apparent “defects of character or logic” providing evidence from a dilemma-centered perspective of competence at persuasion. 1. The Complainant. Recall my earlier analysis of the dilemmas confronting David Thielen. Both within the local Boulder Valley arena and in the larger context of race and liberalism in America these past fifty years, Thielen’s wafflings over whether to come forward, what was at issue, and what needed to be done were understandable. Looked at another way, these apparent inconsistencies mirrored those of the community and thus could be appreciated as signs of a common humanity. In other ways Thielen projected exceptional qualities that, in combination with that common humanity, marked


Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse / 57 him as an ideal type persuader, a “super-representative” of those he was trying to influence. Thielen also came across as a concerned parent and a reluctant warrior, with passion sufficient to ignite a firestorm of controversy and wisdom enough to help put out the fire before it burned out of control. His second speech at the February 27 board meeting cleverly expressed two kinds of appreciation, the first to be taken at face value, the second ironically. The first list of thanks was a long and inclusive one, beginning with gratitude for what his daughter had done and ending with “a huge thanks to MEAC.”24 The second list seemed initially to be an appendage to the first but had a Burkeian twist: with appreciation for those in the school system whose errors of judgment in support of yanking the science project had led a lot of people to realize a lot of valuable things. Presented in this light, the school officials were not vicious but simply mistaken, a very human failing, and not to be condemned for that. Little wonder that Thielen got a favorable press, his issue agenda becoming theirs substantially, his arguments shaping their editorial content.25 The peroration to Thielen’s second February 27 speech is stunningly eloquent. Admittedly, he says, race is difficult to talk about but it remains a huge issue that must be addressed, and not merely as a prepackaged lesson in the sterile confines of the classroom. The discussion should also not be confined to the bad things bad people did in the past; it must be extended to the much more dangerous—that is, “sensitive”—territory of the “here and now . . . as it comes up.”26 This is the hard fight we have to make. Studies have shown that children start disc—making distinctions about race at age three. And if we make the subject taboo, it means they make the decisions without our guidance. We talk to our children about drugs, we talk to them about sex. We should be talking to them about race. Our society has been stuck on the issue of race for the last thirty years, since 1970. And perhaps our children can show us the way out.27 2. The Defendants and Their Supporters. Cicero taught us that what is eloquent is not necessarily wise. There are holes in Thielen’s argument, but his powerfully stated appeals for free and open, “here-and-now” discussion were dif-


58 / Simons ficult to resist. Who could possibly object to waging the hard fight against racism, providing guidance to children before ugly stereotypes took form in their heads, being as candid about race as we are about sex and drugs? This is not to say that pulling the Barbie experiment was wise. It was not. If the object was to contain the genie of race—to bottle up school discussions of race issues as well as public discussions of race pedagogies—then the decision to remove the Barbie project was clearly counterproductive. Moreover, those who supported removal of the science project quickly became “The Defense” in the sensitivity contest. On balance, the defense was rhetorically adept at handling its difficult rhetorical situation. Rhetorical critics seldom applaud banalities, but with the cards stacked against the defense, it was helpful to say what in other contexts would not have needed saying: for example, that “parents want the best for their children, and so do the teachers at Mesa.”28 Some critics of the science fair project wisely paired their criticism with evidence of their progressively liberal, antiracist bona fides. “Encourage our children to open their minds,” pleaded the Daily Camera’s features editor, Maria Cote: “Ask them to read the paper every day to understand that injustice exists everywhere, that prejudice burns ugly and deep in all parts of the country—not just in the South, not just in the past, but in every city and town, today.”29 Her argument took the form of the classic “yes-but” for such situations. Yes, there is racial inequality in Boulder County, as there is in the rest of the United States. And yes, racism and race relations are too often ignored. It’s true, adds Cote, that these subjects should not be taboo in classrooms. “But a third-grade classmate should not be delivering such lessons.”30 At issue fundamentally for the defense were questions about what “belonged” where. The Barbie project was not “appropriate” for the science fair, said Clare Schoolmaster. It “belonged” in the classroom where it could be discussed.31 She had a point, to which I shall return. This, however, is tricky rhetorical ground in discourse directed toward adults. Words like “belongs” and “appropriate” play well in the elementary school classroom. They are teacherly words, often implying the authority of professional judgment. But left undefended, or inadequately defended, they appear more authoritarian than authoritative. On what everyone agreed was the “difficult” topic of race, much that was said by the defense seemed inadequate to the task of explaining why the Barbie project didn’t belong in the science fair. But that


Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse / 59 should not surprise us, for, just as it is difficult to teach race issues to little kids, so it is difficult to defend one’s race pedagogies to adults. Clare Schoolmaster provided the most elaborate defense of the decision to pull the project but it relied heavily on speculative professional judgment. The fateful decision came after attempts to work out alternatives with the parents had failed, she said. Letting the project stand on its own was risky. It could have had the reverse effect from what was intended. The media might have had a field day with the decision as well. Speaking on behalf of the staff on February 27, Schoolmaster emphasized that Mesa does not fear the topic of prejudice or intolerance. “As professionals, we made the decision in the best interest for all our students, staying true to teaching practices that are best for students’ developmental readiness, their capacity for understanding, and their ability to transfer their learning into usefulness for their lives.” This sort of claims-making leaves the essential weaknesses in Thielen’s case still unexposed. Suppose, however, that someone as knowledgeable about race pedagogy as Schoolmaster could have gone toe to toe with David Thielen, in a forum where neither side enjoyed the presumption of moral superiority or suffered the presumption of error. What might such a school master have been able to say to him? I think she might have begun with a word that they both used liberally, the word “discussion.” What did Thielen mean by discussion? Discussion how? Discussion for what? Did Thielen have in mind a guided discussion, something on the order of what Billig and his colleagues call “cued elicitation,” in which the teacher prompts the student to deliver the correct response?32 If so, how guided would Thielen have been willing to make the discussion? Would he as teacher have gone so far as to coerce a politically correct outcome? But if so, how open would that discussion be? And if, by contrast, Thielen would have insisted on a fully open discussion, what objections could he possibly register if, say, the prejudiced white students not only gave voice to their stereotypes but also sought to justify them, and did so convincingly to the other students? “No,” our imagined school master might have said, a free and open discussion isn’t the answer either. And a discussion outcome that reinforced race prejudice wouldn’t sit well with Boulderites or with the larger society. So we both must fall back on some such notion as “appropriateness.” Our imagined school master might now take another tack. Clearly Mr. Thielen would not want little children to believe that all was well in


60 / Simons American race relations. If so, how far would he be willing to go in the opposite direction? Malcolm X far? Black Panthers far? Afrocentrism far? And if, in fact, he was prepared to turn those cherubic little children into the fiercest of militants, was he not aware that this sort of persuasion would be seen as unprofessional propagandizing, even in liberal Boulder, and certainly in more conservative quarters? So, again, some sense of “appropriateness” is in order. The elementary school teacher is rhetorically required to steer a middle course between saying that things are just right in the race department and saying that they are awful. Consider next the relative merits of poster displays versus give-and-take discussions of controversial matters. Wouldn’t Thielen himself prefer the latter in communications on controversial issues with fellow physicists? And if such discussion is preferable to poster displays among physicists, how much more vital is it that little children get a chance to talk things over in their classes, especially when, as Thielen seemed to acknowledge, the findings from the Barbie experiment can variously be interpreted as “innocuous” indicators of familiarity or as evidence of race prejudice? This Socratic dialogue that never happened but perhaps should have happened could have done a lot to deflate the balloon of free, open, hereand-now discussion. It could have made more understandable why schools teaching race issues routinely begin (and sometimes end) with stories about unequivocal heroes and villains, good and evil, and why on such matters they place a heavy emphasis on affective learning, postponing talk of scientific research findings for later. 3. The School Board Members. But the February 27 school board meeting was not set up for such a dialogue; they seldom are. Nor did it aim at negotiations leading to the precise wording of an official resolution; that would have required an executive session. This was an open meeting before an audience at which resolutions of some sort could have been introduced but weren’t. What then was the February 27 board meeting designed to accomplish, and what rhetorical requirements did its structure and its functions impose upon its board members? Michael Halloran lists the open school board meeting as a species of public proceeding, the genus including such other varieties as a courtroom trial, a legislative debate before an audience on a proposed piece of legislation, and


Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse / 61 the televised deliberations of a national political convention.33 Halloran’s shoe fits well enough as to suggest two primary rhetorical requirements for the February 27 school board meeting. The first of these involves provision of a forum for the airing of differences and subsequent decision making. Although no action was taken or proposed at the February 27 meeting, it had elements of a trial and elements of a legislative deliberation. Those present heard testimony for and against the science fair project, the decision to remove it, the media’s coverage of Barbiegate, and possible remedial steps that the board or BVSD administrators could take to prevent future Barbiegates. Exactly what purpose (or purposes) was to be served by this testimony remained somewhat unclear. Arguably, its goal was to prepare the way for subsequent decision making on policies, regulations, and guidelines. Several board members joined Janusz Okolowicz in commenting on the adequacy of BVSD antidiscrimination and science fair rules.Yet playing up policies and regulations and guidelines may also have been a way of playing down issues of personal responsibility in the Barbiegate case.Without anyone articulating it as such, I believe the Barbiegate case also became “a teachable moment” for Boulder Valley’s adult community, prompting consideration of what it stood for on matters of race, freedom of speech, and the like, and how it thought its value priorities could best be passed on to the next generation. The second rhetorical requirement for the public proceeding as a whole is described by Halloran in fictive and theatrical terms. It consists of presenting a mythic view of the community to the community as in a certain sense a unit or unity with shared norms to which its members “belong.” What is offered to the community, he says, is one among a number of possible images “of a reality that is itself ultimately more fiction than empirical fact.”34 The proceeding collectively enacts a view of community and of itself as a representative body, with which the audience may or may not identify. If it succeeds, the body’s legitimacy is enhanced. This translates into rhetorical requirements for individual board members. They were free to declare for one side or another in the Barbiegate case, but, as Halloran has suggested, they had another, overriding rhetorical function to perform, that of representing the community.35 Failing to fulfill that function or going so far as to attempt subversion of that function would have placed their own legitimacy at risk.36 More than the others who testified at the meeting, the board members were obliged to affirm the commu-


62 / Simons nity, to insure a fair hearing for competing viewpoints, to help bridge differences and protect egos, and finally to move the deliberations forward, effecting some degree of closure. This sense of rhetorical obligation to reinforcement of overarching communal values constrains what representatives can say as adversaries and how they can say it. It places a premium on appearing evenhanded, balanced, nonjudgmental—which can conflict with expressions of partisan interests. And the primary responsibility for representing the community rests upon the chair of the public proceeding. Balancing rhetorically his own interest in weighing in on Barbiegate with his obligation as committee chair to represent the community’s interests was done expertly by vice president Bill de la Cruz. As the closing speaker at the February 27 school board meeting, vice president de la Cruz took upon himself the difficult tasks of reconciling opposing positions and healing wounds opened up by Barbiegate in what he said was an effort to move the conversation forward. He presented himself as a credible bridge between the white and minority communities of Boulder Valley, thus indispensable to both, and right for the larger dialectical tasks of reconciliation. De la Cruz’s children were “minorities”;37 he himself was a combination of the “oppressor and the oppressed.”38 And his expensive Southwestern attire testified to a comfort with affluence as well as ethnicity, thus adding to his bridging potential. Moreover, de la Cruz proved to be a master of strategic ambiguity, a hedger par excellence. “Based on the regulations,” he begins, “what was done was proper and in the best interests.”39 Just whose interests is left unclear, but clarity in this instance would not have been a virtue. The utterance serves rather as support for the teachers, which then enables him to say: “It [not the teachers] could have been a little more sensitive to all of the people involved.”40 This second utterance comes off as something of a reversal of the first, but not entirely so; and any implication that wrong may have been committed is mitigated by the possibility that the fault lay not in the actors but in the wording of the regulations. Thus, the second utterance effectively balances the first, providing succor to those (everyone?) who may have felt at one time or another that they had been treated insensitively. De la Cruz provides further support to all involved when he says: “So, I’m gonna talk a few minutes more about the piece that intrigued me the most which was the reaction from the racial perspective and how quickly in


Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse / 63 this community everybody was calling everybody a racist. And um just going from that perspective and to me a racist is somebody who from a series of events and interactions shows that they indeed have no tolerance and no respect for other people. And if I believed that the people in this room or the people in this school were racist, I wouldn’t sit here and try to change things from this seat.”41 So, according to de la Cruz, no one on either side of the controversy is a racist, at least not an out-and-out, intolerant, disrespectful, overgeneralizing racist. However, in the very same speech segment, de la Cruz retells the story that appeared in the Daily Camera about the Boulder homeowner whose own overgeneralizing led Boulder police to mistreat two Latinos in her upscale Boulder neighborhood. At first glance the two statements seem blatantly contradictory. But, like the Daily Camera editorial of March 1 that took up the case, de la Cruz was drawing a distinction between impermissible racism and racist attitudes that, if properly acknowledged and confronted, turn the admitted defect into a potential virtue. That distinction, here reinforced by de la Cruz, may have been the principal lesson from the “teachable moment” that was Barbiegate. But now de la Cruz, having warmed to the task of rooting out racism, borrows pages from Thielen on the need for a more tough-minded multiculturalist curriculum and from his critics on the need not to refrain from pointing the finger of guilt at anyone. Thielen is right about the need to look at our own attitudes and our behaviors, and not always in a controlled environment. But the school board and the school district are equally committed to rooting out racism, equally committed to looking at the oppression and the injustices. So Barbiegate in de la Cruz’s reframing of it becomes a win-win for all concerned: “we can all benefit from it and move forward.”42

CONCLUSIONS In an oft-quoted passage from Attitudes toward History, Kenneth Burke admonished us to give up our pretensions to superiority over others, pairing “our” virtue against “their” madness or badness. Humane enlightenment, said Burke, “can go no further than in picturing people not as vicious, but as mistaken.When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are


64 / Simons exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy.”43 This is, I think, a recurring lesson of small-scale, “ordinary” democracy. It helps of course if there is a noticeable breach in accepted community practice, as occurred over Barbiegate. Then we become sensitized to the fissures and contradictions and potential embarrassments of taken-for-granted ideologies, to the ways they have been managed rhetorically in the past, and to the new and greater problems sometimes created by the “solutions” devised. It helps too if, as in Barbiegate, the principal actors are nice people, people like us, members of our community. Then we have little choice but to identify. It helps if, as with Barbiegate, the case also defies easy resolution. Then we can observe others (and perhaps ourselves) muddling through—doing with rhetoric what can’t possibly be done by reliance on hard fact and cold reason. What, then, were the chief lessons I learned from Barbiegate? 1. Barbiegate exposed fissures in liberal antiracism reflective of divisions of liberal opinion nationwide, but rendered more difficult to manage rhetorically in affluent Boulder, “sensitive” Boulder, owing to its vulnerability to charges of hypocrisy. The paradox of affluent progressive liberalism is that it is easy to vilify, despite its good works and even nobler intentions. 2. Dilemma-centered analysis helped to account for anomalous features of Barbiegate discourse, such as Thielen’s waffling and the retreat to platitudes by the “defense.” Analysis of the discourse further sharpened my appreciation of the rhetorical problems these actors confronted, and it challenged my own liberal convictions, prompting me to entertain as reasonable, for example, a distinction between permissible and impermissible racism. 3. Halloran’s theory of the public proceeding was similarly helpful in making sense of the board members’ discourse on February 27. Especially useful in studies of this sort is his notion of a collective rhetorical obligation to honor and further legitimize the myth of community—or else risk one’s own perceived legitimacy.


Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse / 65 4. The Barbiegate study further convinced me of the value of a dialogic, Socratic rhetoric, and of distinguishing, as Socrates did, between what persuaded and what was wise. I found myself moved by Thielen but not fully convinced that the race pedagogy he preached was—well—“appropriate” for the elementary school classroom. Removing the poster was unwise, but critics of teaching about racism via a poster display had a point, one that they could not develop effectively under the constraints imposed by school board meeting rules. Were I a member of the BVSD community, I would urge that future school board meetings over issues as important as Barbiegate provide opportunities for dialogue, and not simply for the making of statements to the board. 5. Much as I applaud the study of “ordinary democracy,” it poses difficulties for the rhetorical analyst accustomed to the study of extraordinary news events where the record is likely to be far more complete.The many questions left unanswered for me by the record made available to the contributors to this volume and by my own limited sleuthing were probably not fatal for the purposes of the study, but they remained limitations of the study nonetheless. 6. While I cannot justify my own claims in this essay by appeals to bedrock foundational supports, I do not regret having weighed in on the issues confronting the Barbiegaters. Postmodern skepticism has effectively called into question blithe assertions of the good, the true, and the real, and I don’t pretend to have resolved the paradoxes it has posed. But po-mo effectively renders itself silent or enfeebled where judgment is called for. There are alternatives to foundationalism and to postmodern skepticism, which this essay should have illustrated. Viewed in context, some arguments appear as better than others, some judgments wiser than others. Rhetorical analysis cannot settle Barbiegate-type issues, but it can advance their consideration.

NOTES 1. I was one such visitor in June 2003, a visiting professor at CU Boulder. Besides teaching a course, leading some colloquia, and catching my breath, I also tried to catch on to the distinctive culture of Boulder. I believe it figured prominently in Barbiegate.


66 / Simons 2. These classic values are given contemporary expression in Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Stephen M. Tipton, The Good Society (New York: Random House, 1992). 3. Radical political theorist Robert Paul Wolff lamented, “The confusion of contemporary American political thought shows itself nicely in the paradoxical fact that while liberals invoke the authority of John Stuart Mill’s great libertarian tract, On Liberty, conservatives echo the rhetoric and deploy the arguments of Mill’s other great contribution to social philosophy, The Principles of Political Economy. What is more paradoxical still, Mill’s strongest arguments for what is today known as conservatism are set forth in On Liberty, a fact which liberals seem congenitally unable to notice; while in the pages of the Principles, we can find the germs of a justification of that welfare-state philosophy which modern conservatives abhor.” See The Poverty of Liberalism (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 3. 4. I was teaching at Boulder when Bill Moyers’s fabulous speech on progressive liberalism arrived online via the Common Dreams News Center (June 10, 2003). It had been presented in Washington DC to the Campaign for America’s Future on June 4, 2003. Progressivism, says Moyers, “started late in the 19th century and remade the American experience piece by piece until it peaked in the last third of the 20th century.” It counts as its accomplishments the eight-hour day; the minimum wage; the conservation of natural resources; and the protection of our air, water, and land; women’s rights; and civil rights. Moyers incorporates classical liberalism’s democratic ideal into his “story” of progressivism, but he insists that it is unrealizable in nations that do not share a commitment to civil rights and to a leveling of incomes and opportunities. Thus, the progressive liberal asks whether “ ‘we the people’ is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality . . . or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.” If income inequality is on the rise, if it persists and grows, then unless you believe that some people are naturally born to privilege, “it’s a sign that opportunity is less than equal.” Self-interest “may be a great motivator for production and progress, but is amoral unless contained within the framework of community.” The rich “have the right to buy more cars than anyone else, more homes, vacations, gadgets and gizmos, [but] they do not have the right to buy more democracy than anyone else.” Available at http://www.commondreams. org/views03-10.htm. 5. Why is lifestyle libertarianism linked in progressive liberalism with welfare state capitalism? What logic joins them together? And can the working class beneficiaries of progressive liberalism be counted as liberals because they vote their interests, or must they articulate to themselves an altruistic rationale for their benefits, as affluent progressive liberals do? I don’t have good answers to these questions.


Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse / 67 6. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes toward History (1937; repr., Boston: Beacon, 1961), 39–44. 7. The civil rights movement was the model for many other movements (e.g., gay/lesbian rights, Latino rights, welfare rights) with which liberalism strongly identified and from which conservatism benefited greatly in the form of a late-1960s white backlash that persists even today. 8. See, for example, “Social Movements,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas Sloane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Readers familiar with my “Requirements-Problems-Strategies” (RPS) approach to the study of movements and much else will recognize elements of it in this essay. 9. Michael Billig, Susan Condor, Derek Edwards, Mike Gane, David Middleton, and Alan Radley, Ideological Dilemmas (London: Sage, 1989). 10. One can find numerous examples of both creative adaptations and tactical blunders in Ideological Dilemmas. 11. I learned some things about what transpired from telephone conversations with Clint Talbott and Amy Bounds of the Daily Camera, and a subsequent e-mail from Bounds, but I would have liked to have learned a good deal more. Bounds passed along two Daily Camera pieces that were not in the contributors’ press file, the first her own news-breaker, dated February 14, the second an editorial highly critical of the teachers’ decision, that appeared two days later. Talbott surprised me further with news that the story had been carried along by bloggers (Web loggers). As to its origins, the Camera had gotten the story from Thielen but had refused to divulge it until after the February 13 board meeting because up until then he had insisted on anonymity. Still, why didn’t the newspaper investigate the matter through its other sources? And what was Thielen afraid of? One concern surely was for his daughter’s privacy. Despite repeated requests from the national news shows and talk shows, said Bounds, he never allowed his daughter to be interviewed and insisted that her name be kept out of the press (Bounds, August 13, 2003). As for the thinking of school officials, their strategizing, if any, about how to defend the decision to pull the project, the dynamics of influence at Mesa Elementary and within the larger BVSD—all this remained a mystery to me. I did learn from Amy Bounds that Principal Greg Thompson was ultimately responsible for the removal decision, and that he was new to Mesa Elementary, having recently come from Australia. 12. See Jonathan Potter, Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric, and Social Construction (London: Sage, 1996), chap. 1. 13. See Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Intellectual Controversy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). See also


68 / Simons my essay on “The Rhetoric of Philosophical Incommensurability,” in The Rhetoric of Incommensurability, ed. Randy Harris (West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2005). 14. Appendix B, no. 1. 15. Appendix A, F. 16. Appendix A, G. 17. Appendix A, I. 18. Appendix A, C. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Appendix A, I. 22. Ibid. 23. For strongly opposed views on these and related race issues, see the conservative critique by Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism (New York, Free Press, 1995); and the liberal defense by Andrew Hacker, Two Nations (NewYork, Ballantine, 1995). 24. Appendix A, C. MEAC is the Multi-Ethnic Action Committee of the Boulder Valley School District. 25. This generalization at least applies to the press record made available to this book’s contributors, and to the additional Daily Camera editorial that I was able to obtain. 26. Appendix A, C. 27. Ibid. 28. Appendix B, no. 11. 29. Appendix B, no. 2. 30. Ibid. 31. Appendix A, E. 32. Billig et al., Ideological Dilemmas, chap. 4. 33. See Michael Halloran, “Doing Public Business in Public,” in Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action, ed. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, 118–38 (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 1978). 34. Ibid., 122. 35. At the Nixon impeachment deliberations of the House Judiciary Committee, which Halloran analyzed, this meant that even Nixon’s supporters, those who opposed impeachment, risked opprobrium from committee members if they sought to subvert the deliberations, but added to the committee’s perceived legitimacy if they behaved cooperatively. Hence, their rhetorical dilemma. The performances of Nixon supporters Charles Sandman and Charles Wiggins provided a study in contrasts. 36. Appendix A, N.


Race, Liberalism, and Barbiegate Discourse / 69 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 41.


4 Political Performances in Public Proceedings The Social Dramas of Barbiegate Bruce E. Gronbeck

A deliberative political setting such as the televised Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) board meetings provides interesting and significant challenges to students of rhetoric. Events such as the televised public discussion between citizens and school board members that came to be known as Barbiegate stretch rhetorical critics’ talents because of their multidimensionality. Public proceedings evoke rhetoric’s civic tradition, grounded in Aristotle’s focus on deliberative or legislative discourse as the heart of the rhetorical enterprise; even though it was not officially convened as a hearing, the BVSD board was, among other things, challenged to refine policy when listening to speeches on whether a third grader’s science fair project violated the district’s nondiscrimination policy. But, a televised public proceeding is more than a deliberative process. The “public proceeding”—institutionalized discussions with audiences purposively composed both of the actual political decision makers and of citizen-spectators—represents by now a significant political form on its own, a hybrid genre of rhetorical practices. The electronically mediated public proceeding has been so clearly and forcibly defined situationally over the last roughly fifty years in different species, from the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings to Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 and the 9/11 Commission hearings in 2004, that it comes with its own performance requirements for participants. As Michael Halloran points out, the public proceeding is a rhetorical event


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 71 speciated in varied forms: trials with social or political implications, state or national legislative sessions deemed important enough to be televised live, gavel-to-gavel coverage of major political party conventions, and televised school board meetings.1 In public proceedings, the dual audience tends to multiply the functions such proceedings can play for persons who may be the subject of such events, for the decision makers, and for the citizen-spectators who are witnessing them. There need not even be votes of affirmation or denial. Central to a proceeding is the nexus of political institutions and constituents in a comparatively formal way. In a previous study of Watergate,2 I additionally argued that public proceedings are marked by processes of officialization (the participants casting themselves not as ordinary people with personal and political interests but as legitimized adjudicants), dialectical engagement (event-defining transcendental issues that make the proceedings ever more significant), and dramatization (acted out as high dramas treating matters of import). Sociopolitical understandings of community ethos and political effectivity often are constructed in and through public proceedings. They become very much like what Kenneth Burke termed a representative anecdote: a story performed for a community to help it better comprehend the practical consequences of some of its central cultural values.3 To Burke, the event may be reductive, but its rhetorical scope is telematic. Murray Edelman would add that the language of public proceedings is generally hortatory; “[t]he conclusions [of a hortatory style], being promises or threats, amount to appeals for public support.”4 The promises and threats so characteristic of a hortatory style suggest that a public proceeding always is about more than its explicit subject matter; it is also about constructing public support and understanding through a sort of implicit public participation. We will see that the sorts of exhortations offered in Barbiegate suggest that advocates saw a great many stakes bound together in a third grader’s science fair project. Rhetorically, then, I am interested in sociolinguistic maneuvers that rhetors use to mark themselves as expert, legitimate spokespersons deserving of voice within the boundaries of the representative body executing a public proceedings; the range of frames that they bring to the subject matter,5 seeking to have it seen through particular social-political portals; and the ways in which the voices and the frames become arranged and related


72 / Gronbeck to one another in identifiable stages through time, becoming a social drama with cultural significance and force.6 If rhetoric is understood as discourse in the service of power,7 then I am examining three aspects of discursive power in public proceedings: the power to construct selves as worthy of institutional station (ethoi), one’s viewpoints as relevant to the contingencies of decision making (dianoia or “thought”), and roles that are played in the construction of the discursive formations (mythoi of a sort) that will dominate the public’s understanding of the subject matter as well as their own relationships to it and, ultimately, to one another. Speakers and speeches as they are bound together in a dramatic political performance, in a kind of deliberative-epideictic exercise: that is what we are examining here in order to better understand what a public proceedings does for and to citizenspectators through ethos, dianoia, and mythos—the three primary characteristics of drama in Aristotle’s Poetics. The ideological and emotional tenor of the social drama that was Barbiegate will provide our focus.

OFFICIALIZING VOICES To have voice, in conceptions as old as Thomas Hobbes’s,8 is to be a participant in a convent (or convention, as we now say). Those with voice join with others so designated to form a “plurality of voices,” which then within that convent are the bases of power (to kratos). Unwritten, that is, voiced, government draws from both civil and natural law, and hence to Hobbes is more central than writing to the human political experience.9 To have voice is, in Carl Schmitt’s understanding of public opinion, to be part of a collective acclamation—the unorganized but publicly assembled bodies and sounds of a citizenry.10 If having voice is a citizen’s right, even yet must that citizen construct a persona in ways relevant to the subject matter of the proceedings in order to be taken seriously. The voices that sought to be taken seriously took one or more of the conceptual-valuative terms inhering in Barbiegate and then used it or them as a portal into the plurality. Barbiegate: The Dramatis Personae: Those who spoke during the open-mike, pre–board meeting period on February 27, 2001:


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 73 Teachers Clare Schoolmaster, Mesa Elementary School School Board Members Janusz Okolowicz Julie Phillips Teresa Steele Jean Bonelli Angelika Schroeder, Treasurer Bill de la Cruz, Vice President Parents David Thielen, parent of the third grader in Mesa Elementary School Jordana Ash, President of the Mesa Parent/Teacher Organization Rita Davis, another Mesa Elementary School parent Nonschool Institutional Representatives Barry Satlow, Boulder County ACLU Judd Golden, Boulder County ACLU Alvertis Simmons, Denver Million Man March The controversy was two weeks old as far as public knowledge of it was concerned. The parent David Thielen had announced it at the February 13 meeting; articles, editorials, and letters to the editor had appeared in Boulder’s newspaper, the Daily Camera. National papers and even an international media organ had circulated the story. The story was hardly news by late February, yet speakers lined up to address it because here was the opportunity to call the school system to an accounting from one side, to vindicate it from the other. Now was the time for classic epideictic—the discourses of praise and blame. Those who were offering the discourses created for themselves voices that, they hoped, would be taken as relevant to that public accounting. Only one teacher, Clare Schoolmaster, spoke and then, as she said, “on behalf of the [Mesa Elementary School] staff.”11 That staff undoubtedly wanted a voice, but as professionals under attack, they obviously preferred to leave the fight to the institutionalized citizen-directors of K-12 education, the Boulder Valley School Board. Three parents spoke. David Thielen used his patrilineage as a doorway into the proceeding.12 Counterbalancing him was a eulogistic parent, Rita Davis, who “want[s] to come in tonight and say thank you to Dr. [Superintendent] Garcia” and Mesa Elementary; she later referred


74 / Gronbeck to herself again as a “parent” and to the school staff possessively as “our teachers.”13 The third parental voice belonged to Jordana Ash, self-identified president of the Mesa Parent/Teacher Organization (PTO). Like Davis, she, too, thanked the school board, the superintendent, and the teachers who collectively and administratively had created “this incredible school, this awardwinning school” thanks to “these award-winning teachers.”14 Here was the voice of a parent who fit Edelman’s vision of the satisfied citizen, the citizen who had felt the arousal and uncertainty of large-scale community controversy but who now was in a state of quiescence thanks to the “[r]itualistic reaffirmation of beliefs.”15 Ash wanted to return to business as usual. In contrast, a professionalized, inquiring persona was constructed for Barry Satlow, chair of the Boulder County American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He spoke as its mouthpiece: “Uh, the ACLU’s very concerned about the prohibition of this project.”16 Here was a voice addressing the very foundation of BVSD school board operations—the basic rights of community membership. His voice was echoed and amplified by Judd Golden, another ACLU representative, one who had worked with the board on its nondiscrimination policy the year before and now wanted to chastise the board.17 One more nonschool institutional representative spoke: Alvertis Simmons, the executive director of the Denver organizing committee of the Million Man March.18 Simmons’s speech, and especially his voice, already have been treated to study by Samuel McCormick,19 who found an “imitative hermeneutic” operating within the speech, one wherein Simmons’s voice intoned both integrationist and nationalist discourses, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. A nationalist ethos was combined, McCormick argued, with an integrationist turn toward harmonizing the races in Boulder County schools, reminiscent of the character Smiley in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing who sold copies of a picture of the two men together.20 For our purposes, his voice complemented the ACLU representatives; if they articulated the legal dimensions of free speech and nondiscrimination, Simmons sought to amplify his voice with a full range of cultural-political overtones from the marginalized communities of Colorado. He was literally situated outside Boulder County, and hence Simmons was pleading for admission to the plurality of voices to which in reality he did not legitimately belong. Simmons signaled his externality: “Um it’s a long drive up to Boulder. I almost didn’t get here, couldn’t find my way,” and “um I don’t


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 75 know if Boulder knows about us, but um we are very hurt by what happened here in Boulder.” From the outside, he continued, “We’re watching. The community is watching; the minority community is watching.”21 Like Satlow and Golden, therefore, Simmons spoke as an instrument for others inserting themselves into BVSD business, even though separated in space (he couldn’t find his way) and personal knowledge (not being sure if Boulder knew about the Million Man March group). Yet, the distance was not so great that it could not be bridged by sight and the knowledge was not so absent that monitoring was not possible. Ultimately, Simmons’s was a transcendent voice, seeking to speak in as broad a multicultural way as possible. It reverberated in the tones of all of those voices that come to us from the margins, anxious to tell the center how to repair itself.22 This leaves us with one more set of participants in Barbiegate: the school board members. Like most members of legislative and quasi-judicial bodies, school board members come with dual personae: that of representative in Halloran’s first sense, as exemplars of community, but also as that of disinterested or distanced institutional operatives, as presumably neutral overseers of educational professionals. They are rule makers, rule interpreters, rule enforcers, arbiters of budgets and personnel, and politicians. As elected officials they owe particular attention to their constituencies, though as administrators they have role expectations defined by the educational culture. They operate liminally, on the boundary of two worlds. Both worlds, as we will see, were marked in the arguments they framed and in the social drama they sought to direct to a self-protective and yet productive denouement. My point for now is simple: the range of speakers making their voices relevant to Barbiegate was rich enough ideologically, institutionally, and emotionally to make the open-mike portion of the February 27, 2001, BVSD meeting a fitting culmination to the two-week brouhaha: a time and a place for stakeholders of various stripes to reflect on relationships between educational institutions, legal tenets, and the sociomoral dynamics of everyday life.

THE FRAMING OF BARBIEGATE Framing is a metaphor suggesting that the world looks different, and is understood differently, from various vantage points. In the case of Barbiegate,


76 / Gronbeck various speakers spoke from multiple discursive formations, employing not only different languages but also different understandings of social life. They framed the science fair project in multiple ways. Table 4.1 lays out in rough form three of the issues central to Barbiegate under three frames: sociopolitical frames, wherein social, legal, and technical perspectives applicable to areas of life outside as well as inside educational institutions are articulated; educational frames, wherein matters affecting what and how children learn inside school environments are raised; and procedural frames, that is, those dealing with the steps or actions that should be taken in order for educational institutions to achieve their instructional goals. And then I examined the speeches, available in Appendix A, for examples of talk on three issues: nondiscrimination, that is, systemic differentiations of power or opportunity for differently raced children; freedom of expression, that is, the right to speak one’s mind; and the science of the project itself, which is to say, the degree to which the Barbie experiment was acceptable science. Notice some of the dynamics of the substantive arguments in Barbiegate. • Sometimes direct clash could be seen in the primary speeches of participants. David Thielen saw the project as one attacking racism, but Alvertis Simmons thought it was racist. David Thielen argued its methodology was good enough to be found acceptable for postsecondary work, while Angelika Schroeder objected to its methods as those of bad science. The father also thought it appropriate to elementary-aged children, while Clare Schoolmaster did not. In such cases of direct clash, it might have been possible to work toward agreement or at least well-argued decisions, even to educate the viewing citizenry on the place of schools in their social lives. But, direct clash on particular issues generally was avoided through other maneuvers. • Frame-shifting is a common occurrence. The question of the BVSD’s nondiscrimination policy could be trumped, as Alvertis Simmons seemed to do, by playing the racism card. The arguments “-ist” and “-ism” are attitudinal, with almost any statement made by another being capable of assessment as evidence of his or her “-ist” attitude.23 Both David Thielen and the two ACLU spokespersons also shifted frames when they explicitly introduced constitutional arguments into the discussion of school policy; such frame-


Table 4.1 Frames for three central issues in Barbiegate Sociopolitical Frames Racism is attacked (DT) Project is racist (AS)

First Amendment is violated (DT, BS, JD) Treasure the Constitution (DT)

BVSD needs unfettered scienti¤c inquiry (DT) Facticity of science is paramount (JO) Political action is part of kids' education (DT)

Educational Frames

Procedural Frames

Nondiscrimination Children have different levels of understanding (CS; TS; AS) Children can understand issues (DT)

Policy on projects is unclear (JG; JD; JO; JB; BDLC) Other nondiscrimination more important (JP; TS; JB)

Freedom of Expression Scienti¤c freedom is at stake (DT; JO) Issue is suppression vs. comfort of children (BS; JO) Barbiegate parallel to K.B. Clark's studies of self-image of Black children (BS) Public discussion of issues needed in BVSD (RD; CS) Sensitivity can become censorship (JD) Project improves understanding of science (JO) Issue is important, but not project (CS; JA) Science Project Itself It would be acceptable as a university project (DR) It's only appropriate to upper grades (CS) It was bad science (AS)

Censorship was exercised (DT; BS) Incident parallel of civil rights actions of kids in 1960s (DT) Interpretation of regulations was faulty (JG; JO) No censorship because the project was evaluated before removal (RD)

It would have created discomfort and racism (CS; TS) Schools are ¤lled with discomfort (DT)


78 / Gronbeck shifting was enlarging but probably also distracting. In a different direction, responses to questions about the eight-year-old being discriminated against were answered by a host of procedural frame shifts: from the bureaucratic “let’s study the policy” to the procedurally transcendent tactic of “let’s move on to more important questions of discrimination [quota systems in the Gifted and Talented program, achievement gaps].” So long as the frame shifted-to is constituted discursively as relevant, it seems to fit. The appearance of fit is what matters in a public proceeding. Further, those who want to avoid the central issues can always invoke the procedural frame as a last resort.24 • Issue-redefinition also can be used as an argumentative distraction. David Thielen did that when saying that his daughter’s project paralleled the actions of black children in joining 1960s-era civil rights marches, explicitly making her project not one of science but of social-political action. Then her civil rights, and not just her educational rights, were presumably violated. The most fluid of the cells in table 4.1 is “Educational Frame: Freedom of Expression.” Queries about the suppression of the project were answered by concerns for the comfort level of others; others—notably Rita Davis and Clare Schoolmaster—wanted to define the issue, not as a science project, but as one of how diversity and nondiscrimination are taught generally in BVSD. When David Thielen raised a challenge to arguments about the comfort of other students, “comfort” was traded in for “safe environment” by Clare Schoolmaster and Teresa Steele. When confronted, they redefined the issue. • And, issue-hopping is a regular occurrence. If you do not want to talk about the nondiscrimination policy, then, like Angelika Schroeder, you could attack the science of the project itself. Or, in the most marvelous move, Julie Phillips absolutely ignored the topic and decided instead to discuss the balancing of schools racially in a new system of school choice. “And so I just wanted to share that with everybody”25 was her only justification for hopping out of one racial arena and into another. Overall, then, the citizen-spectators who tune in on such a televised proceeding can be treated to a sparkling panoply of exhortations for how to think about and act in the face of an event-of-interest. Not only are the possible issues numerous, but they can also be framed from both inside and outside


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 79 the institutional confines of the dispute, both substantively and procedurally. The ethoi of the speakers announce their sources of expertise, concern, and legitimacy, and then from those charactertological positions they articulate what they take or make to be relevant positions (logoi). The positions each person assumes may or may not engage others in rational or even reasonable ways. While public proceedings often are juridical, they in fact need not be. Laws of evidence and operative rules need not apply, making them loose, wide-ranging public affairs, especially when no decision is to follow.

THE SOCIAL DRAMAS OF BARBIEGATE Barbiegate may have seemed disorganized, even chaotic, without a recognizable fractal in sight. Thinking about it as a hearing or trial could lead to such an assessment. But it was a public proceeding, not a rule-governed, forensic encounter. Because discussions and debates occurring in open-discussion periods require no legislative or judicial outcome, they are loosed from the rules of judicial and parliamentary procedure employed in other parts of politicalinstitutional encounters. Indeed, only two temporal rules controlled Barbiegate: (1) speakers were given two minutes apiece in a prearranged order to say what was on their minds, and (2) the open-discussion period was to take no more than an hour in toto. Such temporal controls, of course, leave the impression of efficiency as the dominating political value. What is valued is the orderly opportunity to have a voice and a position. The two-minute time limit permits a large number of voices to be heard and a maximum (more or less) number of positions to be built. And that is all. Being given a voice only once all but guarantees no real exchange, no direct challenges requiring answers—and no focused discussion formed so as to produce resolution. The drama of Barbiegate, then, is not that of the well-made play or legal proceeding. There is no systematic march from narration to struggle to denouement, or from accusation to defense to verdict. Neither do we see in any pure form Burke’s conception of the social drama as moving from order to pollution to guilt to sacrifice/redemption and back to order again, though such a pattern forms a shadowy background, especially if the opendiscussion events are put in the context of public materials that can be found through a LexisNexis search.26 The Daily Camera and the citizens who wrote


80 / Gronbeck letters to the editor were sensitive to the issue as disruptive of Boulder’s smug community of supposedly enlightened, liberal Coloradoans who saw themselves in sharp contrast to the generally conservative population of the rest of the state. The issue signaled pollution in the community, as can be seen in this letter: “It’s unfortunate yet predictable that the Mesa Elementary School science fair project regarding skin color was pulled from the exhibit. America continues to deny that skin color is an issue and as always, it’s never the ‘right forum.’ Benign neglect continues to move across America.”27 Even stronger statements on the racism of Boulder schools in particular were made by Malaika and Andrea Pettigrew, Richard Garcia, and Karen Ashmore, parents from the Boulder area.28 And then, depending upon letter writers’ points of view, either David Thielen’s daughter or other children in Mesa Elementary were being sacrificed to school policies. But, hoped “75 Mesa Parents,” order could be and would be restored: As parents, we are sorry for the disappointment the third grader has felt for working hard on her science project and then having it pulled. She was trying to tackle one of the most highly complex and sensitive subjects of our country, if not our world.We are also sorry for the pain it has caused our school as well as the teachers we believe [are] trying to [be] just. Hopefully this will help us all become kinder, more tolerant people. We have faith Mesa Elementary will grow from this tough experience and will continue to help its students learn about human rights, diversity and acceptance as it has done so in the past. 75 Mesa Parents29 Those seventy-five parents ever so nicely depicted the controversy as over, as one more episode that allowed the school to grow “as it has done so in the past.” Students could learn about human rights, diversity, and acceptance of others in the wake of teachers’ just actions and Mesa Elementary’s—the abstract-yet-concretized school’s—willingness to endure pain. Here was a representative anecdote worthy of Burke’s (and our) attention, one with scope yet reduction, a pollution-guilt-sacrifice-order narrative line filled with pathos and productive even of Aristotelian catharsis. The community was purged and returned to health after doing battle with the diseases that Barbiegate manifested in the bodies educational and politic.


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 81 But what of the public proceeding itself? How should we conceptualize its drama, its life as an episode in century-long controversies? I think that, rhetorically, it is useful to understand the performed drama that centered Barbiegate in two ways: (1) ideologically, that is, as a series of statements drawing from politically marked perspectives, and (2) emotionally, as a flow of lived experiences imbued with feelings that are related to one another in formal ways and to the cultural environments created when a school rejected an eight-year-old’s science project and her father raised a public stink about that rejection. Put more formally, the drama of Barbiegate had positionality and flow.

Positionality During an open-discussion portion of a BVSD board meeting, those who want to speak sign up and then speak in the order in which they recorded their names. Those who talk do so in a preordered fashion, though the order is determined by exigencies of who signed up when, not by an alteration of affirmative and negative speakers as happens, for example, at so many public meetings. The result is that a public proceeding can be filled with ideological shards, neither structurally nor substantively whole. The short speeches lie around as so many chips of recognizable but fragmentary positions that move by spectators like the tinted crystals of a kaleidoscope. Each speaking turn produces a different ideological scene. Part II of Kenneth Burke’s The Grammar of Motives is titled “Scope and Reduction.”30 It opens with his discussion, as we already have noted, of the representative anecdote, which reduces cultural life to the material circumstances of particular events even as it magnifies the scope of social life’s underlying valuative and ideologies tenets. The dramatic uptake of Barbiegate’s school board discussions, in part, lies in its reduction of underlying principles of the catchphrases of ideological positions and yet the sheer scope of those positions taken as a whole. Any sense of dramatic form comes from the ways positions become related to one another proximally—even if those proximations are the result of the haphazard process of signing in to become part of a speaking order. That is, speaking order determines which comments or speeches provide the contexts for the following talks, that order likely dictates at least in part how one statement is related to another ideologically, and thus the drama that is the public proceeding takes its shape. The You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

82 / Gronbeck drama is not found “in” the speeches so much as it is made out of them by the citizen-spectators. For example, had the public proceeding that night started with Jordana Ash’s hymn of praise to Mesa Elementary rather than David Thielen and the ACLU attorney’s summary of the issues, quite a different event would have been witnessed and, I suspect, quite a different drama would have been made by the audience. Table 4.2 captures the drama of the ideological positions I saw acted out in the school board meeting. The prologue was David Thielen’s opening address on February 13. One can be sure that he hurried to sign up to be an early speaker, hoping to dictate both the emotional climate (see below, “Structures of Feeling”) and the ideological orientations deemed relevant to Barbiegate. His opening speech:31 • described the “science fair experiment,” challenging those who saw it as anything other than science; • argued that it was not “racially discriminatory,” trying to counter the raced “-ist” charge before it was made publicly; • called the school’s action “censorship,” preparatory to raising the First Amendment issue of civil rights later in the speech; • termed the school’s action “a violation of your own strategic plan,” urging that the school’s action was in conflict with the board’s educational goals; • suggested to the school board that it controlled the lessons that would be learned by children if the “teacher-administrator network” continued doing similar things to other children, implying institutional conspiracies; • talked of the “devastation to a child” who was told her project was “so terrible it had to be removed,” reinforcing his parental role; • described the basic tenets of science invoking Galileo’s fate as paralleling his daughter’s, invoking his professional training;32 • attacked a school administrator’s suggestion to reword the conclusions if she wanted the project shown; • bemoaned the small number of women going into science, introducing gender; • talked about the kindergarten-aged children of Selma, Alabama, who “marched out against white police officers,” suggesting that social action is a natural result of good education at any level; and,


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 83 Table 4.2 Ideological positioning of Barbiegate speakers Speaker

Topics

Ideological Positions

Satlow

free speech, individual liberties

libertarian individualism

Thielen

school board must act on issues

classic republicanism

Golden

free speech, need for institutional adjustments of nondiscrimination policy

negotiative individualism

Schoolmaster

pedagogical control needed on all issues

technocratism

Ash

panegyric to school system from parents

classic republicanism

Act I. Education, Individuals, and Society

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Act II. Education as Equipment for Living Simmons

social equality at all costs

absolute multiculturalism

Davis

extra-curricular issues in assemblies

technocratism

Okolowicz

¤ght against totalitarianism in education

intellectual individualism

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Interlude Phillips

[new ways of balancing school populations; irrelevant to Barbiegate]

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Act III. Learning from the Past Steele

achievement gap

historicization of event, social responsibility

Bonelli

achievement gap, teachable moments

historicization of event, technocratism

Schroeder

bad science

proceduralism

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Epilogue:A Brighter Tomorrow De la Cruz

anti-racism, achievement gap

historicization of event, social responsibility

• reviewed his arguments about censorship, the strategic plan, and free speech (and hence “civil rights”). David Thielen’s first speech, therefore, was built around an ideological inventory of educational-institutional, social-political, technical-scientific, and sexist-ageist arguments. His was a dramatic prologue wherein was reviewed


84 / Gronbeck a magnificently broad array of topics that would comprise this episode of American controversies over the purposes of public education, civil rights, the tenets of science, and familial advocacy: family rights versus educationalinstitutional prerogatives. His opening speech served as a traditional narratio or prologue, painting the conceptual and doctrinal universe within which the public proceeding in fact would proceed. Then came the speeches alluded to in table 4.2. I group the speeches of Barry Satlow, David Thielen, Judd Golden, Clare Schoolmaster, and Jordana Ash together as the first act because I see them putting the foundational ideological forces into play: The ACLU lawyers Satlow and Golden brought the visions of citizenly individual rights into the ideational universe, differing only in the fact that Satlow offered a more pure libertarian doctrine while Golden stressed the need to translate libertarianism into operative policy, which would involve some practical negotiation with the tenets governing educational institutions. Interestingly, Thielen and Ash were paired, yes, as parents, but more fundamentally as republicanists calling upon educational institutions to represent the needs and values of the citizens who legitimate them; both were, in Hobbes’s understanding, embodying the plurality of voices calling governing bodies to account.They differed in polar ways, however, in actually giving that account:Thielen, finding that the board had failed to act in accordance with enduring principles, and Ash, praising the responsiveness of the system to students’ (and hence parents’) needs and expectations. The school system itself talked through Schoolmaster, who celebrated the technocratic efficiency of the BVSD that, when teachers as educational professionals are given control, produces highly laudatory educational outcomes and environments for growth. In Act I, citizen-spectators viewing the proceedings watched the initial dance of individual rights, citizen rights, and systemic operations. The initial set of ideological issues brought into play produced the central controversial questions: What do schools owe to children? to their parents and the citizens that legitimate them? What level of autonomy is appropriate for the professionals, the experts, running the system? to what degree should an oversight citizens’ body, the school board, intervene so as to bring interpretivepolitical accounting into an institution that often sees its missions as strictly intellectual (cognitive) and social?


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 85 The next trio of speakers, Simmons, Davis, and Okolowicz, formed Act II. Both Simmons and Okolowicz offered impassioned pleas for understanding the school system as a microcosm for society: Simmons, around racial themes (raced actions in school are equatable with raced actions in external society), and Okolowicz, around matters of individual actions within the collective. Yet, not only did Simmons and Okolowicz offer contrary assessments of Mesa Elementary staff actions and judgments, but they also were polarized ideologically, with Simmons focused on the dynamics of sociality, and Okolowicz on a conception of collectives as comprised of autonomous individuals. Davis’s speech echoed Ash’s, but with an important proviso: that school assemblies could have aired the cultural (relational) issues brought to the fore in Barbiegate. So, she could laud the school even while suggesting— albeit in a soft voice—that the educational establishment should be attentive to social issues. Thus, these three speakers, in their own ways, understood that schools must provide students and communities with equipment for living, as Burke understands that idea.33 Act II, therefore, treated the dynamics of ways in which individuality and sociality could directly become imbricated in the educational processes. I term Phillips’s speech an interlude, a sort of lyrical rhapsody on ways of balancing magnet school programs racially, because while it deals generally with educational strategies in a multicultural society—with a kind of affirmative action policy—it yet has nothing to do with the racial issues of Barbiegate per se. It fit into the open-discussion-period philosophy of letting people say what is on their minds regardless of what is on the school board’s agenda, yet on the surface was irrelevant to the talk of others. Nonetheless, it released the ideological tensions building through Acts I and II. In Act III, the three speakers effectively historicized the events of Barbiegate. They were thrown into the past, as events from which something important or useful could be learned. Steele started to talk about the achievement gap as a supposedly related issue through which educational institutions could demonstrate and execute their social responsibilities. Bonelli picked up the thought, though moved the discussion squarely into pedagogical territory with her reference to the “teachable movement,” thus historicizing Barbiegate as an event that will be useful to teachers in the future.34 Schroeder offered a direct answer to Okolowicz’s discussion of the project as teach-


86 / Gronbeck ing the tenets of science and to Thielen’s assertions about the high quality of the project; her speech was a proceduralist attack on the eight-year-old’s work, justifying teachers’ rejection of it on technical grounds. Schroeder’s arguments paralleled yet did not touch those of Bonelli, who was preaching pedagogical, not investigative, lessons. Schroeder thus sought to step away from ideological engagement in her disquisition on scientific method. It is little wonder that de la Cruz did not engage her. De la Cruz, instead, provided the bookend to match Thielen’s prologue. His was a summative review of anti-(not just non-)discrimination, personalized understandings of racism, and the need to bridge the achievement gap between ethnic groups regardless of cost, even pointing to a legislative initiative in a package of educational reforms. The rights of individuals were blended into the need to reform the collective. De la Cruz’s epilogue was choric in its vocalization of the social responsibilities of schools in bringing up the young in ways that will produce better citizens and a better society. Barbiegate was but one more event that should give direction and force to the work of students, parents, teachers, administrators, and Coloradoan society-at-large in the never-ending search for a brighter tomorrow. Ideologically, in sum, the primary Barbiegate speeches laid out an array of frames or vantages from which to view the events of Barbiegate, frames that sorted themselves out around philosophies of individualism, institutional responsibilities to society (republicanism), and the pedagogical and administrative technocracies that made educational systems function effectively, justly, and responsibly. Acts I, II, and III can be constructed as they are, I would stress, because of how speakers signed up. With Thielen, Satlow, and Golden getting on the sheet first, questions of individuals’ and society’s stake in the operations of schools of course dominated Act I, and provided the contexts within which Schoolmaster’s and Ash’s discussions of school operations would be understood. That is, Schoolmaster’s technocratism became framed in the individualism-republicanism divide because that dialectic was articulated before her speech. And Ash’s panegyric could be thought of as a republicanist statement only because it, too, followed Satlow, Thielen, and Golden.35 Pairing it with Thielen’s second speech created a place from which citizen-spectators could assess their school system’s operational successes or failures. Act II affirmed those educational philosophies that stress schools’ cen-


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 87 trality to cultural practices of relationship. Simmons and Okolowicz may have disagreed on how Barbiegate was handled, but they were unified in their understanding of education’s place in society. The ideological jockeying that contrapoised the republican rights of the collective with the libertarian rights of the individual evolved in Act II into a more straightforward inquiry into the social and citizenship responsibilities of schools. And then, after an interlude, Act III provided ideological space for enlarged rumination: on schools’ social responsibilities, on how to meet them pedagogically in teachable moments, and on pedagogy itself as it was asked to judge the quality of an elementary student’s science project. And it was left to de la Cruz’s epilogue to explore the individual, educational, and ultimately social-political aspects of positive race relations as they ought to be pursued by students, educational professionals, parents, and even state-level governmental agencies. Before we consider the dramatic form—one that I will identify technically as a romance—let us look to the other face of the drama, its emotional demeanor.

Structures of Feeling The phrase “structures of feeling” is identified most closely with British culturalist Raymond Williams. While he used it in multiple ways, it took on its clearest meaning in his book Marxism and Literature.36 Structures of feelings are aspects of lived experience, that is, ways in which individuals lead and understand their everyday lives. They are the places in the mind where cultural sentiments run into societal structures, where the “affective elements of consciousness and relationships” negotiate with familial and institutional structures within the subject or observer.37 John Feteke calls a structure of feeling “the distilled residue of the organization of the lived experience of a community over and above the institutional and ideological organization of the society,” and Alvaro Pino, an articulation of “the social with the personal, emotion and affect with meanings and values, the lived with the desired, experience with change, material practice with semantic availability, the known with the knowable.”38 The key in all of these characteristics is: what is known or understood from the past is relived or felt in an evolving present. Williams says that “the


88 / Gronbeck making of art is never itself in the past tense. It is always a formative process, within a specific present.”39 But he could as easily have been talking about such prosaic media as local-access television. The citizen-spectators tuning in to the school board meeting we are discussing likely experienced the “frequent tension between the received interpretation and practical experience.”40 That is, the Barbie dolls incident had been written up in the Daily Camera after David Thielen first made a complaint at the February 13 meeting prior to the February 27 one that is the focus. Citizen-spectators had a “received interpretation,” and, for that matter, prior knowledge of what Williams identifies as “the social past”—“the known relationships, institutions, formations, positions.”41 Citizen-spectators perhaps came with curiosity, anger, fear, or any number of other feelings derived from their past experiences with known relationships, institutions, formations, positions— the “facts” of the Barbie doll incident, the newspaper’s judgments, perhaps social interactions, maybe the school district’s struggle even with its nondiscrimination policy. But, the public proceeding with which we are concerned was not in the past. It was an evolving present and hence subject to the structuring of feelings that occurred within that progression of event-after-event-after-event. I am not evoking a phenomenological reading strategy here, though that is not foreign to my purpose. I mean to suggest only that public proceedings catch up their audiences in the emotions of the sheer drama of the performances— the wondering of what will come next, who will perform how, who will be embarrassed or angry, what one will be asked to think about or feel. Just as the public hangings of old allowed collectivities to act out not only their ultimate cultural sanctions but also a range of other festive activities (picnics, markets, children’s day out, etc.), so a school board’s public proceedings are multifaceted. The feelings that were structured into the evolving present that was those televised school board meetings in February 2001 were called up in the sequence of the actors’ performances. The assault on the teachers and principal of Mesa Elementary as well as the school board launched by the initial speakers—Thielen, Satlow, and Golden—undoubtedly created an atmosphere of attack, of intellectual, pedagogical, and especially moral indignation. The assertions-of-fault in those four speeches, as we have seen, ran through multiple frames; the voices articulated legal-professional and


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 89 parental-citizenry personae. The accusations, the kategoria in classic rhetorical terms, created a hostile environment, with strong feelings compressed all the more tightly because David Thielen thought he had five minutes to speak and so was forced to mount all of his attacks in a long two minutes. As one views a videotape of the event, he seems all the more urgent and aggressive because he was hurrying. The language of sheer anger—personal, social, and political outrage— that ran through the opening speeches no doubt charged the atmosphere and challenged those who saw racism but no censorship, sensitive teaching but no suppression of a child. The negatively charged feeling-states could be matched in kind only with positively charged counterexpressions. Kategoria could be balanced only with apologia, speeches of justification or defense. Accusation and defense, to be sure, were not played out in any orchestrated way; that occurs in legislative or legal settings, but not in free-flowing forms of public proceedings. Rather, the point is that the speeches of Schoolmaster (the focus on pedagogy as a guiding consideration) and Ash (the panegyric to the school system) likely were perceived as apologia, as justifications or even defenses, because they directly followed the kategoric speeches of Thielen, Satlow, and Golden. The Act II talks of Simmons and Okolowicz not only had similar ideological functions (even though they worked in dialectical tension with each other); they also served parallel emotional functions—Simmons, intensifying the apologia, and Okolowicz, the kategoria. Their statements were powerful enough to simply sweep away Davis’s quiet disquisition on the place of assemblies in elementary education—so powerful that perhaps Phillips’s seemingly irrelevant discussion of balancing school populations was necessary if the public proceeding was going to be anything other than a confrontational shouting match. If the kategoria and apologia had continued to dominate the proceeding in a kind of Firing Line atmosphere, one side or the other would have had to triumph and the other side would have to have been vanquished. When feelings are structured dialectically, the need for resolution through decision can become overwhelming. A zero-sum game would have been played. But that is not what happened. Rather, Steele and Bonelli altered the emotional atmosphere, and hence the drama. In driving the Barbie incident into the past and then transcending it by following some of its frames into other aspects of


90 / Gronbeck Boulder County public education, Steele and Bonelli provided the grounds for restructuring the feelings of the citizen-viewers. And de la Cruz supplied emotional flesh to the new structure. Steele’s was the more interesting of the two speeches emotionally.42 She referenced the difficult times that focused on “a science fair project” in her first sentence, thus depersonalizing it even as, in the second sentence, she talked about another student, Timo Sandoval, who was shot in a target shooting incident. The pain of another allowed her to worry a few statements later about “a safe environment for every one of our students.” From that expression of concern, she then shifted the emotional climate to how she has worked on teaching reading skills around issues of race and “religious beliefs,” thus broadening the issue, which, four statements later, became a call for an attack on “the achievement gap.” That gap was talked about, not in terms of race, but in terms of “English [as] second language learners,” whose percentage in a nearby school (Columbine Elementary) had jumped from 14 percent in 1991 to, ten years later, 34 percent who were also getting “free and reduced [price] lunch.” Race now was overlaid with linguistic and economic categories. She completed her speech with: “And t- to take responsibility for what we have said that we care about these kids now let’s put the money where it’d do the most good.” Thus, Steele bumped Thielen off the front page by substituting Sandoval, first expanding the morality of race with a question of religion added to it, and then remanufacturing the racial differences as more generally ethnic and economic differences. The substitution of Sandoval for Thielen put bodily injury in place of the psychological “devastation” that Thielen alleged, the reference to religion made the question of race more than the prejudice of mere eight-year-olds, and the introduction of Columbine’s data on ethnic and economic differences between high and low achievers trivialized the question of hurt feelings in the case of the Barbie experiment. And so, physical pain trumped psychological pain, sacred questions overran secular ones, and the achievement gap vaporized the kategoria and apologia of the perception gap that lay at the foundation of the Barbie interviews. And with that, Barbiegate itself was shunted to the past and locked up there, to remain only as a lesson-for-the-future. The structure of feeling then could change—from the acrimony of the zerosum game about racism and free speech to the anticipated promise of institutional and collective progressivism.


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 91 Bonelli’s speech about the teachers knowing what they were doing—by listening to kids so that no one could be hurt—while the adults engaged in “a philosophical discussion,” added fuel to the fire of emotional enlargement, as did Schroeder’s concern about improving the “comfortable level” that should come from a clear and broadly understood discrimination policy.43 But it was de la Cruz who offered personal testimony intense enough to enflame a new structure of feeling. The dialectics of the first couple of acts were replaced by his personal drama that developed into a collective drama, a representative anecdote.44 While he suggested early on that the Thielen girl was not treated in a “sensitive” manner, he signaled that her case should not be revisited: “that’s not something I’m going to dwell on because it’s really time to move forward um from this point.” What he related was his own story: explaining prejudice to his two-year-old children “because they are a minority population and it’s important for them to understand um not to fear, but to understand the issues that come from being different and looking different.”45 He then offered a stringent definition of “racist,” one strong enough to assure him that no one in the room was one. He also suggested that talk of racism “is uncomfortable, and it is not ever risk-free because when you talk about racism, you have to talk from your heart and you have to talk about injustice and you have to talk about oppression.” And from there, he moved into personal anecdotes: one, about an elderly neighbor who called the police when she saw two Hispanic males in his own neighborhood, both non-Americans studying at the University of Colorado; another, about his experiences as someone of mixed blood (Mexican, Indian, and Spanish); a third about the Trail of Tears, which was not studied in their schools; a fourth about teaching kids about the foods and dress of Asians but not about American discrimination against them; a fifth about being followed around stores in Boulder; a sixth about not being able to cash a check. From these educational and personal examples, de la Cruz draws conclusions: (1)Yes, the Holocaust can be taught, but “we have all of these examples of discrimination and racism in our own country. But I think to look at those means we have to take some ownership of them, not from guilt and not from saying well gee I’m not responsible, but to really look at how it perpetuates the whole notion.” (2) “I truly believe in my heart that this school board and this school district is totally committed to dealing with these issues and be-


92 / Gronbeck cause we take a step back does mean we’ve uh we’ve we’ve finished and we can’t keep moving forward.” (3) The board, therefore, should hold a symposium on the issue to “be aware of our own stereotypes and our own ways that we operate and and be able to move forward.” (4) And, we should follow the governor, the state attorney general, and a bipartisan legislative group, all of whom are pushing educational reform so that the achievement gap can be effectively closed. The structures of feelings, that is, the affective realms of individuals’ consciousness lying between the personal and the social, between their personalsubjective and the institutional-objective senses of identity and belonging, shifted across the open-mike portion of that school board meeting. The kategoria and apologia were criterion-referenced attacks on the shortcomings of teachers, a superintendent, and members of the central school administration. They were the voices of the plurality exercised in examination of a powerful community institution. They were deeply involved emotionally in their expressions of outrage and satisfaction. The dialectic-of-performances was intense enough to require—to demand—some kind of resolution. But, one set of personae did not do battle with and then defeat another set. Here was not a comedic confrontation, where evildoers who had violated societal norms were vanquished and punished; rather, the drama here witnessed was a romance.46 There was a confrontation, yes, a struggle, yes, but then, a realization that principles of life could be seen in the confrontation and used to transcend the mundane details of the confrontation. The transcendence in this social drama, I have argued, was dual: it represented the articulation of a general institutional-cultural principle—social responsibilities of schools—that stood as a kind of synthesis of the dialectic among the ideological positions, and, as well, a distinct movement away from bipolar emotional states to the joyous sense that a lesson was learned and the school and community were progressively attacking the divisive forces of ethnicity, race, and all other forces of discrimination. The social drama as witnessed by the citizen-spectators thus achieved structural solutions to its ideological conflict (transcendent synthesis that comes from articulating a higher principle) and its distraught emotionality (transcendent affection that comes from confronting personal-collective evil and laying out paths to progressive improvement). Remembering that “[t]he


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 93 romance is nearest of all literary forms to the wish fulfillment dream, and for that reason it has socially a curiously paradoxical role,”47 the transcendent endings ideologically and emotionally to Barbiegate in no way actually solved the problems that were articulately by those involved. Rather, order was only apparently restored: the guilt was not washed or sacrificed away; it was eliminated through transformation. By the end, Barbiegate was no longer about an eight-year-old’s civil right to discuss the racial attitudes of her peers. It was about learning when English is a second language; about the underclass and ways to improve its educational achievements; about clarity of school policy; and about collective commitments by the community, the school system, and even the state to find the means to foster social harmony. Those items comprised the dream that Barbiegate fostered. The paradox, as Northrop Frye would have it, lay in decrying the science and the politics of the Barbie study but then escaping to a larger cultural realm to articulate the very concerns that the eight-yearold’s study seemed to demonstrate. That which had been denied vehemently at the beginning of the evening was affirmed in equally impassioned performances by the end of the night.

RHETORIC, AUDIENCES, POLITICAL PERFORMANCE, AND THE PUBLIC PROCEEDING This essay has ambled through discussions of Aristotle’s three defining characteristics of drama—mythos (the emplotment of human activity), dianoia (“thought” or discursive formations as we now understand that phrase), and ethos (the character of individuals and the communities of which they are parts)—albeit in terms Aristotle might have found a bit strange. It remains now to pull together both interpretations of Barbiegate as a concrete crisis in the life of a community and of public proceedings as a genre of activity in the life of the polis. I will begin this assemblage process by discussing explicitly something only alluded to along the way in this chapter—the audience, its experiences and the uses to which it could put Barbiegate. Then I will return to the definition with which we began this investigation in order to fill it out a bit, and conclude with some additional thoughts about the place of public proceedings in contemporary political culture.


94 / Gronbeck The Audience of Public Proceedings I have referred regularly to “citizen-spectators.” Now is the time to think about them in a more focused way. A television gallery. The audience may well have had expectations and personal interests in Barbiegate the evening they tuned in, but they also were treated to a political spectacle. That is, their television screens positioned them in several important ways; in the electronic world, specularity is a central term.48 As Murray Edelman argued in 1988: “The spectacle constituted by news reporting [or live televised community events of import] continuously constructs and reconstructs social problems, crises, enemies, and leaders and so creates a succession of threats and reassurances.These constructed problems and personalities furnish the content of political journalism and the data for historical and analytic political studies. They also play a central role in winning support and opposition for political causes and policies.”49 Specularity is a term encompassing the ways by which viewers are positioned by what they view. They are positioned by the array of signs that constitute the image, that is, by what they actually see.They are positioned by the camera angles, by the places from which they look.The screen itself serves as a frame, cutting away from sight the nonseen so as to emphasize that which is actually in view. And all of this they are allowed to see from home or some other location, at a distance. There is always an actual and a psychologicalsymbolic distance between political actors and their constituents; that is part of what representation is all about—working separated from, yet for the sake of, those who cannot be there to do the labor of the polis. Watching Barbiegate through the inferior technology of locally produced television—bad lighting in the board room, sound and a two-camera setup arrayed so as to compile a record of, not involve viewers intimately in, the events—is to be positioned at a great distance, in a political gallery. The technologies of local access television are distancing. They do not work with close-ups; the hard surfaces of the walls give sound a distracting echo; the breaks, false starts, speech disfluencies, and the shuffle of people to and from the mikes call attention to the apparatuses of the proceeding itself. What is created for the audience is a gallery of political performances, to be assessed as such, because of the cavern yawning between the actors and the audience


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 95 watching it. The citizen-spectators are never given a chance to willingly suspend their disbelief. Viewing at literal and psychological-symbolic distances encourages, I would argue, a series of different sorts of assessment, similar to those one might make in an artists’ gallery: of the work, of the institution putting it on, and of one’s own reaction to the work. Similarly, viewers of Barbiegate likely assessed substantively and politically the messages of individual speakers, their legitimacy in speaking and their positionality; the school board itself as a dually representative body; and their own reactions to questions of school operations, nondiscrimination as a school policy, the degree to which Boulder was a community with a proper (however that should be understood) orientation to racism, freedom of speech, and elementary education. A public proceeding, well done, should produce prudential judgments about the actors, the institution, the citizens themselves, and the community of which they are parts. Audience judgments. I think Barbiegate probably did that. The parental, professional, and school board voices that were heard articulated a thoughtfully broad range of issues that aired personal, educational, and communal concerns. The voices and subsequent positions taken by school board members were relevant to school policy, community concerns, and even, I suspect, electoral concerns. So far as the school board was concerned, I would infer from the letters to the editor that at least some vocal community parents might have liked the board to actually participate directly in the events, though by simple count the seventy-five signatories on the most formal letter thought its sentiments were proper—again, whatever that meant. The most interesting assessments for me would be those that citizens might have made about themselves and their community. The hortatory discourses that Edelman sees as central to so much of political discourse addressed to constituencies force any reasonably contemplative viewers of Barbiegate to reflect upon their own personal-social identities, ideas about race relations, students’ rights within the professionally oriented environment of public schools, and what they think a community ought to get for tax levies that pay for the educational system.50 And more in-the-large, Barbiegate should have called upon Boulder to envision or reenvision itself as a community, as a plurality of voices that speak


96 / Gronbeck to one another and that build relationships between individuals. Among the columns, for example, Maria Cote, a features editor for the Daily Camera, picked up the talk about racism, suggesting it isn’t “child’s play” even as she reviewed the economic gaps between black and white in the community and called for much more penetrating approaches to racism and inequality in the schools.51 Members of the University of Colorado Stereotyping and Prejudice Lab pushed multicultural research projects, much like the Thielen girl’s, as ways of improving ethnic understandings and relations in the schools and the community.52 Another letter assured Boulder that “silence is not golden and, in fact, may be a sign that something is wrong.”53 The self-reflexivity produced by public proceedings can be both individual and communal if only because the voices that speak are both personally and socially attuned. The political gallery is a mirror turned on one’s self and one’s collectivity, and looking into the mirror can be revelatory.54 The Daily Camera’s editorial of March 1, 2001, summed up the reflexive dimensions of the public proceeding in this way: “But in a town where feel-good community forums are too often offered up as evidence of ‘progress,’ we think individual vigilance is the real key. Let’s all take advantage of our own ‘teachable moments,’ when we default to stereotype or presumption, to deliberately stop and examine what we feel, and why. Let’s seek out and own our prejudices, not bury our heads and proclaim some kind of easy, untested purity. Because, in the end, very few of us are pure enough to do much finger-pointing.”55

The Place of Public Proceedings in Democracies Returning to our initial definition of a public proceeding—institutional hearings with audiences composed both of the actual political decision makers and of citizen-spectators—we now are in a position to deal more concretely with specific characteristics of such a political event. The hortatory language is a call to political action for both citizens and their representatives.The citizen-spectator, yes, has been put into subject positions by the televised literate, aural, and visual discourses of the event and the technologies that deliver them. But specularity is not all that can or even should occur in a public proceeding. A political proceeding goes public, one must assume, for very good reasons. Establishing modes of communication— scheduling assemblies that call for institutional-citizen interaction—perforce


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 97 occasions action. It is little wonder that exhortation is a dominating speech act in public proceedings and that, following such proceedings, citizens have come to expect activity in the public and institutional spheres. Performativity is a central activity of both citizens and their representatives in public proceedings. What Dwight Conquergood calls “embodied practice” is key to the operation of such political occasions.56 While letters and white papers can be written, manifestos issued, documentaries produced and aired, and e-mails sent from everywhere to everywhere, in public proceedings political personae are materialized in voices made present through bodies. While it is televised, the public proceeding is composed of embodied voices intermingling in mutual presence. Hobbes’s plurality of voices takes on a tribal character as society’s institutions materially interface with their members. The rhetorical power infusing such events comes from physical adjacency of personae whose voices have been officialized, that is, made suitable for public negotiation. Those from outside the community, Simmons, for example, look for ways to give themselves the authority to participate in the contestation over which frames should control outcomes and dominate the public conceptions of what the proceeding is all about. The letters to the editor, the newspaper articles, the Associated Press releases, and such, all had their place in spreading the news and acting as Publizitat—Habermas’s notion of gaining publicness or publicity.57 But, it is the physical acting-out of democratic commitments to public deliberation prior to collective decision making that marks public proceedings as peculiar activities in the polis. Because the public proceeding occurs without rigid rules of conduct (unlike court and legislative proceedings), it serves multiple functions simultaneously. Barbiegate, for example, spread information about the project, publicized the ACLU’s and Million Man March’s judgments of the events, forced public officials to take stands that could be assessed for their rationality, policy implications, and even value as bases for electoral decisions, and reflected on individual and collective visions of important social values— freedom of speech, professionalized commitments, the degree of racialethnic and economic openness of life in Boulder County and beyond. For that matter, a range of other issues were discursively stitched into the event: the achievement gap, the economics of access to the dominant Boulder culture, quota systems in school composition, the importance of state action in attacking disparities in the educational system, even a gender issue. Ulti-


98 / Gronbeck mately, a public proceeding far exceeds, at least potentially, the generic limitations of Aristotle’s original conception of rhetorical events.The public proceeding was born in the democratic era, and that shows. Overall, the public proceeding is an everyday, rhetorical check on institutional power in a democracy. The original conception of representative democracies used elections, independent courts, and, in many countries, petition to give the citizenry access to powerful political institutions. The tribal and clientele operations of nineteenth-century politics employed private relations—the ethnic blocs of some cities, the promise of services for votes in others—to make relationships between Leaders and the Led even tighter.58 The public proceeding is a step beyond mere electoral control and private access, for it includes both a public accounting and a public givingof-voice that, while not guaranteeing interaction, provides a forum for questioning, challenging, reframing, sounding alarm, and mobilizing larger publics. Therein lies their great promise.

The Other Side of the Coin And therein, too, lies their danger. Once a proceeding is opened publicly, there are few checks to public talk. No matter how hard Stan Garnett, board president, tried to rein in David Thielen the first night, he really could not do it without Thielen’s willingness finally to sit down. In the open-discussion portion of a school board meeting, topics are unlimited. The diffusion of issues, the climate of accusation and tests of loyalty/disloyalty that made the Army-McCarthy hearings so infamous, the ability to grandstand without responsibility—these are just some of the difficulties that public proceedings can present. They can effectively stop action, as many felt the House and Senate hearings over the Vietnam War did; diffused talk was allowed to proceed without forcing the larger governmental bodies to take action in concert with citizen recommendations. Only presidents, not Congress, finally acted in the early 1970s. To be sure, uncontrollable democracy can decay into anarchy, but then, it must be remembered that a public proceeding is not really a judicial or a legislative event. It is multivocal, hortatory, performative, and productive, not of public policy, but of personal and collective reflexive thoughts about who individuals and the societies they create are, what they hold to be true and


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 99 valuable, and where they want to head next on the journey through cultural space and time. A public proceeding is a transitional event between states of being and acting, and therein lies its great value—even for the citizens of Boulder County in 2001.

NOTES 1. Michael Halloran, “Doing Public Business in Public,” in Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action, ed. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Washington, DC: National Communication Association, 1978), 118. 2. Bruce E. Gronbeck, “The Rhetoric of Political Corruption: Sociolinguistic, Dialectical, and Ceremonial Processes,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 64 (1978): 155–72. 3. Kenneth Burke, The Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), 59–60. 4. Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 134. 5. I use the notion of frames very much as does Shanto Iyengar in Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 6. The term social drama is associated with Burke (see Joseph R. Gusfield, Kenneth Burke on Symbols and Society [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989], 31–32) and is extended fruitfully by sociologist Hugh Daziel Duncan in Symbols in Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) and James E. Combs, Dimensions of Political Drama (Santa Monica, CA: Goodyear, 1980). 7. Such an understanding comes from substituting “rhetoric” for “ideology” in John Thompson’s theory of discursive power laid out in Ideology and Modern Culture: Critical Social Theory in the Era of Mass Communication (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 8. Thomas Hobbes, De cive (1642/1647), chap. 7, sec. 5, http://www. constitution.org/th/decive.htm. 9. Hobbes, chap. 14, sec. 14. 10. Quoted and elaborated in Hanno Hardt and Slavko Splichal, eds., Ferdinand Tönnies on Public Opinion, foreword by Gary T. Marx (Latham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 33–34. 11. Appendix A, E. 12. Appendix A, B. 13. Appendix A, F.


100 / Gronbeck 14. Ibid. 15. Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence (New York: Academic Press, 1971), 46. 16. Appendix A, B. 17. Appendix A, D. 18. Appendix A, G. 19. Samuel McCormick, “Earning One’s Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of Public Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 109–31. 20. Ibid., 112, 114–17. 21. Appendix A, G. 22. Bruce E. Gronbeck, “Rhetorical Visions of America from the Margins, 1968– 1988,” in Retoriska Frågor:Texter om tal och talare från Quintilianus till Clinton tillägnade Kurt Johannesson, ed. Christer Åsberg (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1995), 267–81. 23. On “-ist” arguments, see Julia T. Wood and W. Barnett Pearce, “Sexists, Racists, and Other Classes of Classifiers: Form and Function of ‘. . . ist’ Accusations,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 239–50. 24. In the classical doctrine of stasis, which were the procedures devised by the ancient rhetoricians to organize potential points of clash, of the statiation of arguments, the procedural “state” was the fourth and weakest position to use in engaging one’s legal opponents. Denial of a charge was the strongest, then redefinition, then justification. Only if one could not win on those substantive grounds was a procedural argument—“This is the wrong court,” “Improper procedures were followed,” etc.—used as defense. The classic essay on stasis theory is Otto Alvin Loeb Dieter, “Stasis,” Communication Monographs 17 (1950): 345–69. 25. Appendix A, M. 26. Such materials were provided to the discussants of this case at the National Communication Association convention panel. Those materials included seven articles and editorials from the Daily Camera, Boulder County’s principal newspaper, seven letters to the editor of that paper, seven other pieces from the Denver-area articles, and the text of BVSD’s nondiscrimination policy. See Appendix B for a listing. 27. Appendix B, no. 14. 28. Appendix B, no. 15. 29. Appendix B, no. 11. 30. Burke, Grammar, 59ff. 31. Appendix A, A, see lines 24–111. 32. It should be noted that David Thielen is a physicist employed in industry.


Political Performances in Public Proceedings / 101 33. Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in Philosophy of Literary Form (1941; repr., New York: Prentice-Hall, 1957), 253–62. 34. See Appendix A, L. The outside world—newspapers, letters to the editor— picked up on the idea of “teachable moment” ironically, for the most part. Bonelli’s speech was laid against those of Satlow,Thielen, and Golden, the Act I talks, so that it could be argued that the teachable moment was missed when Ms. Thielen’s project was pulled out of the exhibit.The ironic analysis began with the Daily Camera columnist Clint Talbott’s piece under the heading “A Science Fair’s Teachable Moment,” accessed on LexisNexis, March 4, 2001, and available at http://www.thedailycamera. com/news/talbott/20lclin.html. 35. Someone could argue that Ash’s speech actually was confirmation of Schoolmaster’s assertion that pedagogical control was essential to good education, in which case it would be assessed more narrowly than I have done so here. I prefer pairing it with Thielen’s second statement because then it comes as a force engaging an issue: the degree to which the school system is meeting the expectations of parents (society). 36. Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), esp. 128–35. 37. Ibid., 135–38. 38. John Feteke, “Williams, Raymond,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), available at http://www.press.jhu.edu/ books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/raymond_williams.html, and Alvaro Pino, “Williams’s Cultural Studies Project, and Grossberg’s Critique: An Exploration,” Cultstud-L, posted August 7, 2000, available at http://www.comm.umn.edu/ ~grodman/cultstud/. 39. Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” 129. 40. Ibid., 130. 41. Ibid., 128. 42. Appendix A, K. 43. Appendix A, L. 44. Appendix A, N. 45. Ibid. 46. I am using the terms “comedy” and “romance” similar to the way Northrop Frye uses them in The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), passim. 47. Ibid., 186. 48. I treat specularity at more length in Bruce E. Gronbeck, “The Presidency in


102 / Gronbeck the Age of Secondary Orality,” in Beyond the Rhetorical Presidency, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1996), esp. 37–41. 49. Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 1. 50. Again, I use the notion of frames very much as does Iyengar in Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. 51. Appendix B, no. 2. 52. Appendix B, no. 6. 53. Pettigrew, Pettigrew, Garcia, and Ashmore, Appendix B, no. 15. 54. The issue that seemingly received the most public consideration was the nondiscrimination policy. It apparently had come into the school system amid intense public discussion in 1995 (when it was written) and again in 2000 (when the ACLU had asked if it were so broad that a student’s speech could be violated). Barbiegate, thus, was but one in a series of episodes in a continuing controversy. See Amy Bounds, “ACLU May Sue BVSD,” Daily Camera, electronically accessed March 4, 2001, and available at http://www.bouldernews.com/news/local/28lshbd.html, and Monte Whaley, “Anti-Bias Policy Linked to Pulled Science Project,” Denver Post, February 22, 2001, available at http://www.thielen.com/barbie/news0222f.htm. 55. Appendix B, no. 4. 56. Dwight Conquergood, “Rethinking Ethnography: Towards a Critical Cultural Politics,” Communication Monographs 58 (1991): 179–94, esp. 180. 57. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 58. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Why Americans Still Don’t Vote: And Why Politicians Want It ThatWay, rev. and updated ed. (Boston: Beacon, 2000).


5 Darkness on the Edge of Town On the Interface between Communicational and Racial Ideologies Darrin Hicks

In the wake of Columbine and other highly publicized school shootings, school administrators are being held accountable for the lack of civility among students.1 The motives of the Columbine students who turned on their classmates were most often explained as the result of living and learning in a hostile school environment where ridicule and social isolation are commonplace. The pain caused by student-on-student harassment, often accomplished by the name calling, taunting, and bullying attached to messages of racial and sexual inferiority, is well documented.2 Hence, the Supreme Court now holds that students who are victims of harassment can recover damages from school boards if they can show that the harassment undermined their educational pursuits and that school personnel expressed indifference to their plight.3 School boards across the country have responded to this threat of liability and to the media attention surrounding Columbine by adopting antiharassment and antidiscrimination policies. These policies define and target unacceptable expression and behavior, in particular any expression that may be deemed as sexually or racially demeaning. Designed with the goals of maintaining a civil school environment and fostering an atmosphere of mutual respect, these policies are intended to formally disassociate school personnel from the expressive action of problem students. The Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) Antidiscrimination Policy that school officials invoked to justify removing Ms. Thielen’s science fair project


104 / Hicks is just such a policy.4 Adopted in 1995 and revised in 2000, the BVSD antidiscrimination policy is a comprehensive document that does the following: defines harassing and discriminatory conduct; sets out specific forms of expression (verbal taunting, name calling, slurs and jokes, and/or displaying written materials that do the same) and behavior (physical intimidation, destroying property, and excluding from participation) that constitutes a violation of the policy; establishes the responsibility for all department heads to institute processes to prohibit discrimination, harassment and violence; and delineates procedures to resolve conflicts and ensure the accountability of students and school officials. This policy was applied to Ms. Thielen’s science fair project, which school officials interpreted as claiming that many of Ms. Thielen’s peers at Mesa Elementary felt whites were more beautiful than blacks and by implication of greater social worth. In his letter to the parents of Mesa Elementary, Principal Greg Thompson explained his decision to remove Ms. Thielen’s research project as the result of complaints by teachers and parents. He argued that the project was seen as “racially insensitive and could cause offense to students of color” and that here was a “real potential for emotional hurt and intellectual confusion.”5 Thus, the project’s display was a violation of section 4c of the antidiscrimination policy, which reads: “It is a violation of the nondiscrimination policy if, on District property, in District vehicles, or in connection with any District activity, or event a District employee or student . . . displays visual or written material with the purpose or, depending on the circumstances and context, effect of demeaning the race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, or religion of any individual or group.”6 In this chapter I contend that the public controversy ignited by the removal of Ms. Thielen’s project was, in essence, a dispute over how to account for rhetorical effects, namely the effects of both the display itself and the school’s removal of it. To that end, I explicate how the participants in this controversy used nascent theories of rhetorical effectivity to account for and justify their positions as to the display’s effect on its audiences and the consequences of its suppression. They used these theories to negotiate whether or not the display would have been a means to broaden racism or combat cultural stereotypes and whether its removal was an unjustified act of censorship or necessary to protect the fledging self-esteem of young children. In particular I focus my energies on how the BVSD policy was invoked by Clare


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 105 Schoolmaster to define the particular form and context of the project’s display as a source of racial contamination and, thereby, justify the school’s decision to remove Ms. Thielen’s science fair project. I am especially interested, for two reasons, in the controversy over the BVSD antidiscrimination policy and its application. First, the BVSD antidiscrimination policy and its application in this case is a fascinating example of how communication has emerged as both the object and instrument of liberal governance. Social ills are increasingly defined in terms of communicative deficits, such as the lack of a deliberative demeanor and the manipulation of communication networks. Concomitantly, the cure for these ills lies in the calculated reshaping of speech performance and the design and regulation of discursive space, prescriptions often traveling under the signs of deliberative democracy and community collaboration. Communication is no longer understood simply as the transmission of information or as the vehicle for giving effectiveness to the truth, but as the medium within which the ethical virtues of an autonomous citizenry are formed and fashioned as the very means of securing the imperatives of democratic government. The productive power of communication as a cultural policy resides in the formation of citizens who see themselves as speaking subjects willing to regulate and transform their communicative behaviors for the purpose of improving their political, economic, cultural, and affective relationships.7 The BVSD policy governs the communicative behaviors of district members. It translates discrimination in discursive terms, as the reputational injury incurred by demeaning expression. This translation renders such speech as a proper object for governance. The policy substantially broadens the scope of existing speech codes by authorizing any person that perceives an utterance as demeaning as a potential complainant, whether or not the utterance is directed at or affects him or her, as a potential complainant. In fact, the BVSD policy uniquely targets discriminatory expression that occurs beyond the traditionally assumed communicative context of face-to-face communication in which the speaker clearly intends to demean her or his interlocutor.8 And, by prohibiting expression that has the “effect of demeaning the race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, or religion of any individual or group,” even when these effects are not intended and are the product of particular, perhaps even singular, circumstantial and contextual conditions, the BVSD policy significantly redefines the


106 / Hicks criteria for evaluating the effects of defamation. The explicit and controversial claim of Clare Schoolmaster’s testimony will focus on those comments that are not intended to inflict injury nor are perceived to do so by the addressee, yet that are overheard by third parties and translated into demeaning forms of expression. These comments are then circulated in a manner as to create the conditions for ideological contamination. These contaminated expressions are prohibited by the policy. The BVSD nondiscrimination policy is in large part a code of civility. Its promise to create an atmosphere of mutual respect and care hinges on the demand that all of those under its jurisdiction become adept at evaluating the ethical effects of their own and their colleagues’ communicative acts.9 All district staff and students are expected to first regulate their own communicative conduct, ensuring that they do not unintentionally demean others. But, the policy also becomes the ground by which any student or district employee can criticize and report another student or staff member who issues demeaning expressions as transgressing the limits of civility constituted by the policy. The policy, therefore, becomes a standard for evaluating the ethical effects of communicative action. Each member of the district is potentially a critic. As a critic the member uses the policy to “isolate the moral character of the implied audience” of the seemingly demeaning expression and encourages her or him to offer “a moral judgment of the rhetor’s vision.”10 In short, the policy works as a dialogic instrument of governance that generates a legion of discourse analysts and rhetorical critics. But this code does more than express the standards of decorum the district hopes to maintain; it is an enforceable policy that justifies censorship and punishment up to termination and expulsion. Hence, the inherent tensions between civility and freedom of speech are very real in this case. In the last few years courts are finding that such antidiscrimination policies may in fact be unconstitutionally overbroad and in effect an attempt to impose viewpoint censorship on political speech.11 Although many of us may be loath to afford to racially demeaning speech the status of deliberative rhetoric that the First Amendment clearly protects, the courts have increasingly come to define such speech as intending to communicate political sentiment. Moreover, the courts reason it is precisely inasmuch as disparaging comments directed at an individual’s race, sex, or religion have the potential to constitute a hostile environment that their political nature is revealed.


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 107 But, most importantly for our purposes, the courts have suggested that the fatal flaw of such policies is that they fail to establish a method for assessing the effects of communicative action and, thus, cannot provide a coherent justification for regulating student and faculty discourse.12 Currently the courts are caught in a doctrinal dilemma when they adjudicate on antidiscrimination polices that regulate speech. On the one hand, there is general acceptance that the school environment is in large part constituted in and through communicative action. But, on the other hand, the courts fear using such a constitutive model to assess the effects of rhetorical acts because they cannot envision how such a model would work other than by rendering an ethical judgment on the content of the discourse. The courts fear that any claim that a particular utterance helps constitute a hostile school environment could only be warranted by reading the content of the utterance as falling within a class of expression that has already been deemed as transgressing the limits of civility defined in the policy itself and thus constituting evidence of a hostile environment. The policy would, in essence, establish the parameters of moral and ethical expression that the school district deemed acceptable and be an instrument for ferreting out and punishing any expression falling outside these parameters. The policy would then authorize content-based censorship. So, while the courts may be sympathetic to school districts’ goals of fostering an environment of mutual respect, they hold that allowing the judgment of effects to be read from the content of the expression itself would make the policy self-validating. Therefore, the courts rely on the traditional, instrumentalist account of rhetorical effects: holding out for causal evidence that the singular act of expression in question was the material cause of the effects attributed to it.13 Causal evidence for these effects operationalized as psychological injury, diminished school performance, or violence, however, is almost impossible to find. The result is that courts are faced with the knowledge that the sorts of invidious discrimination and harassment constituted by demeaning speech cannot be captured with an instrumentalist model of communication.Yet, those antidiscrimination policies that target communication practices responsible for the creation and maintenance of hostile environments cannot be endorsed, because the constitutive model of effects underwriting these policies, a model often based on methods of ideological criticism that read utterances for their historical and cultural meaning, cannot pass constitutional muster.


108 / Hicks I contend that a detailed reading of Clare Schoolmaster’s testimony reveals a possible solution to the courts’ dilemma. Albeit, a solution that may have considerable costs. Specifically, a close reading of Schoolmaster’s testimony shows that she refuses to read the rhetorical effects of Ms. Thielen’s display from either its ideological content or its epistemological commitments. Rather, she argues that the potential effect of the display to “broaden racism” is wholly the result of the interplay of its formal features and the context of the science fair in which it was displayed. This context is defined in terms of a purpose-built speech-exchange system for disseminating factual information. Schoolmaster employs a reading strategy that assesses rhetorical effects without reference to the content of the display, the motives of the participants, or the status of the display as knowledge, but rather assesses them wholly within the circulatory matrices of the display and the public it summons. By means of this reading strategy, Schoolmaster can successfully avoid the dilemma of how to utilize a constitutive account of communication without endorsing content-based censorship. This reading strategy, however, is underwritten by two powerful, longstanding communicational ideologies: the Platonic division between dissemination and dialogue and the epidemiological model of communication as social contagion. These ideologies challenge the dominant liberal interpretations of meaning, persuasion, intention, and rationality in forming and expressing political beliefs. Therefore, these ideologies, especially the social contagion thesis, wreak havoc with the traditional justifications for wide free speech rights in particular, and for the value of public deliberation, generally. Moreover, the social contagion thesis radically expands the object domain of governance by defining political agency as the authority to regulate how messages circulate within the public sphere and by undermining our faith in critical reflection and voluntary choice in formulating political beliefs, two commitments at the heart of any theory of public deliberation. Thus, its application reveals an inherent tension in the liberal project to govern in and through dialogue. It is an open question whether this tension opens up space for inventing new vocabularies and modes of thought for resisting the governmentality of dialogue, if one does want to resist it at all. Instead this contradiction between a subjectless propagation of linguistic forms infecting and, thereby making, human subjects and the phenomenological “I” presupposed by accounts of dialogue, may itself become the constitutive force animating new theories of discursive democracy. The inherent tension between You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

Darkness on the Edge of Town / 109 social contagion models of communication versus the model of communication as dialogue may then supplant the tensions between liberty and equality at the heart of modern nondiscursive theories of democracy.14 While it remains beyond the scope of this essay to attempt an answer to this question, I would be happy if this case study prompted some reflection upon it. Here we come to the second reason the application of the BVSD policy and the controversy it ignited warrants interest: It is a particularly fertile event for understanding how communicational ideologies shape political judgment. The doctrinal dilemmas that antidiscrimination polices have created for the courts and how these dilemmas are addressed and resolved by Clare Schoolmaster are intriguing cases of how ideologies of communication shape the modes of interpretation, the evaluation of evidence, and the justifications of predictions about the consequences of rhetorical action (and here I am expanding Judith Irvine’s definition of linguistic ideologies as “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” to include those ideas about public and interpersonal communication as well as linguistic form and function).15 I am especially interested in explicating how ordinary social actors, like Clare Schoolmaster and Alvertis Simmons, use communicational ideologies to invest speech-exchange systems like dialogue and deliberation with ethical substance. Having done so, they can use them to create standards of communicational rationality and reasonableness to police their own and others’ conduct in deliberative settings. In the remainder of the chapter, I take an ethnomethodologically inspired approach to rhetorical criticism to explicate the working logics animating Schoolmaster’s and Simmons’s evaluations of the social reality constituted by the display.16 I then explicate the forms of practical reasoning that shape how they use these evaluations to distribute blame and assign responsibility. I pay particular attention to the ways that the communicational ideologies underwriting each of their assessments of the display’s rhetorical effects interface with racial ideologies and how this interface is used to mark and govern the affective borders between white and black, between Boulder and Denver.

JUSTIFICATORY GAMES: THE MESA STAFF SPEAK The February 27, 2001, meeting of the Boulder Valley School Board was not a hearing; there was no verdict rendered. It was not a debate; there was no You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

110 / Hicks decision made and no one’s arguments were answered. It was not an inquiry; no facts were found and no problems defined. Nor was it a deliberation; there was no new policy formulated and no recommendations were made. Because the decision had been made, the display removed, the apology offered and accepted, and the credit for the science fair project awarded, what was left to do was offer the participants the opportunity to publicly justify their positions. In this game of public justification the participants’ goal was not to convince the others of the rightness of their position and, thereby, win their adherence.17 Rather, their aim was to display for the public the reasons they made the decisions they did and to make those reasons appear to be rational and reasonable. These justifications did not need to be true or compelling, but simply sufficient to cultivate the appearance that they made the decision in light of the available evidence, to the best of their abilities and with good intentions. Someone else may have decided differently, but as long as the public can see that the decision was indeed made in a responsible manner, no more justification is necessary. Participants simply must show that their decision was one among several appropriate responses to the demands of the situation (it was rational) and that it was not an abuse of political power (it was reasonable).18 As long as their reasons appear to be rational and reasonable, then, the school board can count on the public accepting the legitimacy of their decision, even if some of them would have decided differently. Clare Schoolmaster’s testimony was the first opportunity for those school officials responsible for removing Ms. Thielen’s project to publicly account for their decision. Her testimony is the official explication of Principal Thompson’s claim that the project could be “seen as racially insensitive” and that it had the potential “for real emotional hurt and intellectual confusion.” Moreover, it stands as the primary attempt, in the record, by the school to reframe the event: first, so the decision to remove the display would be seen as a justifiable breach of the norm to respect freedom of speech, and, second, so the school board hearing itself could be redefined as an invitation for members of the public to realign themselves with the relations of authority preceding the event. To be considered a successful account—that is, as a justification for the breach of the student’s rights and the realignment of responsibility needed to restore the preexisting moral order—Schoolmaster’s testimony had to ac-


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 111 complish three objectives: She needed to justify the decision to remove the display, showing that it was both a rational and reasonable act. She needed to establish the propensity for the display to demean the race of students, both those students present and those who might become the object of harassment if word of the project were circulated, to claim that the display violated the BVSD nondiscrimination policy. And she needed to reassign blame for the incident to the appropriate parties, establish who among them has the authority to speak on racial issues, and show how recognizing the proper distribution of blame and responsibility could serve as the source of rapprochement.19 Clare Schoolmaster had no intention of arguing against David Thielen or Barry Satlow and Judd Golden from the Boulder County ACLU. As she states in her opening (lines 376–78) she is there to “clarify the information concerning the decision to not display the Barbie doll science fair project.”20 To “clarify” implies that she has no intention of altering her position, and that she has the authority to correct others’ misperceptions of the event. This authority follows from her being the school’s spokesperson. She begins by describing herself as a teacher at Mesa Elementary, but after a self-initiated repair, immediately upgrades this description to that of staff spokesperson.The difference between being a teacher who speaks as a representative of the staff and speaking on behalf of the staff is a crucial one for establishing the footing necessary to “clarify” the decision. There is always a gap between a representative and her or his constituency, and opponents can exploit that gap to their advantage by raising doubts about the correspondence between what the representative wants and what her or his constituency actually desires. As a spokesperson, however, there is no gap between her testimony and what we are to assume is the feelings of every teacher at Mesa, an assumption she attempts to warrant by taking on the collective voice of “the staff at Mesa” (lines 375–76) to announce their intention to clarify the decision to “not display” the project. Note how the phrase “to not display the Barbie doll science fair project” (lines 377–78)—as opposed to the candidate formulation “the decision to remove the Barbie science fair project”—makes the decision appear as the product of prior deliberation rather than a reaction to the “offensive” content of the display. This appearance helps render the decision as reasonable, because it does not ground the decision in the subjective “sensibilities” of the teachers, a standard that has been ruled unconstitu-


112 / Hicks tionally overbroad and admonished in the ACLU’s letter and testimony, but as the product of deliberation over the likely consequences of the display.21 Throughout the rest of her testimony she uses the pronouns “our” and “we” to continuously enact the collective voice of the staff, with the only exception being her use of “professional” to modify “we” midspeech (line 411), a modification that attaches both expertise and a special responsibility for the welfare of the students as incumbent features of the membership category “staff,” thereby expanding the scope of their authority. Having established the moral footing needed to “clarify” the decision, Schoolmaster can now use the remainder of her testimony to instruct her audience as to why the decision was warranted by the teacher’s professional judgment and, in fact, was necessitated by their professional responsibility to care for the student body.22

FORM + CONTEXT = EFFECT: INTERPRETING SCHOOLMASTER’S CONSTITUTIONAL POSITION The most fascinating feature of Schoolmaster’s testimony is that she does not justify the decision to remove the project by addressing the epistemological and ontological aspects of the display. She does not claim that the project is bad science or that social science projects should not be allowed in the science fair. She will not attack those absolutist interpretations of the First Amendment that suggest that the nondiscrimination policy does not provide adequate legal grounds to remove the project. She will not say that the claims embedded in the display are incorrect or racist in and of themselves. Nor does she interpret the display as disclosing the character of the Mesa students, their parents, or even Boulder itself. In refusing to ground her justification on epistemological or ontological grounds she completely sidesteps the arguments offered by David Thielen, the ACLU, and the editorials condemning the decision. Rather, Schoolmaster, uninterested in discerning the motives of Ms. Thielen or her father and seemingly indifferent to the content of the display and what it means, is concerned with how the form of the display circulates within the context of the science fair (articulated as a purpose-built system for distributing the right to speak and disseminate information) and how this circulation produces unintended and potentially damaging consequences. Schoolmaster does not perform a reading of the display’s cultural meaning to uncover its ideological content and use the of-


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 113 fensive nature of that content to justify the decision to take it down. Instead, she performs a form-sensitive reading of the display and the context of the science fair to determine the responsibility, and concomitantly the blame, that each of the parties must take for the social reality created by the circulation of talk about the display, in particular talk that has the potential to demean. The heart of Schoolmaster’s testimony is seen in lines 387–96: “Our major concern was the form in which this project would have been displayed. Letting the project stand on its own would not have allowed for a needed discussion to tackle and address the complex and difficult subject of racism.The project would have served to even broaden racism if young students took results at face value or insensitive, ignorant remarks were overheard in passing.” Here Schoolmaster lays out the primary justification for the decision. The display would have had the effect of broadening racism if the teachers would have allowed it in the science fair. In claiming that the display, if allowed to stand, would broaden racism, she is directly orienting to section 4c of the BVSD policy, which again states: “It is a violation of the nondiscrimination policy if, on District property, in District vehicles, or in connection with any District activity, or event a District employee or student . . . displays visual or written material with the purpose or, depending on the circumstances and context, effect of demeaning the race, ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, or religion of any individual or group.” The display is clearly not an act of verbal aggression, thus, the first prong of the policy, that the display is purposely demeaning, is inapplicable. The second prong, that the display, given the circumstances and context, has the effect of demeaning, however, is most definitely applicable given Schoolmaster’s formulation of the display’s perlocutionary force. In line 394 Schoolmaster posits a condition that would engender the display as a device for spreading racism: “if young students took results at face value.” Here she is claiming that if the students at the fair failed to read the project’s finding that the majority of the students in Ms. Thielen’s poll find whites more attractive than African Americans ironically, as it was obviously intended to be read by Ms. Thielen, they would simply take this finding as established fact and hold it true for themselves as well. They would not be able to discern the ad populum fallacy at play in any attempt to generalize the findings as a social fact. No reasonable person can, Schoolmaster implies, ex-


114 / Hicks pect “young students” to posses the discursive competency needed to read the display in any other way than at “face value,” especially if we assume that they have yet to be instructed in the realities of white supremacy and its cultural legacy. The elementary school science fair, according to Schoolmaster, is not the appropriate place to teach that lesson. The classroom is. As she says in lines 396–402, “We do not fear the topics of prejudice or intolerance. We ensure these issues are incorporated into the curriculum and are brought to human scale through literature, discussions of current events, and in our dealings with the daily conflicts that we have in our classrooms and on the playground.” It would be easy to read this statement as making an epistemological claim, that the humanities and social sciences, not the sciences, are the appropriate disciplines for teaching about the “complex and difficult subject of racism.” Perhaps she is making just such a claim, but I think a more useful reading, especially if we are interested in it as a justification for the decision to remove the project, is to place it alongside her claim in line 390 that it is the form of the display, in particular the fact that display would “stand on its own,” that concerned the Mesa staff. And, thus, we should interpret her claim throughout the testimony as concerning the nature of the science fair and how it limited the available rhetorical forms the display could take. A typical science fair display, and it is important to note that Ms. Thielen’s was no exception, takes the form of a poster that sets out the research question, or hypothesis, the experiment designed to address the question, the process of gathering data, and the results and analysis of the data. What it does not typically do is offer a historical, social, or political genealogy of the research question or a set of interpretive guidelines for reading the results and translating them into policy recommendations. We do know that Ms. Thielen’s project did not do either of these things because David Thielen and Barry Satlow go to great lengths to assure the audience that this project was a model science fair display and, thus, never made any claims about the meanings or significance of the results. David Thielen defends the project by explaining that “Um, the experiment was not derogatory, it was not racially discriminatory—it’s right there [referring to the actual display he has set in front of the podium]—did not create racial animosity. And its conclusion is incredibly innocuous.”23 The ACLU letter claimed that any interpretation of the findings that depicted the students as racist could only be the product of someone “speculatively putting spin on the results.”24 Exactly.


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 115 Schoolmaster never claims that the findings are racist or that they portray the students at Mesa as unwittingly racist. This is a conclusion that could only be made if one already knew that using race as the standard of assessing beauty and, thereby, social worth was wrong. This is precisely the background knowledge that “young students,” according to Schoolmaster, do not have. Since there is nothing in the display that would impart that knowledge and, crucially, the form of the science fair display actually prohibits putting the findings “in human scale,” there is no reason to believe that these “young students” would treat the fact that their peers use race to assign social worth as any less “innocuous” than the process by which mold forms on bread or what happens to white mice when you feed them a diet of junk food. They are simply facts that will be incorporated as knowledge. If the other participants were to doubt this line of reasoning, Alvertis Simmons’s, the chairman of the Denver Committee of the Million Man March speaking in support of the school’s decision to remove the display, “face value” reading of the display forcefully performs its validity: “But would you allow your school newspaper to say that Blacks are less attractive than Whites? Would you? No, you wouldn’t. So, why would you allow us a project to come into your school system, a project that says, you got two dolls, one Black, one White? You got thirty kids. Twenty-four of them, it’s my understanding, said that the White doll is much prettier than the Black doll. What do you all think the Civil Rights movement was all about? It was about self-esteem for Black folks and for minorities.”25 The second way the display could “broaden racism” is if “insensitive, ignorant remarks were overheard in passing” (lines 395–96). Where the first item in the conditional concerned the welfare of innocent children who were not culturally literate enough to understand the display, this second item targets those audience members who do understand the display’s intended meaning but choose to disregard it and purposely mistranslate it so as to transgress community norms of decorum. Schoolmaster is most likely referring to older students who would turn the display’s findings into a joke by overstating their significance and overplaying their scientific value. They would read the display ontologically—that it discloses the essential character of Mesa students and Boulder residents in general—and, then, use that reading as a means to ridicule and harass the students of Mesa, the residents of Boulder, and perhaps even minority students. Schoolmaster may


116 / Hicks also be referring to those media outlets that would turn the display, and the ensuing controversy over whether to allow it or not, into a scandal: A media heyday in which the Mesa students would be portrayed as young racists and the Mesa staff as brutal censors. This is certainly Jordana Ash’s, the president of the Mesa Parent/Teacher Organization, take: “As some of you may know, Mesa has received an incredible amount of um harassing and really disturbing phone-calls and emails from the community, the nation and even internationally. And this has done some serious damage to the morale of this incredible school, this award-winning school, and these award-winning teachers.”26 Schoolmaster, however, is not overly concerned with the character of these malicious students or irresponsible journalists, but, rather, with the innocent bystanders who would “overhear” these “insensitive, ignorant remarks in passing.” Schoolmaster fears the circulation of remarks about the display, in the form of jokes, gossip, scandalous stories, and the like, that may demean the reputation of minority students, or more likely of Mesa Elementary students and staff. And, perhaps, “broaden racism” by circulating these “ignorant, insensitive remarks” to vulnerable audiences who would repeat these messages to others and, thereby, turn them into racists.

UNCONTROLLABLE CIRCULATION: THE CHALLENGES OF OVERHEARING But, what does overhearing entail and why does Schoolmaster claim that it is so dangerous? Following Emanuel Schegloff, we can identify two aspects of what he terms the “overhearer’s problem” that make it clear why.27 First, every act of overhearing exposes the inherent instability of meaning. A person who overhears a conversation, either catching a snippet of it or perhaps all of it, without understanding the “what-is-being-talked-about” independently of the talk she or he is hearing, will “hear ambiguities in the talk that are not there for the ratified participants in the conversation.”28 Coparticipants in conversation design their talk so that they can continuously track what is being talked about and when ambiguity arises they can initiate a repair to restore mutual understanding. The overhearer, however, cannot. He or she must construct a new context in which the utterance makes sense. There are, however, no guarantees that this context will be isomorphic with the context constructed by the ratified participants; in fact, it is likely that


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 117 it will differ in consequential ways. The overhearer must take each snippet of conversation and imagine a variety of contexts that render it meaningful; each newly imagined context raising the possibility that the original context of meaning constructed by the ratified participants could be lost in translation. If Schoolmaster’s description of the inherent ambiguity of the display is correct, those students who pass by the display and overhear concerned teachers and parents discuss its ramifications or those who hear about the display from media reports will face the same problem that faces every overhearer: constructing a context that makes sense of the display. The display, already severely undercontextualized, is sure to be mistranslated, perhaps maliciously so. These fears are not allayed when we consider the second aspect of the overhearer’s problem, the uncontrollable circulation and citation of the mistranslated utterance. The utterance can be replayed for countless others, picked up and reperformed at different times by otherwise unrelated people. Moreover, the process of reconstructing possible contexts of interpretation is an activity best done with others. Anyone who has engaged in trading gossip and circulating rumors understands that much, if not all, of these activities’ pleasures arise from the communal play of imagining scenarios that otherwise might remain hidden or unknown. Gossip, as pointed out by Vincent Rafael, “is contagious, insinuating itself into other forms of writing and speech without itself becoming a separate and distinguishable discourse.”29 Gossip provokes fear because it triggers a potentially “limitless series of speculations.” And it is this combination of the “highly speculative with the potentially limitless that lends gossip its scandalous aspect. It does not know where to stop, nor does it care to. It therefore produces the opposite effect of pity: suspicion, disrespect and disbelief.”30 Or as Jordana Ash testified, it can unleash a series of “harassing and disturbing phone calls and emails” designed to demean the students and staff at Mesa Elementary.31 Once Ms. Thielen’s display has been translated into a newsworthy item, it can be disseminated indiscriminately. The media attention, including the coverage of the school board meeting, has reconfigured the display as a form of public address. It addresses a public comprised of anyone whose attention is captured by the display’s findings. Since the meanings that can be ascribed to the project’s conclusions are so indeterminate, the potential for them to be translated into a sensational form is potentially unlimited. The


118 / Hicks display’s message, hence, can no longer be restricted to any particular audience, such as Ms. Thielen’s fellow students, her parents, her teachers who are judging the fair, or even her friends and family. The security that comes with knowing whom the display’s audience is and trusting them to interpret the findings in a charitable manner is lost. The display, in Michael Warner’s words, “commits itself in principle to the participation of any stranger” and, therefore, “puts at risk the concrete world that is its given condition of possibility.”32 For the participants of the February 27, 2001, BVSD school board meeting, Alvertis Simmons is that stranger, one who is outside of a group but who has the moral authority necessary to confront it with its failings, as George Simmel explains.33 From the first lines of his testimony in which he stresses his long and troublesome journey from Denver to Boulder to his report of the many phone calls from “African American parents in the Denver community” who have gotten word of the display and are “very hurt by what has happened here in Boulder,” Simmons is there to let the members of the school board and the audience know that news of the project’s display is circulating, that Denver’s African American community feels the project’s display demeans African American children, and that it is taken as a visible sign of the racial animosity of the residents of Boulder.34 Simmons’s testimony is the embodiment of the conditions Schoolmaster posits that would have rendered the display an instrument to “broaden racism.” He validates the first condition by reading the display at “face value,” a reading that confirms his suspicion that the residents of Boulder do use race as the basis for assigning social value and that they teach this lesson to their children. And by reporting his journey to Boulder with word that news of the display has circulated throughout the area, and that its circulation must be stopped or it will hurt even more African Americans, he provides evidence that the “insensitive, ignorant remarks” will indeed be “overheard in passing.” Yet there are crucial differences between Simmons’s and Schoolmaster’s testimonies. For Simmons, the content of the display is at issue. The project’s findings are evidence that Boulder is a racist community and that the children of Boulder have been socialized to think in racial terms as well. Simmons is, however, not overly concerned about the souls of Boulder’s children; he simply wants the teachers and the school board to stop the leakage of these racist messages into the public sphere so they will no longer hurt the


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 119 self-esteem of Denver’s African American community. Schoolmaster, meanwhile, cannot brand the third-grade class at Mesa Elementary as protoracists (a conclusion that I am sure she does not believe anyway). Instead, she treats the display as a well-intentioned but potentially dangerous mistake. Not only was the form of the display wholly inadequate to frame the findings so they could provide an important lesson about tolerance and the parents’ need to interrogate their children’s, and by extension their own, nascent reliance on racial hierarchies to assign social value, the science fair itself is an inappropriate context for the “needed discussion to tackle and address the complex and difficult subject of racism.” This is not because racism is an unsuitable topic for science, or the third grade too soon to discuss the issue of race, but because the science fair, by its very nature, does not allow for dialogue. The science fair is, rather, a site for the dissemination of information, for the broadcasting of discoveries, but it is not conducive to conversation.

(IM)POSSIBILITY OF DIALOGUE: THE SCIENCE FAIR AS A COMMUNICATIVE FORUM Throughout the proceedings, the limitation of the science fair as a forum for addressing questions of race was a pervasive topic. Schoolmaster closed her testimony with this claim: “We feel our decision was appropriate given the ages of our students, the arena of a grade school science fair, and the district’s nondiscrimination policy. The project did not belong in the science fair forum, but the issues it brings up do belong in the classroom, in the homes of our students” (lines 434–40). Like many categorical descriptions used in persuasive discourse—by which I mean, the culturally organized descriptive practices through which people classify actors, actions, and event and, in the process, strategically impute cultural knowledge about motives, expectations, obligations, and consequences to those actors, actions, and events—Schoolmaster’s depiction of context is accomplished through a contrastive pair: the science fair versus the classroom.35 This disjunctive contrast was the crux of much of the testimony given at the school board meeting as well as the editorials written about the event. For example, Rita Davis, a parent at Mesa Elementary, testified that the project did not belong in the science fair: “Rather than having it in the science fair, I would rather have seen it as a parent in the classroom, or at a school assembly, which we have every


120 / Hicks week, and we have some wonderful things that the kids do at assemblies.”36 Clint Talbott’s editorial in the Boulder Daily Camera underscored the belief that a science fair is inherently not a dialogic space. “Later the director of elementary education argued, ‘a science fair is not the way we choose to discuss race relations.’ No Kidding. A science fair is not the way we discuss anything. It is not a discussion. The girl was not propounding a point of view. She conducted a scientific experiment. She reported the results. She displayed initiative, curiosity and discipline. Just as she was supposed to.”37 Even David Thielen’s defense of the display oriented to Schoolmaster’s contrast between the chaotic context of the science fair and the safety of the classroom. “However we cannot limit discussion about race merely to the sterile controlled environment of a set lesson in a classroom. We must discuss it in any context. The world is not neat and ordered; it is messy and chaotic and only in the context of the real world can we address all aspects of the racial issues we ourselves face today.”38 Each of these accounts describes the classroom and the science fair, first and foremost, as communicative contexts. Not in the impoverished terms of the standard treatment of context by rhetorical critics and discourse analysts, but as an embodied set of procedural norms regulating who has the authority to speak, how they should speak, the types of knowledge claims that can be heard as authentic and true and, most strenuously, where persons should speak from and to whom.39 As communicative contexts the science fair and the classroom assign even more power than who has the right to speak and the obligation to listen and, thus, the participants describe the science fair and classroom in moral and political terms. This contextualization strategy is anchored in the medical binaries the participants used to describe each context: sterility/contamination, controlled/ uncontrollable, healthy/infected, and sensitive/exposed. Hence, the decision to display the project in the science fair or to remove it and remand it to the safe environs of the classroom was presented as a moral and political choice by each of these participants. The classroom, on the one hand, as a site of dialogue and discussion becomes a place capable of fostering searching conversations on race. The science fair, on the other hand, is an “arena” for the dissemination of factual information at best and scandalous gossip at worst. The classroom is a semiprivate space, coextensive with the home, and, thus, a “risk-free” environment for these children to examine and explore their attitudes and behavior, while the science fair is a quasi-public


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 121 “forum”; that is, it is a school-sponsored event that potentially addresses a public of strangers and, thereby, puts the reputation of the school, the staff, and the students at risk. The moral and political agency ascribed to the contexts of the science fair and classroom—evidenced by the ability to transfigure the display into either an instrument that “would have even served to broaden racism” if left standing “on its own,” or “a learning opportunity for the upper grades” and a “springboard to healthy and honest conversations on racism,” if presented in a “risk-free atmosphere where the discussion of and sharing of ideas are common and encouraged practices”—is underwritten by two longstanding, powerful ideologies of communication: the Platonic division between dissemination and dialogue and the popular model of communication as a form of social contagion. The disjunction between the science fair and the classroom is an instantiation of the Platonic division between writing and speech, and between dissemination and dialogue. As John Durham Peters argues, “Plato was haunted by multiplication, a term that ought to be taken in its double sense of simple copying and sexual reproduction. Whereas oral speech almost invariably occurs as a singular event shared uniquely by the parties privy to the discussion, writing allows all manner of strange coupling: the distant influence the near, the dead speak to the living, and the many read what was intended for the few.”40 Since Plato, dissemination has been seen as impersonal, asymmetrical, seductive, and unfaithful and dialogue as selfless, mutual, reciprocal, and transformative. Dialogue is personal, concerned with discovering the truth through intersubjective agreement. Dissemination is indiscriminate, concerned with attracting attention and power. It is this promiscuity of dissemination that Schoolmaster uses to render the Mesa Elementary science fair as a dangerous site for the propagation of “insensitive, ignorant remarks.”

CONTAGION: CIRCULATORY MATRICES AS RHETORICAL AGENTS But why should we assume that these “insensitive, ignorant remarks” would have actually increased the number of children who hold racist attitudes? The promiscuous nature of the science fair may be enough for Schoolmaster to show that these remarks will circulate widely, and Simmons’s and Ash’s


122 / Hicks testimony are presented as evidence that she is correct. But, the propensity for wide circulation does not prove in and of itself that those who “overhear” such remarks will be turned into protoracists. Especially if we do not assume that all of the children of Boulder are “judgmental dopes” who believe everything they hear.41 Or that they are already racists and the display simply outed them. Schoolmaster’s claim that the display “would have” actually had the power to produce the effect of broadening racism (and her use of the epistemic modal “would have” throughout lines 386–407 signals that she is certain that these effects “would have” actually transpired) must then be underwritten by a second linguistic ideology, one capable of explaining the display’s perlocutionary force in the absence of conscious uptake. In other words, to satisfy the dictates of the BVSD nondiscrimination policy, which holds that one must be able to show that the display would have the “effect of demeaning” the race of some person as the burden of proof for invoking the policy, Schoolmaster needs access to a model of rhetorical effectivity that explains how beliefs and attitudes are transmitted and incorporated into a person’s commitment set without her or his assent. The epidemiological conceptualization of communication as a form of contagion—ideas and feelings are transmitted from person to person like germs, and, thus, communication is best modeled as a virus—is her solution (signaled by her formulation of the display’s effects in lines 392–96—the display “would have even served to broaden racism” if “insensitive, ignorant were overheard in passing”).42 The social contagion thesis holds that emotions and beliefs spread through and leap between populations in a process that is more akin to a disease like the flu than rational choice. The logic of contagion, as explained by Alvin Goldman, is quite simple.43 First, the carrier exposes her or his condition to a potential receiver and, second, the receiver catches or contracts the condition. The contraction phase, best illustrated by emotional contagion, can also be broken down into two discrete steps. First, when the receiver observes the emotional state of the carrier, most notably through facial expressions, her or his face involuntarily mimics that of the sender. Next these facial expressions trigger “resonant emotion” in the observer. This multistep process explains how emotions are communicated from one person to another, or, better, how they are recreated in another person. Belief contagion works much the same way. When a person makes public her or his beliefs,


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 123 the receiver often naturally comprehends the proposition communicated and also accepts or believes. This is not always the case, however. As with diseases the receiver may posses “antibodies,” for instance, contrary evidence, which leads her or him to reject or repel “the invading proposition.” “But acceptance of a proffered proposition,” Goldman argues, “may be the default reaction.”44 Hence, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychology defines contagion as a form of collective excitement “in which emotions and behavioral patterns spread rapidly and are accepted uncritically by members of a collective.”45 Contrary to most theories of persuasion, there is no assumption here that the acceptance or rejection of a belief is a voluntary choice. Common to all accounts of social contagion, which recently have been studied under the sign of memetics, is the hypothesis that attitudes, feelings, or behavior are spread without the recipient perceiving an intentional influence attempt on the part of the sender. But, importantly, the transmission of a belief is a voluntary choice, one a person can be held responsible for. While the social contagion thesis may be simple, its conclusions are radical: under certain circumstances mere touch or contact with some sociocultural phenomena is sufficient for social transmission to occur. “The results of contagion research suggest,” as Paul Marsden, a memetics scholar, explains, “that just as we do not choose to be infected with, and pass on, biological contagions, we often behave as if we have little control over the culture we become infected with and consequently spread.”46 This claim radically undermines the traditional image of the autonomous human agent constituted by intentional action and rational judgment. “Whilst we may like to believe,” Marsden continues, “that we consciously and rationally decide on how to respond to situations, social contagion evidence suggests that some of the time this is simply not the case. Rather than generating and ‘having’ beliefs, emotions and behaviors, social contagion research suggests that, in some very real sense, those beliefs, emotions and behaviors ‘have’ us.”47 This conclusion plays havoc with the traditional justifications of free speech, in particular, and democratic public deliberation, in general. Public reason depends on the assumption that individuals are capable of listening to both sides of an argument and making rational, or at least pragmatically wise, decisions.48 The social contagion thesis, by locating rhetorical agency in circulatory matrices, or what memeticists term “thought contagions,” rather than the speaking subject, implies a much more fragmentary, chaotic, and


124 / Hicks conflict-ridden account of public decision making than the communal, epistemically sensitive, civic-minded Aristotelian account of deliberation underwriting classic free speech theories, such as John Stuart Mill’s “Marketplace of Ideas” or Alexander Meiklejohn’s claim that free speech is the cornerstone of political freedom.49 In the world of social communication described by the contagion thesis, deliberation becomes a Hobbesian war of each against all, except that the warriors are not people but viral particles of information that constitute their individual hosts and use them as vectors of propagation.50 The public sphere is not comprised of rational choosers deliberating over their collective future, but, paraphrasing Dilip Goankar and Elizabeth Povinelli, a swarm of cosmopolitan forms that act as mobile carriers of culture populating, cross-pollinating and summoning transnational publics.51 This communicational ideology does substantial work for Schoolmaster. It provides her an account of rhetorical effectivity that locates the power of the display to “broaden racism” completely within the interplay between its form and its circulation in and through public space. She need not claim that these effects in any way derive from the display’s cultural meaning—that it sends a symbolic message to which the culture attaches racial significance—or its epistemological commitments as science, effects on which both Barry Satlow and David Thielen’s justifications depend—Satlow in his assertion that the project is a replication of Kenneth Clark’s pioneering studies and Thielen when he defends the project as an exemplar of the scientific method.52 If Schoolmaster can claim the perlocutionary effects of the display do not originate from its “offensive” conclusions (as Alvertis Simmons does) or by virtue of its inappropriate application of social science (as Angelika Schroeder, a member of the board, argues in her testimony), but wholly from the interplay of form and context, she can satisfy both the dictates of the nondiscrimination policy and, more importantly, the courts’ demand that the policy avoid viewpoint censorship.53 Furthermore, the social contagion thesis’s formulation of the constitutive force of communication in a biological idiom translates the account of reputational injury at the heart of the BVSD policy, an account the courts reject as insufficiently causal, into a naturalistic schema of cause and effect that can legitimately circulate under the law’s auspices. Schoolmaster can also count on the anxiety provoked by the rhetoric of contagion to help her establish and maintain the affective border between


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 125 the science fair and the classroom, and by extension the affective border between Boulder and Denver. Contagion may be described in neutral terms by memeticists like Marsden, but its usage is always contaminated by its association with deadly diseases and, thus, even the most subtle of its metaphors can signify danger and mobilize calls to protect the community’s children. The panics associated with contagious diseases are not proportionate to their mortality but are, as Margaret Humphreys finds, tied to the sense of selfcontainment or integrity that is felt by the body or place that has been infected.54 By breaking the sacrosanct integrity of the classroom and concomitantly the teacher’s ability to control the ideological messages circulating within the school, the display provoked a great deal of anxiety, as evidenced by Jordana Ash’s and Rita Davis’s testimony. I will conclude this chapter with an analysis of how Schoolmaster leveraged this anxiety to assign blame to the parents and reclaim the authority of professional judgment. But first, we need to account for the tight interface between the communicational ideology of social contagion and the politics of race.

CONFESSIONS OF A CARRIER: SOCIAL CONTAGION AND THE POLITICS OF RACE The reason this communicational ideology plays so well in Schoolmaster’s testimony stems from the historical articulation of the rhetoric of contagion to racial politics.This articulation has been especially seductive for those narrating cross-cultural encounters. For centuries the rhetoric of contagion has been used to marshal blame onto and justify exclusion and violence against outsiders and outcasts, especially immigrants and minorities.55 The historian Alan Kraut has coined the term “medical nativism” to mark this practice of stigmatizing the Other as the source of disease and, therefore, violent exclusion.56 Two new medical discourses of the nineteenth century, bacteriology and epidemiology, played a crucial role in justifying both physical and intellectual segregation. Particularly so for African Americans, where “blackness” was equated with filth and disease and the social status of patients influenced medical decisions about etiology and treatment.57 A fascinating case of rhetorical reappropriation, the communicational ideology of contagion has come to underwrite much of contemporary antiracist politics too. Where medical nativists held blacks were the source of


126 / Hicks disease, in the post-civil-rights era antiracist activists and theorists use the language of contagion to describe the etiology and treatment of racism itself. Racism is figured as a disease “often unwillingly and unwittingly hosted by members of the dominant American culture.”58 Charles Lawrence has persuasively argued that understanding racism as a disease rather than as a crime more “accurately describes both its origins and the nature of the injury it inflicts.”59 This is because understanding racism as a disease better accounts for the unconscious nature of our racially discriminatory beliefs and ideas. As the recipients of a historical and cultural legacy of racial antipathy, Lawrence contends, “Americans inevitably share many ideas, attitudes and beliefs that attach significance to an individual’s race and induce negative feelings and opinions about nonwhites.”60 To the extent that this “cultural belief system has influenced us all,” he continues, “we are all racists.”61 Yet, because we refuse to recognize the ways that our cultural legacy has shaped our identity and informs our actions, most of us do not recognize our racism. In other words, racism “infects almost everyone.”62 Our reluctance to admit that we are sick leads us to underestimate the pervasiveness and severity of racism and blinds us to our complicity in its continuation.Which explains why a significant amount of racial discrimination is unconsciously motivated. Figuring racism as a disease usefully separates fault from responsibility. While we cannot be individually blamed for unconsciously harboring racist attitudes, because racist messages permeate the dominant culture, we are still responsible for monitoring our thoughts and actions so we do not inadvertently become carriers of racist ideologies and infect others. Racism is, therefore, no longer defined as a social problem that affects only its victims but a public health crisis in which all of us have a responsibility to work toward finding a remedy for its injustices. Those who define racism as a disease posit two closely related explanations for the unconscious nature of racially discriminatory attitudes and behaviors. Each of these explanations is articulated to a model of social communication as contagion and each is taken up in Schoolmaster’s and Simmons’s testimonies. First, social psychologists focus on the cultivation of unconscious racism through the transmission of cultural stereotypes.63 From cradle to grave people are inundated by images that use white or Eurocentric standards to define the relative worth of other cultures. Most notably standards of beauty in the United States are already well defined at an early age,


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 127 some say by three years old, in terms of a blond-haired and blue-eyed image. These images become an integral aspect of the culture; they are not experienced as explicit lessons, but are embedded in the individual’s tacit knowledge, ordering her or his perception of the world. When a child sees her or his parents, peers, and other authority figures operating as if these images were accurate, she or he does not need to be told that African Americans are not as attractive as whites, for she or he will assume it is so. Of course, this is precisely what Ms. Thielen’s project confirmed. An “importationist” theory of contagion animates this explanation of unconscious racism. An importationist etiology claims that an external agent brings diseases into the community, typically through the air or through physical contact.64 Many popular “carrier narratives”—films like Outbreak and 28 Days Later, books such as The Hot Zone and The Coming Plague, and the flood of news reports on West Nile virus, Anthrax, and influenza—are importationist in character.65 These stories of infection resurface at times of important cross-cultural contact, such as the European discovery of the New World, the era of immigration and urbanization in the early twentieth century, and in the twenty-first century the permeability, if not obsolescence, of national borders signaled by globalization. Each of these eras, Priscilla Wald has shown, is populated by stories that play off the anxiety of the stranger infecting the community with some terrible new disease.66 For cultivation theorists the carrier of unconscious racism is the onslaught of mediated images into the home. For Clare Schoolmaster it was the presence of Ms. Thielen’s display within the science fair. As we have seen, it does not matter that the display was intended to announce the presence of racial stereotypes and, thereby, was designed as an antidote to unconscious racism. Because the form of the display meant that its message would have to be broadcast as a social fact and the context of its circulation entailed that the composition of the display’s audience was illimitable, the display would have had the effect of circulating messages of racial superiority despite Ms. Thielen’s intent. For Schoolmaster, David Thielen’s and Barry Satlow’s depiction of the display is analogous to the smallpox vaccine; it may inoculate some but since the vaccine must carry the very agent it attacks, it would invariably infect the most vulnerable populations with smallpox, killing them in the process. The second explanation of unconscious racism is found in arguments


128 / Hicks made by cognitive psychologists that racism is a manifestation of defending oneself against pangs of guilt by denying or disregarding those desires that contradict what the individual has been taught is good or right.67 Specifically, an individual is faced with the conflict between her or his adopted creed of egalitarian values and the fact that her or his deeds are in large part purchased with other’s suffering. Upon realizing that those accomplishments are the result of being a member of a privileged class and not simply the product of her or his unique talents and efforts, she or he will experience a great deal of cognitive dissonance and anxiety. One method of coping with this anxiety is to dismiss the racist implications of her or his acts from consciousness, typically through a variety of defense mechanisms such as denial, projection, intellectualization, rationalization, and minimization. The most common method of dealing with the contradiction between creed and deed is to become racially apathetic: if asked to account for your racial politics, express overt support for measures to support equality (but not radical ones that would require redistribution and, therefore, inequality of opportunity), but otherwise live your life so as to be relatively unruffled by the inequities between whites and people of color. When children see that their parents can be both supportive of everyone’s equality and for the most part be undisturbed by the systemic inequalities that mark social life, and more importantly by their own complicity in this scheme, they will follow suit. The result is what Judith Skillings and James Dobbins term a “rule of irrelevance”:That “data from and about members of target populations, when they conflict with existing schemata, are irrelevant.”68 Thus, the presence of Native Americans can be disregarded in accounts of U.S. history, whites can laugh at jokes that lampoon white privilege told by African American comics, and politicians can ignore the presence of African Americans unless they are overtly courting the “black vote.” Or in terms of Ms. Thielen’s project, if asked to choose which doll is “prettiest” and the choice is between two dolls with identical facial features, body types, and expressions, differing only in skin and dress color, pick the one wearing the purple dress. A “miasmist” theory of contagion animates this explanation of unconscious racism. A miasmist etiology posits that the origin of disease is local, caused by decaying organic matter releasing poisons into the environment.69 Miasmist stories are not nearly as prevalent in popular culture as importationist ones. But, where they do surface is in accounts of disease by colonized


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 129 and oppressed peoples. For instance, in the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793 there was a vehement debate between importationists and miasmists (which would continue until Walter Reed established the link between yellow fever and mosquitoes at the beginning of the twentieth century). Importationists, on the one hand, argued that the disease could be linked to the French settlers who had fled the revolution in Haiti as well as the several hundred black slaves they brought with them. The miasmists, on the other, claimed that the outbreak was caused by the effluvia given off by stagnant waters. The debate between these two camps, as Lisa Lynch argues, should not be understood simply as a conflict between differing epidemiological accounts. Rather, it was a struggle over the moral obligations that African Americans and whites owed each other in times of medical catastrophe.70 Enlisted to care for whites suffering from yellow fever—based on the false assumption that those with black skin were immune from the disease—African Americans found that they were simultaneously dehumanized and held to a higher standard of self-sacrificing behavior in tracts like Matthew Carey’s A Short Account of the Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia.71 Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, two former slaves, answered Carey’s charges in their own A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia 1793: And a Refutation of Some Censures,Thrown upon Them In Some Late Publications.72 The Proceedings defended blacks who aided fever victims, emphasizing their sacrifice and valor. But more importantly, as John Edgar Wideman demonstrates, the Proceedings used a miasmistic account of the origins of yellow fever to hold whites, like Carey, accountable for the sins of slavery.73 Yellow fever was the somatic effect of slavery; the waters of the city having been desecrated by the sins of oppression had become poisonous. Where an importationist account of contagion informs Schoolmaster’s testimony, a miasmistic account of moral contagion underwrites Alvertis Simmons’s. The display is a sign of Boulder’s “history of hating black folks,” a social mutation caused by the lack of diversity. “You don’t even have a black in this room, other than myself and my organization,” Simmons exclaims.74 The display, a product of white guilt, is an attempt to intellectualize the contradictions between Boulder’s reputation as socially progressive and the reality of its racial and class exclusivity. Or in Simmons’s words, “If you are gonna say that we’re all equal, then you gotta treat us as equals.You


130 / Hicks can’t treat us as less than equal and say one thing in Boulder, and then we sit back looking at you all and the students are following you al- you all’s example. That is why we are angry in Denver.”75 Ms. Thielen’s project is an attempt to relieve the guilt of the contradiction between “creed and deed,” by “displaying” the sins of Boulder’s children, and by implication the parents and schools of Boulder, to the offended party. The audience is, thus, constituted in two camps: the white Mesa students, and by extension the school and their parents, who have committed the sin of unconscious racism and the virtual audience of minority children, virtual because there are actually no African American students enrolled at Mesa, to act as confessors. This confession may be damaging to the staff and students at Mesa because it offers no apology and no means to correct the wrong. But, for Simmons, the real harm is that all the display can do is set up the African American community in Denver, who stand in for the virtual audience, to be restigmatized. For Simmons, Ms. Thielen’s project was more than a failed attempt at social critique; it was the proverbial case of the little girl taking her finger out of the dam, releasing the sins of Boulder so they could contaminate Denver’s groundwater with racism. The only cure in a case like this is quarantine: for the school board to remove the source of contamination, to monitor the student body for any residual effects, and to attempt to restore order.

COLLABORATIVE CENSORSHIP: JUSTIFYING THE SCHOOL’S DECISION With the display figured as a contaminated object, the school had two options. They could have removed the display, making sure that its message did not circulate. Or, if they wanted to try a less restrictive option, they could have altered the display so that it circulated in a benign form in a safe environment, such as an “issue” to be discussed in the prophylactic of the classroom. This option, as Schoolmaster testifies in lines 378–87, was thwarted by Ms. Thielen’s parents: “Our decision to pull this project came after efforts to work out alternatives for the dis- project’s display were turned down abruptly by the parents. We are disappointed common ground and modifications were not reached with the family in order to display the project. This could have modeled a more positive way to handle disagreement and perhaps would have been an excellent lesson in tolerance and compromise be-


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 131 tween people in conflict.” Here Schoolmaster renders the school as the reasonable party. The school was willing to modify the display so that it could still be shown but in a manner that would have circumvented its demeaning effects. However, the parents were overzealous. They were unable to take into consideration the display’s potential effects and willing to force their own views onto others despite the teacher’s warnings. Hence, they “modeled” the display’s “intolerance” by their own unreasonableness; a failure of liberal disposition that is directly countered by Schoolmaster’s invocation and performance of the proper dialogic means to govern such disputes. The Thielens’ unwillingness to reach “common ground” demonstrated that they were unable to set aside their principles to take into consideration the welfare of all of the students, including their own daughter. Moreover, their unwillingness to engage in a “healthy and honest conversation” about the “complex and difficult subject of race” exposed their nondeliberative demeanor and, thus, their irresponsibility as parents. If the Thielens refused to protect the students, the school had to intervene. Thus, the parents’ unwillingness to transform the conflict over the display into a “teachable moment”—to engage in an act of collaborative censorship so as to provide an important “civics lesson” for their daughter—became the warrant for the school to substitute their “professional judgment” for that of the parents.76 “As professionals,” Schoolmaster testifies in lines 411–16, “we made the decision in the best interests for all our students, staying true to teaching practices that are best for the students’ developmental readiness, their capacity for understanding, and their ability to transfer their learning to usefulness in their lives.” This substitution, Schoolmaster contends, was necessitated by the likelihood that the school would have been held liable, at least in the public’s eye, for failing to exercise its “professional judgment” to protect the students: “We also wonder if we had displayed the project in earnest hopes that no child would be hurt by its impact that outrage would have occurred, questioning our professional judgment and our insensitivity to minority children. Perhaps the media would have had a heyday with that decision too” (lines 402–8). School officials, unlike the parents, could not base their judgment of the display’s effects on “earnest hopes” (and notice how this phrase renders the parents both naïve and zealous) that its “impact” (the psychological-cum-physical pain caused by the display) would not be felt. The teachers, instead, had to base their judgment on what their training and


132 / Hicks experience told them would be the potential effects of the display. The parents, hence, are not only irresponsible but incompetent as well. By shifting the blame onto the parents and reassigning the responsibility for regulating the circulation of racial messages to the school, Schoolmaster displaced the concerns over Ms. Thielen’s free speech rights, evidenced by the many times that those testifying or editorializing commented that this case is not about free speech at all. Instead, she reconstituted the event as a forum over the proper limits of school authority: does the school have the authority to control what was displayed in the science fair; does it have the authority to decide what lessons it would teach about race and when and where it would teach those lessons; and, most importantly, how could the school, and by extension the residents of Boulder, dissociate themselves from their own children if they expose the contradictions at the heart of their community?77 Now what is left for Schoolmaster to do is reestablish the moral order that preceded the event. She begins this process by reviewing the extant channels of communication the Thielens could have used to ensure that the issue of race was addressed in an appropriate manner, and she reestablishes the proper relationship between parents and teachers for the future: “Parents at Mesa can bring concerns and issues to teachers, the principal, or to our SCDM, which is a SIT committee, a school improvement committee which sets our goals for our building” (lines 422–26). She then proceeds to model the very tolerance and commitment to dialogue that she found lacking in the Thielen’s for the audience: “We hope that the discussions arising from this project will bring new insights on how to best address these issues surrounding racism with children. We will learn from the science fair event and take the implications seriously and to heart” (lines 426–31). But her shift to the future tense does more: it is an effort to reconstitute the hearing itself into a “learning opportunity.” Consistent with the justification game she has been playing, Schoolmaster is suggesting now that the decision has been “clarified,” the hearing should be transformed into an opportunity for reconciliation. Deliberation, for Schoolmaster, is not the rigorous process of discussion and public debate the community uses to invent, formulate, evaluate, and revise the laws and social polices that govern them. This is not the time and place to debate the meaning and scope of the BVSD nondiscrimination policy. Nor is it the time and place for a forum on the racial attitudes of the Mesa students. Those “discussions” will arise after the close of the “hearing” in a context more conducive to learning, a context governed by the You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

Darkness on the Edge of Town / 133 metapragmatic norms of Socratic dialogue, its insistence on reflexivity, abstraction, and intimacy, and its concomitant relations of authority between pupils and instructor. That is, now that she has publicly justified the decision, the hearing should become a classroom: safe, secure, private.

CODA No story of contagion can simply end this way: with the moral order of the community restored by the investigative work of the epidemiologist and her or his assurances that the source of contagion has been safely eradicated. No. Our narrative appetites have been conditioned to hold out for the epilogue, to wait for the closing shot returning us to the pastoral scene that opened the film.78 But in this viewing we notice something is wrong, the presence of a strange, almost imperceptible substance, or perhaps the slight delay in speech or gesture that reveals that our protagonist or her loved one has been infected. Or any one of the few variations of this theme, all signaling that we are not really safe, that the threat of contagion is always lurking, and, thus, we will need the services of our hero once more. A contagion narrative without a coda would feel wrong, incomplete. In the closing moments of the hearing, when the school board members were trying to assess the meaning and significance of what had just transpired, the conversation moved quickly to the topic of how to get beyond the event, of “moving forward.” To avoid seeming indifferent to the racial politics opened up in the preceding testimony, the school board members needed a topic capable of facilitating the transition from “Barbiegate” to new business that still allowed them to appear to be sensitive to issues of discrimination. BVSD board member Teresa Steele found that topic when she suggested that the difficulty of spending the last two weeks engaged in such painstaking discussions over the science fair incident could be laid to rest if the committee chose to focus on the real issue facing the BVSD: the achievement gap between white and minority students.79 Jean Bonelli quickly agreed, suggesting “that’s what we really need to be doing.”80 And Bill de la Cruz concluded the hearing by suggesting that since the lessons of “Barbiegate” had been learned, that the community could now see the event as a “gift” because of conversations it sparked, the BVSD could get to the real business of eradicating discrimination by supporting the state’s initiative to close the achievement gap.81 You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

134 / Hicks But what is the real difference between this talk of the achievement gap and Ms. Thielen’s science fair project? Both “display” the presence of racial inequality and the effects of extreme structural disparity in economic resources and educational opportunity in Boulder. Could it be as simple, and disheartening, as the fact that Ms. Thielen’s project “displayed” the nascent racial categorization embedded in the judgment of Boulder’s white children, a fact of considerable embarrassment to the community, while the achievement gap “displays” their deep pessimism about the intelligence of minority children, a belief that researchers have found is so pervasive and taken for granted even among African Americans it often escapes moral censure when articulated in educational policy?82 The debate over the achievement gap, Charles Lawrence claims, is often less about ways to improve educational opportunities for minorities than it is about beliefs about their intelligence; a public debate that takes place “before a backdrop of Jim Crow, Minstrel shows, and a host of historical and contemporary practices and cultural icons that give the conversation meaning.”83 Lawrence expresses a profound ambivalence about this debate when he writes: “But despite the good intentions and importance of such efforts, I experience a strange mixture of anxiety, anger, and self-doubt when I listen to the public conversation about the achievement gap. With each new study, opinion piece, and news article, my head is being measured again.”84 Surely, this display would be as likely as Ms. Thielen’s to be read at “face value” by students unable to comprehend that the complex structural inequalities resulting in the achievement gap means that minority children are not to blame for their lack of academic achievement (but here, they would not have to be young, or even students, to perform this misreading). Furthermore, this “social fact” is as likely to circulate uncontrollably in the public sphere, finding its way into media reports and, even, academic treatises.85 Yet, this “display” will never be prohibited by the BVSD antidiscrimination policy. It is the virus disguised as the vaccine.

NOTES 1. For instance, “A Curse of Cliques: There Are Good Reasons to Form TightKnit Groups. But in America’s High Schools They Can Be Harsh,” Time, May 3, 1999, 44.


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 135 2. Anne G. Garrett, Bullying in American Schools: Causes, Prevention, Interventions (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003). 3. Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, (97–843), 526 U.S. 629 (1999). 4. Appendix B, no. 21. 5. Cited in “ACLU of Colorado Challenges School Censorship of 8-Year-Old’s Science Project on Racism,” available at http://www.aclu.org/StudentsRights/ StudentsRights.cfm?ID=7150&c155. 6. Appendix B, no. 21. 7. For a discussion of the link between governmentality and rhetoric, see Darrin Hicks, “Review of Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope, and Interpersonal Relationships,” Communication Theory 10 (2000): 124–35; and Ronald Walter Greene, Malthusian Worlds: U.S. Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 1–15. 8. For a systematic treatment of the communicative conditions of verbal aggression and hate speech, see Richard Delgado, “Words That Wound: A Tort Action for Racial Insults, Epithets, and Name Calling,” in Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment, ed. Mari J. Matsuda et al., 89–110 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993). 9. For a discussion of codes of civility, see Ronald Arnett and Patricia Arneson, Dialogic Civility in a Cynical Age: Community, Hope, and Interpersonal Relationships (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); and Mark Kingwell, A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue and The Politics of Pluralism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). 10. John L. Lucaites, Celeste M. Condit, and Sally Caudhill, Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader (New York: Guilford, 1999), 328. 11. Saxe v. State College Area School District (SCASD), 240 F3d 200 (3d Cir. 2001). 12. Saxe. The Saxe court applies the causal standard for assessing communicative effects set out in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 US 503 (1969). 13. Working from Harris v. Forklift Systems, 510 US 17 (1993), a sexual harassment case concerning the effects of sexual jokes and vulgar displays directed at women in the workplace, the Saxe court argued that for conduct to constitute a hostile environment it must both: (1) be viewed subjectively as harassment by the victim and (2) be objectively severe or pervasive enough that a reasonable person would agree that it is harassment. The court held that the “objective” prong of this inquiry must be satisfied by looking at the “totality of circumstances,” including the frequency of discriminatory conduct, whether it is humiliating or merely offensive and whether it unreasonably interferes with the employee’s job performance. In theory, if a disinterested, reasonable (read typical) third party (read judge) can look at the evi-


136 / Hicks dence and conclude that he or she would feel harassed by such conduct and that this feeling of harassment would be sufficient to make working difficult, if not impossible, the court can say that there is objective evidence for harassment having occurred. It is difficult to see why this is an objective test; it simply substitutes the judge’s account for the victim’s. Notwithstanding the inherent problems with such a reasonable person, standard judges are loath to actually perform such a reversal of perspective. In practice, it is evidence of severe psychological or physical pain resulting from pervasive degradation measured by an inability to perform on the job that usually counts as “objective” evidence of harassment or discrimination. In the educational domain this translates into conduct that systemically undermines the student’s ability to perform in the classroom or the school’s ability to provide educational programs and activities. For a discussion and critique of the reasonable person standard, see Darrin Hicks and Phillip Glenn, “The Pragmatics of Sexual Harassment: Two Devices for Constituting a Hostile Environment,” in The Lynching of Language: Gender, Politics and Power in the Hill-Thomas Hearings, ed. Sandra Ragan et al., 218–27 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). 14. For a discussion of the constitutive tensions of discursive democracy, see Darrin Hicks, “The Promise(s) of Deliberative Democracy,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002): 223–60. 15. Judith Irvine, “When Talk Isn’t Cheap: Language and Political Economy,” American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 255. 16. For a lucid account of how ethnomethodology can be used to read rhetorical texts, see Michael Lynch and David Bogen, The Spectacle of History: Speech, Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 262–88. 17. For a discussion of public justification rituals, see Benjamin Bates, “Ashcroft among the Senators: Justification, Strategy, and Tactics in the 2001 Attorney General Confirmation Hearings,” Argumentation and Advocacy 39 (2003): 254–73. 18. For a discussion of how rationality and reasonableness are assessed in political arguments, see Darrin Hicks, “Reasonableness: Political Not Epistemic,” in Arguing Communication and Culture, ed. G. Thomas Goodnight, 104–12 (Annandale, VA: National Communication Association, 2002). 19. For a discussion of the conditions for a successful account, see Jennifer Coburn-Enquist, “The Logic of Protection and the Strategy of Normalcy: The (Re)production of Child Sexual Abuse,” in Argument in a Time of Change: Definitions, Frameworks, and Critiques, ed. James Klumpp, 262–68 (Annandale VA: National Communication Association, 1998). 20. Schoolmaster’s speech is found in its entirety in Appendix A, E. Line numbers in the text correspond to those in the appendix.


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 137 21. Appendix A, B. 22. The concept of footing comes from Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 124–59. My application of Goffman’s concept is indebted to Gregory Matoesian, Law and the Language of Identity: Discourse in the William Kennedy Smith Rape Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 23. Appendix A, A. 24. Appendix A, B. 25. Appendix A, G. 26. Appendix A, F. 27. Emanuel Schegloff, “On Some Questions and Ambiguities in Conversation,” in Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 50–52 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 28. Ibid., 50. 29. Vicente L. Rafael, “Your Grief Is Our Gossip: Overseas Filipinos and Other Spectral Presences,” Public Culture 9 (1997): 290. 30. Ibid. 31. Appendix A, F. 32. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 113. 33. Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 143–50. 34. Appendix A, G. 35. For a discussion of contrastive pairs, see Matoesian, Law and the Language of Identity, 55–56. 36. Appendix A, H. 37. Appendix B, no. 1. 38. Appendix A, A. 39. What is important about this strategy, for our purposes, is how it reveals that context is more than the extratextual phenomena, such as setting, situation, prior knowledge, or identity that sets parameters on possible interpretations of meaning. Rather, context, in this case and I would suggest generally, is an analytic category invoked by participants in the midst of communicative encounters to set discretionary limits on what, and therefore whose, acts and utterances can be heard as meaningful and what modes of association are bestowed with moral authority.That is, context is a strategic device used by participants to assign meaning and value to one another’s conduct and, thereby, assign rights to and impose obligations on participants. This account differs from the traditional treatment of context in the social and human sciences, in general, and communication studies, in particular. Context in this tradition is conceptualized as a static container external to and in some cases determina-


138 / Hicks tive of the meaning and significance of communicative action. This leads analysts to oscillate between radically localizing context by reducing it to the text surrounding a particular utterance and the norms of the particular genre of discourse in which the communicative act is performed. Or analysts totalize context by equating it with macrostructural effects such as history, capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism. While the expansive definition of context in the standard treatment does have the advantage of rendering features of the text unnoticed by the participants in the encounter visible, it carries with it the concomitant disadvantage of excluding those features outside the professional interest of the analyst, features that the participants themselves may find to be crucial for their interactional work. Moreover, the standard treatment is besieged with analytical problems: how to establish with any degree of precision the context that must be invoked to make sense of the text; agreeing on criteria that could establish the relevancy of a description of that context; and how to account for the relationship between context and rhetorical effects, that is, how to establish the consequentiality of context. To understand the present case, as well as to expand the analytic uses of context for rhetoric and discourse analysis more generally, I suggest conceptualizing context as a rhetorical tactic. Thus, context is an indigenous feature of interaction and invoked by participants, in both explicit and subtle ways, to govern communicative action. Let’s define context, then, as those regulatory systems constituted by the methods that participants use to assign meaning and value to their own and one another’s conduct. Contexts are constituted from sets of discursive procedures that formulate the qualifications and conditions that participants use to regulate their interactions. Contexts establish the qualifications that individuals must possess to be allowed to speak. They set out how utterances must be performed in order to be heard as conforming to the standards of decorum. Contexts also provide criteria for hearing utterances as authentic and true and distinguishing those statements from that which is considered taboo and false. Unlike schemas, frames, and speech events, contexts are not neutral deceptions of interaction. By establishing the officially recognized vocabularies interlocutors can use to press claims, the paradigms of argumentation accepted as authoritative in adjudicating those claims, the bodily comportments associated with speech that render it as authentic and convincing, and the political economy of speaking opportunities, a context shapes the means and opportunities of social struggle. Hence, the conceptualization and application of context is inherently political. For an extended discussion of the role of context in critical analysis, see Darrin Hicks, “The Politics of Talk: A Constitutive Account of Context” (PhD diss., Southern Illinois University, 1995). 40. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 37.


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 139 41. The term comes from Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 73. 42. For statements of the epidemiological model of communication, see Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Beliefs Spread through Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Richard Brodie, Virus of the Mind:The New Science of the Meme (Seattle, WA: Integral Press, 1995); and Jack M. Balkin, Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2003). 43. Alvin I. Goldman, “Social Routes to Belief and Knowledge,” The Monist 84 (2001): 346–67. 44. Goldman, Social Routes, 356. 45. Cited in Paul Marsden, “Memetics and Social Contagion: Two Sides of the Same Coin?” Journal of Memetics—Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission 2 (1998), available at http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/1998/vol2/marsden_p.html. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Hicks, Promises, 241–45. 49. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New York: Penguin Books, 1975); Alexander Meiklejohn, Political Freedom: The Constitutional Powers of the People (Hartford CT: Greenwood Press, 1979). 50. This imagery is drawn from David Charney, “Farwell to an Idea? Ideology in Legal Theory,” Michigan Law Review 97 (1999): 1596. 51. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition,” Public Culture 15 (2003): 385–97. 52. Appendix A, A and B. 53. Appendix A, M. 54. Margaret Humphries, “No Safe Place: Disease and Panic in American History,” American Literary History 14 (2002): 845–57. 55. Priscilla Wald, “Imagined Immunities,” in Cultural Studies and Political Theory, ed. Jodi Dean, 189–208 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 56. Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigration Menace” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 57. Harriet Deacon, “Racial Segregation and Medical Discourse in NineteenthCentury Cape Town,” Journal of Southern African Studies 22 (1996): 287–308. 58. Charles Lawrence III, “The Id, the Ego, and Unequal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism,” Stanford Law Review 39 (1987): 321. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 322. 61. Ibid.


140 / Hicks 62. Ibid. 63. Judith H. Skillings and James E. Dobbins, “Racism as a Disease: Etiology and Treatment Implications,” Journal of Counseling and Development 70 (1991): 206–12. 64. My discussion of importationist and miasmatic accounts of contagion and how these are linked to racial politics is taken from Lisa Lynch, “The Fever Next Time: The Race of Disease and the Disease of Racism in John Edgar Wideman,” American Literary History 14 (2002): 776–804. 65. For a discussion of contagion narratives in popular culture, see Wald, “Imagined Immunities,” and Heather Schell, “The Sexist Gene: Science Fiction and the Germ Theory of History, American Literary History 14 (2002): 805–27. For a discussion of earlier popular accounts of contagion, see Nancy Tomes, “Epidemic Entertainments: Disease and Popular Culture in Early-Twentieth-Century America,” American Literary History 14 (2002): 625–52. 66. Wald, “Imagined Immunities,” 189–91. 67. Skillings and Dobbins, “Racism as a Disease,” 209–10. 68. Ibid. 69. Lynch, “Fever Next Time,” 780. 70. Ibid. 71. Matthew Carey, A Short Account of the Malignant Fever Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1793). 72. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, during the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia 1793: And a Refutation of Some Censures,Thrown upon Them in Some Late Publications 1794 (Philadelphia: Eastern National Park Association, 1993). 73. John Edgar Wideman, Fever and Other Stories (New York: Holt, 1989), 127–61. 74. Appendix A, G. 75. Ibid. 76. The term “teachable moment” is taken from Appendix B, no. 1. For a discussion of how “professional judgment” is used to assign blame in educational conflicts, see Ronald W. Greene and Darrin Hicks, “Judging Parents,” in Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminacy, ed. John Sloop and James McDaniel, 196–219 (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1998). 77. These are the questions at stake in the landmark school expression case Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 484 US 260 (1988). Schoolmaster’s testimony effectively mirrors the Court’s reasoning in Hazelwood. 78. Wald, “Imagined Immunities,” 196–201. 79. Appendix A, K. 80. Appendix A, L. 81. Appendix A, N.


Darkness on the Edge of Town / 141 82. Charles Lawrence III, “Still Blaming the Victim,” Boston Review 28 (2003): 39. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid. 85. For instance, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).


6 Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand Discursive Moves of Ordinary Democracy Kathleen Haspel and Karen Tracy The rhetoric of decline should send up a red flag; for the socially concerned intellectual, it is as much off-the-rack rhetoric as is a rhetoric of progress to an ebullient technocrat. —Michael Schudson1 Ideals and standards formed without regard to the means by which they are to be achieved and incarnated in flesh are bound to be thin and wavering. —John Dewey2

Democracy is on shaky ground, citizens are apathetic and uninvolved, the quality of public discourse, when it does occur, is abysmal: so goes the refrain.3 For the most part, this refrain is conducted in sweeping abstractions detached from particular people, places, issues, and discursive expressions.4 Our goal in this essay is to consider what we see when we view democracy from the ground up, through the words of two ordinary citizens, one white, one black, as each seeks to shape his community’s view of how their public school system is handling the issue of race. As discourse scholars, we approach the public meeting with an interest in describing citizens’ methods of participating in public discourse and in considering what the methods accomplish interactionally. How did these two participants manage the challenges of ordinary democracy? A distinction is made in studies of language between marked and unmarked forms, usually of subjects, often of descriptors that modify them.


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 143 An unmarked form is the shorter taken-for-granted one, whereas marked forms are longer expressions that make visible how a marked form does not satisfy some state that is normatively assumed by its unmarked version. An example of marking is the term “mother” (the unmarked form), that George Lakoff analyzes so compellingly. Marked forms in common usage include unwed mother, biological mother, teen mother, stepmother, surrogate mother, and working mother. Each marked form highlights what is normatively presumed, although not necessarily empirically true, about mothers— that mothers typically are married and not teens, that they raise the child rather than just giving birth or loaning their uterus for a fetus’s maturation, that they stay home to care for the child rather than go to work, and so on.5 What goes unmarked and what must be marked to be comprehensible provide a window into a culture’s assumptions.6 Applying the notion here, “ordinary democracy” is the marked form whereas “democracy” is the unmarked one. In its unmarked form, democracy assumes two features. First, democracy is an ideal, detached from action, hard to define or observe. Ordinary democracy, in contrast, is what people do. It is the face of democracy in action in places where democracy should be going on. Second, “democracy” tends to assume a national level frame. To talk about democracy is to focus on presidential politics and congressional actions rather than the actions of local scenes such as school boards and city councils. Ordinary democracy is what citizens and officials in local governance groups do when they confront the tangle of competing concerns that are part of any actual community meeting. Ordinary democracy is the talk in such groups that orients to, enacts, appeals to, and, at times, subverts the ideal of democracy. We begin the chapter by sketching the challenge for ordinary democracy in the Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) board meetings, with particular attention to the vantage point of members of the public. The analytic heart of the chapter shows how two ordinary citizens managed effectively three challenges that inhere in democracy, and especially the American version of it. From the opening moment of their speeches, both speakers marked talk about race as a sensitive subject to be taken up in this public context; we show how the speakers did this. In the next two sections we consider how the speakers managed tensions between competing concerns—namely, building unity and respecting differences—and show how they worked to motivate their public, elected officials, local residents, teachers, parents, and


144 / Haspel and Tracy their largely white audience for collective action. These complex and competing goals of democracy, we show, were met by these speakers through their use of a set of discursive devices—the personal pronoun “we”; deictic place references such as “here”; contrast, repetition, parallel structure, and lists. These devices were bundled together with cultural commonplaces and deployed at key moments to move the board and fellow members of the public to collective sentiment. At the chapter’s end we suggest why discourse analysis of ordinary democratic talk is essential if we are to develop a more functional ideal of democracy.

THE CHALLENGE OF ORDINARY DEMOCRACY IN BVSD BOARD MEETINGS In contrast to the egalitarian and deliberative assumption made in many models of democracy, school board meetings give citizens and officials different participation rights, and the end for participation is often considerably more ambiguous than weighing in on a decision.7 Robert Craig and Karen Tracy suggest that when citizens speak on issues that are not on the agenda, as was the case with this science fair controversy, their participation is best conceived as motivating public sentiment about what issues deserve deliberative attention on future agendas.8 Participation rights of citizens in BVSD board meetings were quite restricted. Members of the public had two minutes at the start of the meeting to speak about whatever concerned them. Their concern might be an agenda item that was up for decision, but it need not be, as was the case with all persons who spoke about the science fair dispute. All public participation was expected to be concluded within the first hour of the meeting. When citizens spoke they could expect no immediate response, and should another citizen or board member comment about what they had said, they had no rebuttal rights.9 In essence, speakers needed to enlist elected officials and the public (preferably both) to support their view of an issue or set of issues in a time period that was short, with no particular issue frame surrounding their talk. Allowing citizens to speak about issues not on the agenda in a very limited time frame with minimal rights to respond or question, where all public participation, including people speaking to the agenda, was bundled at the meeting’s start, can be seen as the board’s attempt to honor its mul-


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 145 tiple commitments. That is, in seeking to be responsive to a community who had expressed a preference not to have to wait for hours to speak, to keep the meetings to lengths not exceeding two to three hours, to avoid having a board member unthinkingly imply district commitment to financially ill-advised or symbolically unfair action, and to provide more talking time to those with expertise (school attorney) or those who invested significant time in discussion and researching (a parent committee), the BVSD crafted a particular multilayered participation format for its meetings. Whether this meeting format is an optimal one is a difficult assessment; it may not be. However, BVSD’s meeting structure was a rather typical solution to these kinds of complex trade-offs. School boards and city councils in communities around the United States adopt similar sets of rules to make their meetings doable and defensible. From a citizen’s point of view, then, the task of designing one’s talk so that it succeeded in marshalling sentiments and readying others for collective action, all within the constraints of the meeting’s rules, was no small task. In addition to the ongoing practical challenge of participating in a meeting where one had limited speaking rights is a second, and, perhaps the most daunting, challenge of ordinary democracy: suitably respecting differences while building common interests. David Ryfe goes so far as to argue that, “no public conversation can succeed without a minimal recognition of shared values.”10 At the same time it is the “valuation of difference,” the need to live and cooperate with others outside one’s immediate group that is so crucial to what we mean by democracy.11 Communicative actions that find fault, criticize, or point out the failure of others make difference clear but threaten connections with others. Studies of talk in a range of ordinary conversational and institutional work sites have found that speakers use a host of devices to manage this kind of interactional sensitivity. Speakers start off by saying something positive before they get to the negative, take multiple conversational steps before they arrive at the big criticism, pause or delay to show that what they are saying is difficult, allude rather than state directly, and gloss rather than detail.12 Although this is a public context, speakers, nonetheless, could be expected to construct critical comments in the delayed, circuitous ways that people do in delicate moments of conversation. The managing of unity and difference is an ever-present challenge in sites of democracy, but some issues bring it forward in especially powerful


146 / Haspel and Tracy ways. In American society issues of race and fair treatment bring it forward especially fast. In Boulder these issues served as prominent facets— and accelerants—of the science fair controversy. Our analysis focuses on the comments of two citizens in the February 27, 2001, meeting: David Thielen, a white man and father of the third grader whose science fair project was removed because of its presumed racially offensive content, and Alvertis Simmons, a black man and leader of the organizing committee of the Denver Million Man March, who spoke several turns later. While they ultimately argue for different kinds of collective action—Thielen for change and Simmons for no change—they traverse the same dangerous territory (race relations in their own back yard), appeal to others through sacred commonplaces, and mark their positions in this site for ordinary democracy with some of the same discursive devices. We trace the path that each speaker takes in making their contribution to the public meeting, marking nodes of common practice and points of departure into making their distinct cases.

HOW THIELEN AND SIMMONS MARKED THEIR TALK AS “SENSITIVE” Thielen and Simmons show talk about race to be a sensitive matter in American public settings in the very ways that they approach the topic. Each makes overt and emphatic displays of support for others early on in their speeches, projecting that potentially nonsupportive, that is, critical, comments are to come. We are able to hear this projection due to a conversational structuring practice whereby positive assessments are typically produced prior to negative ones and agreement prior to disagreement.13 Thielen and Simmons make use of this practice to structure their essentially critical contributions in initially affiliative ways. Thielen shows his support for others through a litany of thanks to various parties (lines 203–27) before laying out the “two issues” he wants to speak to, whether his daughter’s “experiment was not science” (line 229) and whether its conclusions “could upset children” (line 238).14 From there he moves on to commenting about how science and race are taught to children, and eventually to criticizing the latter. Simmons shows support for others by emphatically asserting his belief in


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 147 the school board’s cause, “we stand behind you, our African American community stands behind you.” He then proceeds to deny that this is “a first amendment issue,” essentially criticizing the position of prior speakers from the ACLU who claimed it was, and compares the display of the science fair project to publishing discriminatory remarks in a school’s newspaper. In taking the time to display support for copresent others and positively aligning with what other speakers have said in a forum that puts constraints on their contribution, these speakers demonstrate a concern for laying the groundwork for a positive reception of their criticisms about how members speak, teach, and act regarding race. In addition, their comments lead up to the critical issue of race rather than introducing it immediately, by first directing criticism to other issues raised by previous participants, namely science and the first amendment, which may be linked to race, but are mentioned as race-neutral issues. In short, each speaker arrives at a criticism related to race in a stepwise fashion. Notice how they do this. Thielen uses his critique of others’ claims that the experiment was not science to move into a consideration of how its conclusions might affect “people,” “children,” “students,” and “teachers,” and eventually arrives at the topic of how “people . . . talk with their children about race.” Simmons uses a critique of the First Amendment argument made by ACLU members who spoke before him to position himself as a black man and invite consideration of the racist implications of the experiment’s findings. In making these moves, both speakers show understanding of the fact—as well as reinforce its social facticity—that in criticizing how others have talked and taught about race, they are raising a sensitive, potentially divisive issue. This stepwise way of organizing their speech also displays an assumption that participating in public discourse needs to be inclusive (or at least not divisive) and indicates their orientation to democratic principles.

MANAGING UNITY AND DIVISION Another indication of the speakers’ orientations to inclusiveness are their efforts to point out the failures of members of the audience without pointing out who in particular is responsible for them. They manage to avoid overt accusation and its potential to divide by using categorical references such as “we” and “those who teach children about race.” On their face, these terms


148 / Haspel and Tracy appear to include most persons present and, as such, could be seen as unifying devices.Yet, their situated use implicates some categories of people more than others. In a quite creative fashion, “we” divides the we. From the opposite pole, Thielen’s and Simmons’s uses of deictic references to place and time, particularly their use of “here,” straightforwardly divide categories of persons.Yet these devices for marking differences among participants in this public process have built-in ambiguities that soften their effect and mitigate the threat to unity. Consider how each works.

Use of Inclusive Category References to Divide In using a reference term, speakers state or imply their membership in one category (we) and, at the same time, their nonmembership in a contrast category (they).We-they terms differ from their singular counterparts (I-you) in two ways. First, the task of figuring out who the “we” or “they” includes is not always straightforward. Although the referents for uses of we and they may be easily inferred, often there is ambiguity. This is especially true for public occasions in which speakers are expressing contestable opinions about past or future actions, and the audience includes a variety of people. Besides dividing by demographic categories (e.g., race, ethnicity, age, gender, social class, nationality), public meetings make relevant the categories of actors involved in the scene (e.g., in a school board meeting, the teachers, parents, children, elected officials, and administrators) as well as categories of people categorized by their views on the issues that are focal to a meeting (e.g., those for and against free speech, those committed to children being able to do social science projects). Second, “we” and “they” simultaneously express alignment and affiliation with some people and disaffiliation and nonalignment with others. As Harvey Sacks has noted, “we” and “they” are special terms: they accomplish far more than simple anaphoric reference. “We” is among “alternative ways of doing address” that have “categorical import” so that one can refer to something one did as if it were done on behalf of others (i.e., members of an institution or a “with”). Likewise, if a person is a member of a particular category, for example “college students,” “we” can be used to take ownership of the actions of others (e.g., “We beat USC yesterday”), or to share or


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 149 shift responsibility for what one did by talking about it as if were done by a “we” or with another.15 Both Thielen and Simmons employ the categorical reference “we” throughout their speeches to refer to different sets of people and to do different kinds of work. Thielen initially positions himself as someone speaking on behalf of his wife and himself. His first few uses of “we” can be heard to do this (Ex1, lines 1–3). As Thielen approaches the topic of race, he employs the categorical reference, “a lotta people” (Ex1, lines 9–11), which can be heard to include the “we” he has been speaking on behalf of as well as others. In developing a list of claims as to what “a lotta people” have done as a result of his daughter’s science fair project, Thielen momentarily distances himself from others. By referring to the people who “need to talk with their children about race” as “they” (Ex1, line 9), Thielen implies that he and his wife are not among those who “need” to do this talking. This implication is set in motion given that the event concerns his daughter’s science fair project about race. But in his next claim (Ex1, lines 10–11), Thielen refers to “a lotta people” as “we,” thereby including himself and his wife among those who “avoid racial issues.” It is this shift in reference that draws our analytical attention. Consider what Thielen said: Excerpt 116 1 We are not asking for an apology. we are not asking 2 for anything to be done with our daughter’s science 3 experiment. In fact we actually do honestly want to 4 thank the school system for what they did. And if they 5 had left the experiment, two or three children would 6 have been made slightly uneasy, ten or twenty parents 7 and teachers would have been—f-felt uneasy, and 8 remained silent. And that would have been it. (1.2) 9 Instead, this has led to a lotta people realizing they 10 need to talk with their children about race. A lotta 11 people realizing we do avoid racial issues especially 12 the ones that are here and now. (1.0) A lotta people 13 deciding to do something positive to address this 14 difficult issue. So out of something very wrong,


150 / Haspel and Tracy 15 something very very good happen(ed), and for that we 16 thank Mesa Elementary, we thank the superintendent and 17 the central administration. .hh So what do we want. To claim that “a lotta of people . . . avoid racial issues” is to make an especially ambiguous criticism in light of Thielen’s opening remarks (not shown here) that it was a “wondrous thing” that “a lot of people are now talking with their children about race.” Thielen softens this criticism by including himself among the people criticized when he changes the reference term for “a lotta people” from “they” to “we.” In addition Thielen further redeems these “people,” by subsequently referring to them as having decided “to do something positive to address this difficult issue” (Ex1, lines 13–14), and then offers his coda: “So out of something very wrong, something very very good happen(ed)” (Ex1, lines 14–15). Finally, his exit from talking critically is marked by thanking categories of persons that are not all inclusive (the school and its administration) on behalf of himself and his wife. This shift in footing, from speaking on behalf of a “we” that includes members of the audience whom he is criticizing (parents and teachers) to speaking on behalf of a “we” who is addressing the school board and other administrative bodies, demonstrates an orientation to being most inclusive when an accusation is especially sensitive. In essence, Thielen blurred boundaries between himself and others in making his most critical claim—that people in general avoid talking to children about race, and that something needs to be done about this. Note that Thielen makes this “we” statement in a context where he has been institutionally constrained: his daughter was not allowed to present a project about race. In using the inclusive “we” at this juncture, Thielen broadens his appeal beyond the decision about the science project. His “we” addresses all who occupy positions where they would be expected to “talk with children about race.” In doing so, he unites the many who face a common problem while criticizing what “we” normally do. Simmons, too, uses an inclusive “we” when delivering his first and perhaps most critical, claim about race—that people say one thing but do another when it comes to diversity and equity. In Excerpt 2 we see Simmons initially using “we” to refer to the “black folks” and “minorities” on whose behalf he speaks, but as he begins to address and reproach the school board


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 151 (the very party he vowed support for earlier in his speech), he uses a momentarily ambiguous “we” (in the contraction “we’re”) before delineating a boundary between “you” and “us” that partitions the “we” into separate and unequal parties. Excerpt 2 1 What do you all think the civil rights movement 2 was all about. I(t) was about self esteem for black 3 folks an for minorities. We believe in ourselves, we 4 know that we feel good about ourselves as a people, 5 you’all hava have an opportunity as a school board to 6 say that if we gonna deal with diversity, if we’re 7 gonna say that we’re all equal, then you gotta treat 8 us as equals. You can’t treat us as less than equal 9 and say one thing h:ere at Boulder and then we sit 10 back lookin at you all and the students are following 11 you all- you all’s example. That is why we’re angry in 12 Denver. In this segment of his speech, Simmons is initially clear in marking the boundary between the audience, who is referred to as “you all” (Ex2, line 1), and those on whose behalf he speaks, a “we” who is variously identified as “black folks,” “minorities,” and “a people” (Ex2, lines 2–4). But in moving from talking about the civil rights movement to talking about diversity and racial equality, Simmons takes on the voice of the school board in announcing the first part of an “if . . . then” statement (“if we gonna deal with diversity, if we’re gonna say that we’re all equal”), implicitly including himself among the “we” he refers to even while effectively enacting the speech of the collective members of the school board. But as he delivers the “then” part of this statement (“then you gotta treat us as equals”), he alters his terms of reference. This pronominal shift changes the boundaries of inclusion implied by his “we,” so that the party to whom he previously referred as “we” is effectively partitioned into “you” and “us.” Simmons does this as he delivers a claim that those whom he is addressing have not treated those on whose behalf he speaks as equals (Ex2, lines 7–8). He further partitions these factions, marking the distance, as well as the difference, between them by lo-


152 / Haspel and Tracy cating the “you” who have treated the “us” as less than equal “here at Boulder,” and the latter “in Denver” (see Ex2, lines 9–12 and discussion of these place references in the next section). In Simmons’s speech, then, his use of a “we” that includes himself, at least in some ambiguous way, cushions the divisive power of the “you” that follows. Consider for instance, the emotional tenor and potential critical impact of his comments if the initial references to “we” were changed to “you.”

Indexing Place and Time to Divide Cautiously Stephen Levinson tells us that “place or space deixis concerns the specification of locations relative to anchorage points in the speech event” and that “the importance of locational specifications” can be gauged from the ways in which speakers refer to objects.17 Thielen and Simmons both make efforts to bring the issue of racial discrimination and inequity home, that is, to ground it in a local context by their use of the deictic marker, “here.” By stressing the location or source of the trouble as “here in Boulder” (Simmons) and “here and now” (Thielen), these speakers bind the trouble to a specific spatial and temporal domain. In so doing, they narrow the range of possible culpable parties to a specific local population, dividing the world into those who are responsible and those who are not. Yet when it comes to pointing out who, specifically, is responsible for limiting discussions of race with children (Thielen’s criticism) or teaching children to discriminate by race (Simmons’s criticism), both speakers’ deictic references leave unsaid who is included in the “here.” Their use of these place terms puts recipients into the position of inferring that a rather broad criticism is being targeted at the particular category in which they are incumbent, even if membership in this category is relatively limited. Consider how each speaker uses deictic references to subtly (and cautiously) mark differences between them and their audience so as to direct their criticism to the latter domain after suggesting that they are all in this together.18 Thielen asserts that “we can not limit discussions about race . . . to the sterile controlled environment of a set lesson in a classroom” and claims that “the racial issues we ourselves face today” can only be addressed “in the context of the real world” (see Excerpt 3).


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 153 Excerpt 3 1 race remains a huge issue in this country and clearly 2 one that is very difficult to talk about. However we 3 can not limit discussions about race merely to the 4 sterile controlled environment ·hhh of a set lesson in 5 a classroom. ·h We must discuss it whenever it arises 6 in any context. The world is not neat and ordered. It 7 is messy, and chaotic and only in the context of the 8 real world can we address a:ll ·h aspects of the 9 racial issues we ourselves face today Thielen’s reference to a “lesson in a classroom” carries the implication that teachers have failed to fully address racial issues even while he names no agent of this communication in the classroom. In contrast, he suggests that race is best taught about in the “context of the real world,” a vague reference to place, but one that makes sense merely as an auspicious alternative to what is being taught in the classroom. Note, too, that Thielen includes himself among those who are responsible for what is taught about race in the classroom and elsewhere by his use of “we” throughout this segment of his speech. Thielen’s call for a shift in venue further suggests that lessons about race might be better taught outside of the classroom, perhaps by persons other than teachers. Having laid this critical groundwork, Thielen moves on to more pointed, albeit still cautious criticism. Moments later, upon learning that his time is running out, Thielen announces that he is skipping to “the biggie” of his speech. He then moves into making recommendations that have criticism of teaching methods embedded in them, yet refrains from pointing fingers specifically at the teachers at Mesa. Excerpt 4 1 I’m gonna skip through the rest of this and hit to the 2 hh (3.0) >the biggie.< ·hh h U:m ·hh we can only de’uce 3 this by discussing racial issues that exist here and 4 now, and I think that is the crux of this


154 / Haspel and Tracy 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

disagreement. Not just history, not just the holocaust and the civil rights struggle that happened in the past and were done by other people. who were ba::d, but what is happening he:re and no:w. not just in prepan- planned lesson plans, but as it comes up everywhere because the pre:planned lesson plans are not sufficient. .hh This is the hard fight we have to make

Here Thielen uses references to time and place (“here and now” and “everywhere”) to offer an alternative to teaching about past racial issues in the classroom. It is noteworthy that he couples this rather vague recommendation with what is arguably his most directly critical claim that preplanned lesson plans are not sufficient. While this claim clearly asserts a failure, the failure is formulated as one of limitation, not overt wrongdoing, which leaves the agents of these failed actions unnamed. This formulation of blame implies that those who create lesson plans are responsible for limited and insufficient discussions of race yet ultimately leaves it to the audience to infer who the responsible parties are, effectively relieving Thielen of the task of pointing them out. In his speech to the school board meeting, Simmons is seen to use place references in somewhat less overtly critical ways than Theilen does, at least initially. Yet Simmons’s references point to specific places, Denver and Boulder, and grow more pointed in their criticism as he builds his case. He uses “here” to specify that while he shares the same discursive space with his audience, at least for the moment, his position is that of an outsider relative to Boulder. This position is erected throughout a series of six references to “Boulder,” three of which are coupled with “here” (see Excerpt 5), so that what the people in Boulder are responsible for is only made clear at the speech’s end. Consider the six instances in the order they appeared in his speech and their cumulatively critical orientation. Excerpt 5 (Lines 471–74)19 Good afternoon, good evenin (1.8) um (1.0) hh it’s a long drive up to Boulder, almost dinn’t get here, couldn’t find my way, y’all had no signs to tell us where we’re to go what’s up with that? ((audience laughter))


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 155 (Lines 480–84) I’ve got several phone calls from African American parents in the Denver community and I don’t know if Boulder knows about us but uh we are very hurt by what has happen(ed) here in Boulder. (Lines 512–17) You can’t treat us as less than equal and say one thing here at Boulder and then we sit back lookin at you all, and the students are following you all- you all’s example. That is why we’re angry in Denver. (Lines 517–20) We’re saying that we going to monitor what’s going on up here in Boulder. I just brought one person with me but w’will come back (Lines 529–33) And Boulder lastly as I con- as I close you know you all have a history of hatin black folks you don’t even have a black in this room other than myself an- and my organization. Although the “here” used by Simmons in “here in/at Boulder” locates him in the same space as the Boulder residents he addresses, at least for the duration of his participation in the meeting, his orientation to Boulder and the very identity of Boulder shift and change across these references, so that these references to place can be heard to cautiously divide and critique those present. In his first mention of Boulder, Simmons can be heard to simply refer to it as a place, although one that was not simple for him to find, which he notes in an ironically cheerful complaint. By his second mention, Boulder is referred to as a population, characterized as a thinking being capable of hurting a separate population, an “us” in Denver on whose behalf Simmons speaks. It is here that Simmons begins to draw a distinction between his position and that of the people he addresses, despite his use of “here” in his next mention of Boulder, which locates him in the same discursive space as his audience. By the fourth time Simmons mentions Boulder (Ex5, lines 512–17), however, Simmons locates himself at a distant and somewhat asymmetrical position relative to Boulder. In this instance, Boulder is addressed as a “you” held in somewhat elevated regard, who has treated an “us” less than equal, and to whom students look as an “example.” But in making his fifth reference to Boulder (Ex5, lines 517–20), Simmons begins to shift this asymmetry. In this instance, he describes the actions of a “we” on whose behalf he speaks as “monitor[ing] what’s going on up here.” This description lends agency to this “we” and shifts their position to a more evaluative one. As Simmons ap-


156 / Haspel and Tracy proaches the end of his speech, he refers once more to Boulder (Ex5, lines 529–33), this time addressing his audience directly as locates them within a racist historical context. In addressing them in this way, Simmons finally locates himself as a complete outsider and effects an even greater shift in asymmetry as he scolds them for their lack of diversity. Note, however, how Simmons characterizes the object of Boulder’s hatred as “black folks” (not “us”). In so doing, he uses a category sufficiently broad to include himself, yet sufficiently impersonal so as to minimize implications of personal accusation, effectively softening the criticism he delivers. The criticism is further diffused by his referencing Boulder’s racism as a “history,” allowing for the possibility that they might not currently be racist. These various shifts in his position and his relationship to others demonstrate an effort on Simmons’s part to divide his audience with caution and criticize them without being openly divisive. These speakers’ efforts to ground the discussion temporally and geographically through their use of deictic references (i.e., “here”) operate in two ways. First, they appear to provide the speakers with a means of aligning themselves with their audience, however marginally or provisionally, while making critical distinctions between themselves and groups within the audience. In attributing failure to teach children about race in a relevant or nondiscriminatory manner to persons who occupy certain positions and locations, these speakers zero in on domains of blame, but never specifically target individuals. In Thielen’s speech, the target of his criticism is those who teach children about race in contexts that are removed from the “here and now.” He subsequently specifies the location of his criticism as the “sterile environment of the classroom” and the “preplanned lesson plans” that govern it, but never points out who is responsible for the failure to teach children about race “here,” “now,” and “everywhere” it “comes up”—he does not have to—for his use of temporal and spatial references creates a context within which the audience can infer who is responsible. In Simmons’s speech, the use of place references also provides him with a means of implicating a category of persons within his audience without directly accusing anyone. Simmons also implies that it is those who teach children about race, or at least those who have taught the student who authored the controversial science fair project, who have failed. Yet he does so by raising questions as to the source of the student’s learning, and formulates this source as a place. Posi-


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 157 tioning them in the immediate proximity of references to Boulder, Simmons creates a context of blame directed at Boulderites, yet leaves it up to Boulder residents to implicate themselves. Indexes of place and time, then, were used to separate the speakers from others who were implicated as doing wrong even while situating them all in the same discursive space. That is, by virtue of their categorical breadth, these devices divided “the public” while diffusing responsibility. In that sense their dividing function was accomplished with care, giving attention to limiting damage. This cautious means of being divisive could best be described as drawing and then shifting the dividing lines between the speakers and those on whose behalf they speak, on the one hand, and those they address, on the other.

INVITING COLLECTIVE SENTIMENT AND ACTION Researchers of narrative discourse have considered what it takes for speakers to “make a point,” or get their audiences to understand the “upshot” of what they are telling them, noting that a point need not be explicitly stated. The upshot of a story may be implicated throughout the telling of a story by the use of descriptive features and organizational devices. John A. Robinson, in fact, claims that a narrative without an explicitly stated point is an “invitation to cooperative problem-solving.”20 While different from conversational storytelling, the discourse examined here shows public speakers inviting their audience to participate in formulating the upshot of their arguments. By bundling ideologically rich content within contrasts, repetition, parallel structure, and lists, Simmons and Theilen make these ostensibly monologic speeches into dialogic contributions to the meeting that invite affirming assent.21

Contrast Discourse analyses of political speeches have found that contrast, one of the most basic rhetorical devices, embodies two elements that are essential to generating positive audience response: emphasis and completion-point projection.22 In Thielen’s and Simmons’s contributions to the BVSD public meeting of February 27, contrast is produced through prosody (contrastive


158 / Haspel and Tracy stress) as well as structurally (contrastive structure) to package each man’s criticism and deliver it in a way that manages to emphasize where he stands without explicitly stating how his stance differs from those of others. By emphasizing a particular word, utterance, idea, or action, contrastive stress foregrounds difference. An explicit use of contrastive stress is found in Thielen’s claim, “some have said this experiment was not science. It is.” (lines 229–30); a more complex, implicit form of contrast is used when he speaks about race. In Excerpt 1, for example, he claims that the controversy over his daughter’s science fair project has led to “a lotta people realizing we do avoid racial issues <especially the ones that are here and now.” In this instance, contrastive stress is used to mark the verb “do,” implying the opposite: that it is assumed that people do not avoid talk of racial issues. The elision of “do not” in this claim and the use of stress on “do” put the audience in the position of inferring the criticism: people claim that they do not avoid discussing racial issues with children, but they do. Thielen and Simmons also used structural contrast in which a bipartite (and sometime tripartite) format is used to juxtapose their criticism of what had (or had not) been done with what should be done. Often a structural contrast will be marked by conjunctions such as “but” or contrastive forms such as “not just . . . but.” One particular advantage of using these contrastive forms is that speakers can project the second part of the contrast without stating it. Even if it is vaguely formulated, audience members can infer the upshot of the contrast. Thielen, for example, uses a series of contrastive statements of the “not just . . . but” form to criticize ways in which race has been discussed (see Excerpt 4). Notice how vaguely formulated the alternatives he mentions in the contrasts’ second parts are—“what is happening here and now” and “as it comes up everywhere.” The contrast posed between his claims of failure (the “not just” clauses) and the correctives he proposes (the “but” clauses) is made apparent through the repetition of particular elements of these utterances, most notably recurrent lexical items (“not,” “just,” and “but”), and semantic features (e.g., the deictics “here,” “now,” “everywhere”). As is evident from this case, contrast is often built from a complex of redundant features of discourse. According to John Heritage and David Greatbatch, contrasts “mobilize audience response” if they are composed of first and second parts that are rhythmically balanced and contain similarities of length, content, and grammatical structure.”23 The “not just . . . but” and “if . . . then” formats emYou are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 159 ployed by Thielen and Simmons do this. In repeating their formulations of what others have said and done within these contrastive formats, they are able to cast negative evaluation on others’ talk and actions, project what should be done, and yet cast their proposals in a positive light. But while the contrastive forms used by Thielen and Simmons demonstrate efforts to emphasize and project, they differ from the contrastive devices observed by Heritage and Greatbatch in two ways. First, Thielen’s and Simmons’s contrasts juxtapose action descriptions rather than position statements. Rather than posing a contrast between ideological positions, they draw a distinction between what has been done (discussing racial issues set in the past, saying that all are equal/preaching diversity) and what has yet to be done (discuss racial issues situated in the here and now, treat all as equals). Second, in projecting actions that should be taken, they use vague terms and figurative expressions that invite audience members to take action rather than direct them to show approval or disapproval of a speaker’s position.24 Although the second part of their contrasts issue directives, the actions that these directives recommend are formulated in broad and idiomatic terms that require listeners to figure out what needs to be done and to infer that they are among the parties responsible for doing something about the named failures. What these contrasts preserve is the ability to criticize others without accusing them of wrongdoing outright. Thielen’s and Simmons’s use of contrast points to the effort that is being made by each of them to present his position and recommendations in the best possible light while implicitly casting a negative evaluation on the positions and actions taken by others. What makes contrast especially persuasive is its ability to emphasize a speaker’s position twice, first in the “negative” (by claiming what it is not), then in the positive, by asserting what it is.25 This valuable feature of contrast may account for its widespread use in criticizing opponents’ positions in political oratory.26 In addition, contrastively formulated criticisms that are subtle and invitational (i.e., somewhat ambiguous) are likely to elicit cheering and other positive responses from audiences, whereas criticisms that are delivered straightforwardly or with derision often elicit booing and other negative reactions.27 In a study that examined how people talk about race in several contexts, Teun van Dijk suggests that subtle contrast may provide a speaker with a means to make negative assessments about another race without being evaluated as racist or unreasonable for doing so.28 Thus You are reading copyrighted material published by the University of Alabama Press. Any posting, copying, or distributing of this work beyond fair use as defined under U.S. Copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. For permission to reuse this work, contact the University of Alabama Press.

160 / Haspel and Tracy talk that sounds equivocal or syntactically awkward may be heard to display equanimity and face concerns. Thielen’s and Simmons’s use of contrast demonstrates their concerns for minimizing the potential divisiveness of their remarks and for having their remarks be received positively. Simply put, the use of an invitational contrastive format is a discursive move that helps citizens effectively manage unity and difference, while also moving an audience toward particular sentiments.

Bundling Repetition, Parallel Structure, and Lists with Ideological Invocation In an analysis of the most famous speeches given by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech) and the Reverend Jesse Jackson (his 1988 speech to the Democratic National Convention), Deborah Tannen shows how unique combinations of repetition and variation call attention to key terms and evoke emotional responses from their audiences.29 Among the techniques used by both Jackson and King was parallelism. Parallelisms are typically found at speech moments where an orator is summing up, recapitulating, or driving home a point. Both Thielen and Simmons employ this rhetorical device to bring their speeches to a close, but both speakers also bundle it with list construction, a device that has been described as a “major weapon in the armory of public speakers.”30 Like contrast, lists have recurrent, recognizable formats that lend them projectability. Lists are used to engage recipients to draw inferences and formulate upshots, but unlike contrast, which appears to be indigenous to specialized adversarial discourses (e.g., legal, journalistic, racist), the three-part list occurs in interpersonal, as well as public and institutional, contexts. Audiences of all types are familiar with three-part lists; people know they should listen for third items even if they are not provided. In the public context, third items, whether or not they are explicitly stated, are used to generate a favorable response from audience members, to move them emotionally, and to avoid offense.31 But moving people to action is not merely a matter of what discourse devices are used; it also depends on argument content. What substantive claim are the devices advancing? Yoking devices to beliefs that are ideologically dominant is likely to work better than yoking them to fringe beliefs.


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 161 At any historical moment, certain beliefs in a society will be commonplace, regarded as transparently reasonable or morally right. Invoking positive sentiment is more likely when speakers can line up what they are saying with one of these commonplaces. This rhetorical task, however, has challenges, as principles that are seen as commonsensical are usually formulated so abstractly that it is not obvious what specific actions or other beliefs are entailed by the commonplace.32 In addition, as Michael Billig and his colleagues have shown, most commonsense beliefs have equally plausible contrary commonsense beliefs.33 For instance, the belief that everyone deserves an equal say in important decisions is held alongside of a belief that decisions should draw on expertise rather than ignorance. Explicit articulation of one commonplace can, therefore, bring a contrary one to mind. For this reason, evoking a commonplace rather than asserting it directly is often particularly persuasive. Such a move draws on the emotional power of the commonplace without making it a focus of logical argument. Both Simmons and Thielen used lists, parallel structure, and repetition, and yoked these devices to a position that evoked (but did not argue explicitly) for a commonplace American belief. Simmons’s move toward closure (Excerpt 6) comes with use of a contrastive conjunction (“but”) to mark a departure from his overtly critical remarks (about Boulder’s racist history and lack of racial diversity) and a move toward affirming, directing, and appealing to his audience. Simmons’s appeal to select members of the audience is explicitly marked by his “please school board” (Ex6, line 2), but what drives his appeal are the lists of three that follow (marked in bold in Excerpts 6 and 7), directives that imply that despite its racist past, Boulder is on the road to redemption. Excerpt 6 1 But this issue is very important so as I close 2 I wanta say please school board do not change your position do 3 not be afraid of the ACLU. Sta:nd firm. We’re watchin. 4 The community is watchin the minority community is 5 watchin. I believe you all are doin the right thing, 6 and please we- you have our support. So I wanted to 7 say that and I’ll stand back and listen to other 8 comments. Thank you


162 / Haspel and Tracy What constitutes the appeal and gives it force is a combination of devices, which are repeated. In his first list, Simmons employs a parallel construction in making repeated use of “do not” in the first two of the three imperative statements that comprise this list of three. The negative formulation of the first two imperatives projects that a directive specifying what to do is forthcoming.Then, Simmons issues a third imperative statement that can be heard to complete this list of three (“Stand firm”). His placement of a stressed imperative in exactly the same syntactic location in each utterance allows us to hear his third imperative statement as the list’s culmination. But more than this, this appeal resonates with other discourses, both an immediate one (what Simmons said earlier in the speech) and a larger ideological discourse that circulates in American society. First, this list of two negatively formulated and parallel-structured imperative statements followed by a directive echoes an earlier moment in Simmons’s speech. Excerpt 7 We want t’ say to the school board we stand behind you, our African American community stands behind you, do not shuffle. Do not go backwards. Keep your faith. We believe you are right on this issue. In this instance, as in the list of imperatives employed in closing his speech, Simmons stresses that the school board should hold their position, stand firmly by their convictions, move forward on them, and have faith that they are doing the right thing. In making this argument using the words he does, Simmons’s speech evokes the discourse of the civil rights movement, and particularly the words of reverends Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King. Compare, for example, Simmons’s appeal to those made by Jackson and King in the closing moments of their most famous speeches. Notice how both speakers stress standing firm, keeping faith, and looking, if not moving, forward to a better, more racially cooperative, future. Jesse Jackson. “Don’t you surrender. Suffering breeds character, character breeds faith. In the end faith will not disappoint.You must not surrender.You may or may not get there but just know that you’re qualified. And you hold


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 163 on, and hold out. We must never surrender. America will get better and better.”34 Martin Luther King. “This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”35 More recently, in a television talk show discussion of the fortieth anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Representative John E. Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia and longtime civil rights advocate, also invoked the discourse of the civil rights movement, formulating it into a three-part list, in responding to a caller’s claim that the legacy of King’s mission is not being carried through by black leaders today. John H. Lewis “We’re not going back. We’re not going to stand still. We’re going to continue our agenda.”36 These examples suggest that Simmons’s final appeal to the school board audience sought to invoke the relevance of a larger, morally taken-for-granted, ideological frame. Across time and contexts, the civil rights frame assumes that faith in the fight for equity, integrity in the face of adversity, and forward movement is what is happening; if not, corrective action needs to happen immediately. In invoking this frame with an audience that is likely to have some familiarity with it—educators, and educated and politically progressive citizens—Simmons serves to legitimize his position, and by extension that of the school board, by occupying a moral high ground only implicated earlier (see Ex5 discussion), which is now recognizable as a position on par with those taken by great civil rights leaders and orators. In concluding with the list of three “do not change your position/do not be afraid of the ACLU./Sta:nd firm,” Simmons is able to wed emotion to motivation to involve his audience ideologically as well as emotionally, and through these discursive moves, obligate them to act. Thielen also closes his speech by bundling parallelism in a three-part list


164 / Haspel and Tracy with an action appeal that taps into a powerful commonplace. Excerpt 8 follows directly on the heels of Excerpt 4. Excerpt 8 This is the hard fight we have to make. Studies have shown that children start discuss- making distinctions about race at age three and if we make this subject taboo, it means that they make their decisions on their own without our guidance. We talk to our children about drugs, we talk to them about sex. We should also be talking to them about race. Our society has been stuck on this issue of race for the last thirty y(h)ears, since nineteen seventy. And perhaps our children can show us a way out of that. Thank you very much. Thielen repeats the same subject-verb-object clause (“we” + “talk to” + “children”) with only slight variation, giving his list of three a marked parallel structure. The third item in this list is distinguished from the others as a description of action to be taken, rather than actions already being taken by parents. The “also” provides an important link between the first two items and the third one and highlights the imperative for talking to children about race by implying that while the other two subjects (drugs and sex) are talked about regularly, this one (race) is not. While it is not news at this point that what Thielen wants his audience to do is talk to children about race, what he does here is new. He delivers this point he has been making throughout his speech in a more imperative manner than before, yet he includes himself among those who should heed this imperative, potentially softening its illocutionary force. In sum, like Simmons, Thielen packages his point in a parallel-structured, three-part list that invokes a larger American discourse about a powerful commonplace. By linking talk about race to talk about drugs and sex,Thielen casts race as a matter as socially and biologically threatening as the other two. While talking to children about drugs and sex may not be something that parents want to do or feel comfortable doing, it is something that they should be doing, according to Thielen’s appeal and others like it. TV and radio public service announcements routinely tell parents that they have this responsibility. The Web site of the National Institute on Drug Abuse Prevention, for instance, describes their TV public service announcements as messages that are de-


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 165 signed to “encourage parents to talk to their children about the dangers of drugs.”37 Other public service health campaigns also endorse “talking to kids” as a method of preventing their engagement in activities that could be harmful to them. A recent public service announcement from the American Cancer Society advises: “Talk to your kids about the risks of smoking—and, remember, kids learn by example.”38 The uncontested nature of these “talk to your children” messages suggests that talk as good is part of a common ideology of parenthood in the United States, as well as of caretaking roles more generally. These kinds of messages put parents, and we would add teachers, into a position of knowledge and moral authority over their children. But they also carry with them the suggestion that adults who fail to talk to kids about these subjects are responsible for what kids do when they act wrongly, and that if kids act on information from sources other than their parents or teachers, they are at risk. In linking to this ideology but not arguing for it explicitly, Thielen suggests that his audience has a profound moral obligation to heed his directive. At the same time, including race in the “talk-to-your-kids ideology” exposes dangling threads that could lead to Thielen’s argument unraveling. We suggested that teachers are included among the adults who should talk to kids. Although we believe this to be true, it is clearly parents who are the focal targets of these announcements. Perhaps race, like sex and drugs, is a matter primarily for talk at home? And yet Thielen suggests it is the children who will be teaching the parents when he offers, in closing, that they “can show us a way out of that.” A second thread in this public service frame is its implication that parents are equipped to talk to kids and that talking is what will lead kids to act well. These implications seem especially questionable in matters of race where gaps between what’s said and done are particularly common (as both Thielen and Simmons point out). Third, the message sidesteps a counter commonsense ideology: With young children, it is reasonable and right that some topics be discussed generally or not at all. Last, but certainly not least serious, in equating racial ignorance with ills that come from children engaging in sex or taking drugs, Thielen places race within a discourse of risk. And while it may seem rather bizarre to equate race with health risks, race has long been talked about in terms of risk and biological threat.39 Nevertheless, for Thielen to align his directive with a well-known


166 / Haspel and Tracy fear appeal is to call audience members’ attention to the severity of the matter at hand, and to suggest to them that they, as parents, are ultimately responsible for arming their children with knowledge to fight such risks. In sum, Thielen packages a taken-for-granted ideology (that talk, particularly talking with kids, is good) with a discourse commonplace (the fear appeal) in repetition, parallel structure, contrast, and a three-part list to garner support for his position that parents and teachers should talk more (and more appropriately) about race with children. Like Simmons, Thielen invokes an ideological framework within a rhetorical structure that allows him to occupy a higher moral ground relative to those in the audience, yet one that invites them to follow his lead by tapping into commonsense beliefs (that we should treat everyone equally and do what we say) after pointing out his audience’s failure to do what they say. While they partition and address slightly different factions of the audience (Thielen appeals primarily to parents while Simmons appeals primarily to school personnel), these speakers use an array of tactics that amount to a strategy to engage, unite, and motivate their listeners. Both men show us, through what they say and how they say it, that speech is, can be, and should be action—democratic action.

CONCLUSIONS In this chapter we analyzed the words of two ordinary citizens as they spoke about a controversial decision involving race and fairness in their community school board meeting. Each speaker sought to show that his concerns were not mere self-interest, but involved matters of the common good. In speaking in this public setting within their restricted few minutes, each man worked to persuade elected officials, the public attending the meeting, and the larger public attentive to the meeting, that the district had a serious problem that deserved thought, talk, and future action. Both citizens designed their talk to marshal public sentiment and incline the BVSD deliberative body toward future action.Through the details of both citizens’ talk, they pursued their goals while navigating the unity-diversity tension that exists in all sites of democratic talk. Each took strong positions without disrespecting others, expressed their stances on perceived wrongdoings without stomping on others, and built positive sentiment in a scene of dissension. By using fairly simple discursive devices (ambiguous, ambivalent, and


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 167 figurative references and descriptions) and fairly common rhetorical strategies (contrasts, lists, and commonplaces) these speakers managed to traverse a complex, dangerous (to some even threatening) territory: the minefield of talking about race in America. In a country founded on principles of equity, fairness, and respect, race has existed as the single issue that threatens to explode these very principles. Yet talking about race is vital to the perpetuation of democracy. According to Cornel West, “the lens of race becomes indispensable in our attempt to understand, preserve, and expand America’s democratic experiment.”40 Thielen and Simmons showed us, through the ways they organized their speeches, that they recognized the stakes. In selecting discourse devices that enabled them to carefully approach, step through, and rally others around principles for future talk about race, they showed us that seemingly peripatetic speech can have a recognizable, reasonable, and strategic order to it. Their talk was an inventive way to deal with the tensions of managing and respecting difference while building common interests by making use of available means of persuasion-references to shared and known-in-common places, histories, values, and concerns. The means for talking about and dealing with problems that cause tensions can be found in recurrent modes of discourse, Kenneth Burke has argued.41 Thielen’s and Simmons’s recurrent use of shifting references to person and place and inference-inviting structures offers examples of how to talk about race and its endemic tensions publicly and constructively, that is, with a coorientation to the public and the social, to place and face.While they may appear to be overly cautious in their footing, they at least traverse boundaries that others circumvent, perhaps because they can. Consider that, on rare occasions when situations call for or enable public “dialogues” on race (such as those during the first Clinton administration and after the brutal racially motivated killing of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas), they are usually led by experts (professional journalists and politicians). In this situation, it is two ordinary citizens who have lived in the trenches of race matters—Simmons, daily, Theilen, temporarily—who direct the discourse. Beverly Sauer reminds us that “the deliberation of questions of policy and value” can benefit from an “approach that draws upon the knowledge and understanding of lay audiences,” especially in making judgments about risk.42 In seeking to understand democracy from the ground up, to give it flesh, and to tie it to communicative actions, we have looked at the available means


168 / Haspel and Tracy of persuasion in the details of Theielen’s and Simmons’s talk, displaying our philosophical stripes as pragmatists. We believe, as John Dewey argued, that the meaning of democracy is to be found in instances of its situated practice. As democracy is a talk-saturated practice, this requires that we study what people say in democracy’s bread and butter sites. Doing so offers a solution to a problem raised by Sauer, who asks, “How do we discover the means of persuasion that are not recorded in writing, inscribed in textual practices, and authorized as conventional within the disciplines and institutions we choose to study?”43 We study the talk of ordinary citizens. In highlighting the ability of ordinary citizen speakers to use common modes of discourse for uncommon ends (to talk critically yet inclusively about race), our analysis resists the chorus about decline prevalent in so many current studies of democracy and public life. Ordinary democracy, and the talk that enacts it, is quite remarkable. From as far back as James Madison’s Federalist Papers and John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems to Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man and Benjamin Barber’s Strong Democracy, theorists have recognized the role of talk in managing factions and individual interests that threaten achievement of a common public good. When the democratic body is ailing, it is interaction that brings it back to life, but not just any interaction will do.What is needed, as Dewey noted is, “conjoint and interacting behavior.”44 This particular meeting moment was an especially sensitive one: citizens were arguing about what should count as reasonable communicative conduct: How should persons in their community be conducting themselves with others as they talked about race? In a public situation focused on this topic, no adult’s expression is free from evaluation. How a person spoke about race was relevant to the issue of how race in general ought to be talked about. It is no surprise, then, that both speakers used nondivisive discourse strategies to assert potentially contentious positions. In this school board meeting much was at stake: speakers had ongoing relationships with those they addressed. To present themselves as reasonable members of their community—adults who were concerned about the wellbeing of children—these speakers needed to engage in conjoint behavior even as they criticized the actions of some among them. In arguing for the importance of talking to children about race and keeping up the fight against


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 169 unfairness, each was an effective “citizen critic,”45 speaking from an ethos of common concern, even as other individualized and competing concerns were made evident in their talk.46 In sum, the speeches of these two citizens to the Boulder Valley School District board meeting show just how extraordinary the practice of ordinary democracy can be. So what can we, as citizens and communicators, learn from Thielen and Simmons? First, we see firsthand how discursive devices can be used as tactics for managing social relationships while functioning as part of a larger strategy for supporting or calling for changes in public policies. The devices that Thielen and Simmons used to talk publicly about race, in a culture that prefers not to talk about it, especially in public,47 provide us with inclusive and invitational methods of partitioning and criticizing an audience. Second, they show us that, as Thielen put it, “the system works.” In spite of limitations on time, location, and relevance, this public forum provides opportunities for the invisible and the unspeakable to be seen and heard. The parent behind the scenes of the science fair project that was pulled from public view gets to talk about race with those who silenced his daughter. A local civil rights activist lets it be known that black people were offended and affected by the science fair project, that the actions of one community regarding race has consequences for those of another community beyond their borders. Both men’s actions through speech show us that the talk of civil rights is not a thing of the past; it is “here and now,” and the “struggle” to practice what our democratic values preach continues. Third, these speakers engage us to think differently about eloquence. They show us that one can manage competing individual and public concerns with sophisticated discursive moves, even if one’s execution of them is not polished or especially fluent. The pragmatic and microanalytic perspective taken here allows hesitation, shifting references, and awkward syntax to be seen as signs of a speaker’s adaptation to audience and situation, rather than a display of cognitive dissonance or communicative incompetence, as others might argue. While Thielen and Simmons may not be expert participants in this forum, they have the “street creds” of those who have lay experience communicating about race and the sophistication to talk about it under egalitarian, nonracist, and anti-intellectual cultural constraints. The fact that they adapt to the situation and adjust to others is good; the fact that


170 / Haspel and Tracy they do so with some disfluency is, in our view, expressive and interactive, and therefore eloquent. As Michael Osborn reminds us, the interactive nature of rhetoric has long been recognized in the use of devices that extend the boundaries of the text “beyond the speech” and “within the audience.”48 Those who manage to reach beyond speech into the audience, Osborn says, are eloquent.49 Finally, that these speakers come off as ambivalent in their affiliations and possibly unclear about where they stand on these issues regarding race is understandable, perhaps even encouraging, if we consider the competing, conflictual, and divisive terms in which race is conceptualized and discussed in American culture. Rona Tamiko Halualani and her colleagues found that their interviewees “frequently used the terms ‘racial lines,’ ‘conflicts’ and ‘entrenched lines’ to connote their concern” that talk about race “build[s] up . . . walls” between people, socially and politically.50 In their contributions to a public dialogue (of sorts) on race, Thielen and Simmons divide their audience along lines of communicative practices of communicating about race, as one might draw a “line in the sand,” as we have heard hawkish politicians characterize ultimatums of diplomacy-or-conflict proffered to enemies. Thielen and Simmons, however, are not that black and white in their approach. They show themselves to be diplomats with a little “d,” taking positions on both individual concerns (that we talk about race and stay the course in fighting racism) and one overarching concern (that we do what we say and “back our words with convictions”). They do so in ways that mark what they are doing as sensitive (potentially contentious) yet blur distinctions and soften differences between them and their audience, so that their alignments were not readily apparent, nor apparently, entrenched. In the land of public discourse we live in today, occupied by us-versusthem ideological imperialists, where public figures who do not make it clear which side they stand on are accused of flip-flopping, the approach taken by Thielen and Simmons is refreshing and encouraging. They show us that a space can be created in public discourse for talking about race on relatively noncompetitive and nonconflictual grounds, where doing so need not be likened to playing a card or calling someone a name. Not doing so would be even worse; for to avoid the issue and pretend that race, racism, and the fight for civil rights no longer exist would keep white privilege intact and in-


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 171 visible and leave democracy an unmarked and unattainable ideal, removed from the talk of ordinary citizens.

NOTES 1. Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen (New York: Free Press, 1998), 301. 2. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927), 141. 3. We would like to thank Michael Lacey for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 4. For a review of how discourse in public meetings has been characterized, see Karen Tracy and Aaron Dimock, “Meetings: Discursive Sites for Building and Fragmenting Community,” in Communication Yearbook 28, ed. Pamela Kalbfleisch, 127– 65 (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004). Although theorists vary in the degree to which they see serious trouble in citizenship and democratic talk, many argue that there is a problem. See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone:The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Touchstone, 2000). Also see James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); John Gastil, “Undemocratic Discourse: A Review of Theory and Research on Political Discourse,” Discourse and Society 3 (1992): 5–27; and Darrin Hicks, “The Promise(s) of Deliberative Democracy,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002): 223– 60. In Nina Eliasoph’s ethnographic study of several different kinds of community groups, she argues that the state of public talk is impoverished. See Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 5. A discussion of marking can be found in Stephen C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 307. The analysis of mother terms is to be found in George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 74–76. A discussion of this example may also be found in Karen Tracy, Everyday Talk: Building and Reflecting Identities (New York: Guilford, 2002), 178. 6. Consider, for example, how descriptors are used to mark minority members of certain occupational categories, such as “male nurse,” “female firefighter.” 7. See Bohman, Public Deliberation, and Hicks, “The Promise(s),” for examples of normative models. 8. Robert T. Craig and Karen Tracy, “The ‘Issue’ in Argumentation Theory and Practice,” in Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, ed. Frans H. van Eemeren et al. (Amsterdam: Sic Sat, 2003), 217.


172 / Haspel and Tracy 9. This description is based on observation of BVSD meetings between 1996 and 1999 and at selected meetings since then that the second author has carried out. Other studies based on analyses of these meetings include Karen Tracy, “The Usefulness of Platitudes in Arguments about Conduct,” in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, ed. Frans H. van Eemeren et al., 709–803 (Amsterdam: Sic Sat, 1999); Karen Tracy and Catherine Ashcraft, “Crafting Polices about Controversial Values: How Wording Disputes Manage a Group Dilemma,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 29 (2001): 297–316; Karen Tracy and Heidi Muller, “Diagnosing a School Board’s Interactional Trouble: Theorizing Problem Formulation,” Communication Theory 11 (2001): 84–104; Karen Tracy and Christina Standerfer, “Selecting a School Superintendent: Sensitivities in Group Deliberation” in Group Communication in Context: Studies of Natural Groups, ed. Lawrence Frey, 109–34 (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003). Currently underway is a book examining the 1996–99 time period, titled Ordinary Democracy:Troubles and Triumphs in School Board Meetings (Albany: State University of New York Press). 10. David M. Ryfe, “The Practice of Deliberative Democracy: A Study of 16 Deliberative Organizations,” Political Communication 19 (2002): 369. 11. For the phrase “valuation of difference,” see Gerard Hauser and Chantal Benoit-Barne, “Reflections on Rhetoric, Deliberative Democracy, Civil Society, and Trust,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002): 261–75. 12. For studies of these discourse practices, see Anita Pomerantz, “Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes,” in Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage, 57–101 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Anita Pomerantz, “Giving a Source or Basis: The Practice in Conversation of Telling ‘How I Know,’” Journal of Pragmatics 8 (1984): 607–25; Kathleen Haspel, “Not Just ‘Hot Air’: Talk of Personal Experience on News Talk Radio as Collaborative and Critical Engagement in the Public Sphere” (PhD diss., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2001). 13. Pomerantz, “Agreeing,” 57–101. 14. Line numbers without an excerpt identified refer to the speeches in Appendix A: David Thielen (Speaker C) and Alvertis Simmons (Speaker G). For the short sections of these speeches that were retranscribed and brought in to the chapter, references include the Excerpt number and line numbers, with line number beginning at 1 (e.g., Ex6, lines 3–4). 15. For a discussion of membership categories, see Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 570–71; for a discussion of “with,” see


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 173 Jenny Mandelbaum, “Assigning Responsibility in Conversational Storytelling: The Interactional Construction of Reality,” Text 11 (1993): 441–80. 16. We have retranscribed the exchange in the appendix to capture more particularities of talk. Transcription symbols are a simplified version of those used in conversation analysis. Punctuation reflects intonation: a period is a falling intonation, a question mark is a marked rise and a comma indicates a listing or continuing intonation. Underlining indicates stress; parentheses containing a period (.) indicate pauses of .2 seconds or less; parentheses containing numbers (2.4) indicate the length of a silence in tenths of seconds; .hhh indicates hearable in-breaths whereas a series of hhh without a period indicate outbreaths. A fuller explanation of these symbols can be found in Atkinson and Heritage, Structures of Social Action, ix–xvi. Boldface type is used in excerpts to draw attention to segments commented on in the analysis. 17. Levinson, Pragmatics, 79. 18. By “cautious” here, we draw on Paul Drew and John Heritage’s characterization of neutral (or at least not overtly critical), equivocal, “innocent,” or “unmotivated” ways of speaking in institutional interaction. See Paul Drew and John Heritage, “Analyzing Talk at Work: An Introduction,” in Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings, ed. Paul Drew and John Heritage, 45–47 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 19. Line numbers refer to those in Appendix A (Speaker G). 20. John A. Robinson, “Personal Narratives Reconsidered,” Journal of American Folklore 94 (1981): 58–85. 21. For discussions of narrative, see Jenny Mandelbaum, “Assigning Responsibility in Conversational Storytelling: The Interactional Construction of Reality,” Text 11 (1993): 441–80; for an analysis of rhetorical devices in public discourse, see John Heritage and David Greatbatch, “Generating Applause: A Study of Rhetoric and Response at Party Political Conferences,” American Journal of Sociology 92 (1986): 110– 57; and Ian Hutchby, “Rhetorical Strategies in Audience Participation Debates on Radio and TV,” Research on Language and Social Interaction 32 (1999): 243–67. 22. J. Maxwell Atkinson, Our Masters’ Voices: The Language and Body Language of Politics (London: Methuen, 1984). 23. Heritage and Greatbatch, “Generating Applause,” 124. 24. For a discussion of the invitational function of figurative and idiomatic expressions, see Paul Drew and Elizabeth Holt, “Complainable Matters: The Use of Idiomatic Expressions in Making Complaints,” Social Problems 35 (1988): 398–417. 25. Heritage and Greatbatch, “Generating Applause,” 122. 26. Atkinson, Our Masters’Voices, 73–77.


174 / Haspel and Tracy 27. Steven Clayman, “Booing:The Anatomy of a Disaffiliative Response,” American Sociological Review 58 (1993): 110–30. 28. See, for example, Teun van Dijk, “Discourse and the Denial of Racism,” Discourse and Society 3 (1992): 87–118. 29. For a discussion of involvement strategies in discourse, see Deborah Tannen, Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. 175–78. 30. Heritage and Greatbatch, “Generating Applause,” 125. 31. See Gail Jefferson, “List Construction as a Task and Resource,” in Interaction Competence: Studies in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, ed. George Psathas, 63–92 (Washington, DC: University Press of America). 32. Herbert McClosky illustrates this point, showing that the vast majority of Americans believe in freedom of speech, but many of them also regard it as reasonable to censor unpopular sentiments. See “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics,” American Political Science Review 58 (1968): 361–82. 33. Michael Billig, Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Michael Billig, Susan Condor, Derek Edwards, Mike Gane, David Middleton, and Alan Radley, Ideological Dilemmas (London: Sage, 1988). 34. Jesse L. Jackson, address delivered to the Democratic National Convention, Atlanta, Georgia (July 19, 1988), available at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/ speeches/jessejackson1988dnc.htm. 35. Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream” address delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (August 28, 1963), available at http://www. mlkonline.net/. 36. Washington Journal, C-SPAN, August 23, 2003. 37. Available at http://drugabuse.gov/drugpages/PSAs.html. 38. Available at http://www.radiospace.com/acspsa.htm. 39. Kent Goshorn and Oscar H. Gandy point out that “most attempts to communicate risk . . . to the general public inevitably, if inadvertently convey particular assumptions about: what is valued, what would constitute desirable outcomes, who is responsible, who is acting, and who is acted upon, as well as the existence and attractiveness of alternative courses of action.” See “Race, Risk, and Responsibility: Editorial Constraint in the Framing of Inequality,” Journal of Communication 45 (Spring 1995): 136. Ashley Montagu documents long-standing beliefs of racial impurity and biological threat in Man’s Most Dangerous Myth:The Fallacy of Race, 6th ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1997). 40. Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight against Imperialism (New York: Penguin, 2004), 14.


Marking and Shifting Lines in the Sand / 175 41. Barry Brummett makes this claim in proposing the social and cultural functionality of representative anecdotes found in public mediated discourse. See “Burke’s Representative Anecdote as a Method of Media Criticism,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 1 (1984): 161. 42. Beverly Sauer, The Rhetoric of Risk: Technical Documentation in Hazardous Environments (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003). 43. Sauer, Rhetoric of Risk, 6. 44. Dewey, Public and Its Problems, 23. 45. See Rosa A. Eberly, Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 19–25. 46. On speakers’ orientation to multiple concerns, see Jenny Mandelbaum and Anita Pomerantz, “What Drives Social Action?” in Understanding Face-to-Face Interaction: Issues Linking Goals and Discourse, ed. Karen Tracy (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991); and Karen Tracy and Sarah J. Tracy, “Rudeness at 911: Reconceptualizing Face and Face Attack,” Human Communication Research 25 (1998): 225–51. 47. This “preference” is implied and displayed in the indirect and stepwise organization of Thielen’s and Simmons’s contributions to this public discourse. In more private venues, this preference is stated explicitly. See, for example, Philomena Essed, Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991); and Rona Tamiko Halualani, Deanna L. Fassett, Jennifer Huynh Thi Anh Morrison, and Patrick Shaou-Whea Dodge, “Between the Structural and the Personal: Situated Sense-Makings of Race,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 70–93. 48. Michael Osborn, “In Defense of Broad Mythic Criticism,” Communication Studies 41 (1990): 121–27. 49. He tells a story of personal experience to illustrate his point. “I was supposed to be simply introduced to a large, predominantly African American audience but not to speak. The atmosphere seemed cordial and receptive, so when I was introduced as the enemy of all the local hate symbols, I simply stood to rising applause, smiled, gave a Black Power signal, and yelled ‘Right on.’ That was all I needed to do, and I was never more eloquent, despite the speeches that Michael Calvin McGee wrote for me” (Osborn, “In Defense of Broad Mythic Criticism,” 126). 50. Halualani et al., “Between the Structural and the Personal,” 84.


7 Chairing Democracy Psychology, Time, and Negotiating the Institution Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn

If ordinary democracy is conducted in everyday settings such as school board meetings, then it will be important to understand how that democracy is conducted in its specifics. That is, we will need to understand the way democracy is sustained in, and embodied in, particular settings and procedures and how, in turn, these settings and procedures become live. In this essay we will pick up a set of themes—time and control, authority and resistance, prejudice and passion—and follow them through the intricate practices that make up interaction in that setting and constitute its nature. We will consider democracy and its management as something practically conducted, often using delicate and indirect means. It is something rich and complicated that requires close attention to understand. Democracy is not something that is simply switched on by invoking a procedure—it is something that can be sustained and subverted in a collective often-dilemmatic manner. In this chapter we will illustrate this moment-by-moment sustenance and subversion with a particular example. Throughout, we will focus on how what is said and what is described is relevant (hearably if not intentionally) to the ongoing action. In this democracy the different actors are making their world at the same time as they act within it, constituting what is right and wrong, and reworking the very procedures for making those decisions from the inside. Its analysis is micro-


Chairing Democracy / 177 scopic, but not as a contrast to the more macro; rather, it is microscopic as it aims to capture the level of detail and organization that the parties themselves demonstrably find relevant. Such detail does not live within broader structures like an ant colony in a tank; it is a part of the constitution of that broader structure. Our argument and analysis will draw on discursive psychology, which in turn draws on conversation analysis, some strands of discourse analysis, and some strands of work on rhetoric.1 Discursive psychology is radically constructionist, treating the mental and social worlds as objects that are described and invoked in the course of particular practices.2 It focuses on the way participants in any setting are confronted by issues of psychology, social organization, and other features of context. Instead of attempting to produce a social science specification of the nature of psychology, social organization, or context, these things are considered primarily in terms of their significance for participants. In particular, how are psychology, social organization, and context produced within particular sequences of interaction as parts of particular practices? Democracy here is not an object presupposed by the parties; it is something live and contingent, something still to be accomplished. The level of analysis offered here is designed to catch that accomplishment in its moments of production. A set of materials, such as the one associated with “Barbiegate,” provides the basis for exploring the many different analytic and theoretical threads found throughout this book. In this case, we will restrict ourselves in two ways. First, we will focus just on the school board meeting of February 13. Tempting though it is to consider the later speeches and the various media constructions of this event, we will try and show how much is pertinently addressed in just this opening material. Second, we will highlight only a small set of themes relevant to the issues in this volume. We will not attempt to produce analytic closure, but rather follow through some relevant threads. For this analysis we have used a transcription scheme developed by Gail Jefferson.3 The style of analysis that we are attempting requires this level of transcript; it captures features that are demonstrably consequential in interaction and yet are unavailable in the more conventional “playscript” that is often used by analysts. We hope that the virtues of using a transcript of this richness will become apparent.4


178 / Potter and Hepburn ACTIONS AND ORGANIZATIONS— A MANUAL FOR CHAIRING What kind of thing is the social organization of a school board? How does it sustain democratic processes—giving a space for different voices, moderating debate, and providing an environment for arguing a case? Whatever else it is, this social organization is something built, managed, undermined, and enforced in the local setting. Part of this is undoubtedly managed and supported by the physical layout of the meeting, with the board president sitting behind a raised desk at the front of a room and the speakers from the floor speaking from behind a podium and addressing the president with the audience behind them. The issue of how to describe participants over the course of analysis is a rich and complicated one, raising fundamental issues around analysts’ versus participants’ understandings. Indeed, this is itself an issue of democracy. Whose characterizations of events should prevail? Should we as social researchers offer a technical specification or should we attempt to work with the categories and displayed understandings in the material? Thus, although we have used the descriptive category “chair” rather than “president”—as this reflects a conventional understanding of the business conducted by this actor in this interaction—it is important to avoid doing analysis by fiat simply in the selection of categories. Here the category chair will be treated as provisional and subject to further respecification.5 The physical features of the scene are supplemented by the technological features. Both president and speaker are provided microphones built into the furniture (i.e., a table for the president and the podium for the presenter). This underscores who the significant speakers are by, for example, making their speech clearly audible over background audience noise. Inspection of the videotape shows that this is a well-attended event. Most of the chairs are full—the room feels busy. People appear to be listening attentively. It is a live democratic scene—speeches are being made to an audience both present and virtually present via the television transmission. One of the themes in discourse work, particularly that associated with figures like Michael Billig and Derek Edwards in the United Kingdom, is the centrality of dilemmas to the operation of social institutions. In the work of Billig and his colleagues on ideological dilemmas, they note that institutions are often characterized by dilemmas over, for example, control and freedom,


Chairing Democracy / 179 regulation and spontaneity, and formality and informality.6 Rather than see these dilemmas as problems to be solved, they suggest that they provide resources for sustaining the smooth running of institutions.Take education, for instance. It is common to distinguish two kinds of educational ideology. A “traditional” ideology focuses on learning set outcomes and following rules; a “progressive” ideology focuses on developing pupils’ own potential and helping them come to their own understanding of the world. Although these two seem opposed, work in this tradition by Derek Edwards and Neil Mercer highlights the way these two ideologies are simultaneously drawn on as teachers manage classes and encourage pupils to reach particular outcomes.7 As Alexa Hepburn shows, what appear to be tensions and problems between ideologies in the abstract can be flexible resources in practice.8 Let us follow up these ideas with the materials. We will focus first on the introductory remarks from the chair. Analysis may seem micro or even trivial at the time—but we are after the lived specifics of how this institution and its democratic process is a subtle accomplishment, not always designed for transparency. The videotape starts during the chair’s opening remarks, which include points about procedure—what should happen in what way and in what order. The structuring of what goes on here is not being treated as something that will happen automatically. Instead, various procedural features are described. Note that this does not mean the complete “institution” of the school board is to be described by the chair beforehand. There are likely to be a wide range of taken-for-granted things brought to the situation (about how interaction works, about what kinds of things are likely to go on at meetings and so on). The task of describing all that would be indefinite and counterproductive. Those things that are described may be so because they specify things that are either unique or unpredictable; or they may be described because they have been areas of difficulty in the past, or are expected to be areas of difficulty on this occasion. When we consider how this introduction is done, we observe a number of interesting features. Take the chair’s very first words: Extract 1: The rule 1 Chair: . . . any: issue you wan’ to:. 2 (0.5) 3 Chair: u:m (0.1) we only have a coupla ground


180 / Potter and Hepburn 4 5 6 7

ru:les:, the first and the most important i:s (0.6) er:: that you have to: um (1.0) s:tart and complete your: comments within two minutes.

First, note the delivery of these opening words. Already we can see features that suggest the management of dilemmas of control in this institutional talk. Apart from the reflexive content of the talk on how the interaction will proceed, note the delivery, with its pauses and ers and ums. These occur most strikingly in line 5, prior to the delivery of the “first and most important” rule, suggesting some kind of caution or trouble with the delivery of that rule. Note also that the articulation of particular words contrasts with formal elocution: “wan’ to” (line 1) rather than “want to,” “coupla” (line 2) rather than “couple of,” or, more formal still, “two.” These features have been found, for example, in the openings of market research focus groups, and they contrast with degree-awarding speeches and other formal and ceremonial occasions that do not have the same emphasis on shared involvement.9 The hesitancy and the informality work against hearing the ground rule about time limits as authoritarian and impersonal.

LAUGHTER AND AUTHORITY A further element that contributes to the management of the dilemmas surrounding control can be seen in the next selection, which continues seamlessly from the previous one. Extract 2: The joke 1 Chair: (0.8) 5Sa:ndy how’r we doin’ on our: (0.3) 2 on our TIMEr tech- (0.1) tech nology. 3 (0.7) 4 Chair: Good.= I noticed at the ]delivered 5 la:st one that er (0.4) .hhh ]in 6 the: EGG timer was just not quite ]“smiley 7 as precise as we needed. ]voice” 8 (0.5)


Chairing Democracy / 181 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Chair: [ (I) s(h)e(h)nse, ] Various: [((Quiet laughter))] (0.3) Chair: Some people would get about forty five seconds and o’r people get (0.2) four or five minutes. [cos of the way those things work so.] Various: [ ((Laughter)) ] [ (0.6) ] Various: [((Quiet laughter and mumbling))] Chair: Ah: thanks: er: ]probably to an we appreciate that, (0.6) ]Sandy

One of the things that Claudia Puchta and Jonathan Potter noted in the way market research moderators opened focus groups was that they often used laughter.10 Laughter does not have to involve the more elaborate joking that goes on here, but can be part of managing delicate actions. For instance, Gail Jefferson, Harvey Sacks, and Emanuel Schegloff describe the way that laughter can be used in the pursuit of intimacy, and Jefferson shows how laughter can serve as a display of making light of one’s troubles by a troubles teller.11 Hence laughter and humor can be used to “soften” troubling or critical actions. First note the way here the chair addresses Sandy by her first name (a feature of informal interaction) and using the folksy and inclusive “how’r we doin” (not “how are we doing,” “how are you doing,” or “is the timer working?”) when asking about “our timer technology” (again the inclusive “our”). This sets up the ironic, indeed bathetic contrast between the “timer technology” and the “egg timer.” The contrast is underscored in the delivery and intonation—“TIMEr” is emphasized with increased volume, while “tech(0.1) technology” is stumbled over somewhat and given some emphasis (line 2). Similarly the “EGG timer” is emphasized by increased volume (line 6). The second element of the contrast is also delivered in a “smiley voice” that, combined with the volume increases, sounds as if the speaker is on the edge of laughing. This hearably cues its nonserious nature and perhaps encour-


182 / Potter and Hepburn ages the laughter that follows in line 10. More extended laughter follows the playful unpacking of “not quite as precise as we needed” following the contrast with forty-five seconds to four or five minutes in lines 13 through 15. The point about this ironic and humorous construction here is that it manages the chair’s emphasis on improved accuracy in timekeeping (in comparison to previous sessions). The tensions between control and democratic participation are softened. Control is stressed, yet the authority that goes along with that is softened. We see the chair doing further work with this dilemma in the next section, which again follows directly from the previous one. Extract 3: The disclaimer and the rule 1 Chair: U:M: (0.8) s:o 2 I 5am gonna try duh- e3 (0.2) I-I don’ wann 4 a be er- (0.2) er: (.) a 5ty7rant up here 5 but please try to keep your comments to 6 two minutes:, (.) er we do have a lodda 7 speakers tonight, (0.1) .hhh (0.1) 8 an’ I am required by board policy to finish 9 a11 the speaker:s (0.4) er within an hou:r. 10 (0.1) 11 Chair: Which I think we can do, 12 5if everybody (0.1) 13 .hh (0.1) u:m (0.1) abides by the rules. 14 (0.3) Notice on line 2, where the chair’s initial utterance emphasized his own role in performing some action “I 5am gonna try duh-”—most probably “try to keep everyone to time” is repaired. The disclaimer “I don’t wanna be er(0.2) er: (.) 5ty7rant up here” (lines 3–4) follows this self-repair. By repairing his prior utterance, the chair attends to the potential for his actions to be heard as (over)controlling, and this is managed with the disclaimer. By way of contrast, one thing that happens at the start of focus groups, where a similar issue of control is being managed, is that the moderators say what the focus group is not (a test, like a school, somewhere where there are


Chairing Democracy / 183 right or wrong answers).That is, the relevant and troubling alternative is disclaimed. This is precisely what happens with the chair’s disclaimer. Tyranny is highlighted as a relevant problem category where rules are being imposed; that is what is not going on here. Hence the self-repair, plus the disclaimer, attend to the potential for the chair’s/the board’s actions to be heard as (over)controlling. Note also that after the disclaimer the rule is phrased in terms of a request with an emphasis on politeness—“please try to keep your comments to two minutes:,” (lines 5–6) as a further contrast to the initial repaired utterance in line 2, which emphasized the chair’s role more starkly.

RULES AND PRACTICES Let us stand back for a moment and consider the broader issue of rules and practices. The picture of rules constraining practices in a clear-cut way has been criticized by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who has highlighted the openended relation between rule and action.12 Rules often require further interpretative work to decide whether any particular novel case will fall within their purview. This kind of theme has been developed in ethnomethodological thinking by Harold Garfinkel and others who have highlighted the practical and ad hoc way in which individual actions are brought into line with, or shown to break, particular rules.13 Another line of work has focused on the use of rule formulations in practical settings. For example, Mick Roffe studied a situation in which social workers were making assessments of parents whose children had been taken into care because of sexual or physical abuse.14 One of the problems for these social workers is in sustaining a stance of partnership with their clients when they appear to be making consequential and often negative judgments about them. These assessment sessions are often fraught and emotional. Social workers often make decisions that are strongly contested by the parents. In this situation it is hard to sustain a stance of partnership. Roffe found that social workers would frequently draw on the rules to manage this problem. They would construct themselves as more sympathetic and supportive of the family yet, reluctantly and unfortunately, constrained by the rules. The rules in this form became an available resource for managing a dilemma around control and partnership.


184 / Potter and Hepburn Now let’s return to extract 3 and consider what happens after the chair’s disclaimer. He offers a further reflexive formulation of this organization’s rules.The chair makes a separation between himself and board policy. Rather than acting as an agent of authority, administering it to others like some benign Judge Dredd, he is himself constrained by it: “I am required by board policy to finish a11 the speaker:s (0.4) er within an hou:r.” (lines 8–9). Like Roffe’s social workers he separates the constraining action of the “board policy” rules from his own goals or desires—the emphasis on “am required” counters the possibility that he may have a free hand in this. Although he does not explicitly say that he would like speakers to take longer, the explicit separation makes available such a possibility. There is another important element to the chair’s construction of rules. Directly after his request that speakers must finish within two minutes he offers the description “we do have a lodda speakers tonight” (lines 6–7). In this interactional slot this description is hearable as an account for finishing within two minutes. Such a timescale will not only be practical (giving everyone time) but will also be fair (giving everyone a voice). Put another way, disagreeing with such a request, for example, by bidding for extra time, might undermine this fairness—a basic democratic principle. It is striking that even when considering the discourse of fascists or those arguing against ethnic advancement, resources stressing practicality and fairness are commonly employed.15 This point is further underlined by the chair with his conditional on lines 11–13: “which I think we can do [finish within an hour] 5if everybody (0.1) .hh (0.1) u:m (0.1) abides by the rules.” Note the display of hesitancy before the delivery of “abides by the rules,” again orienting to being heard as (over)controlling, and also note that this utterance provides an environment in which someone wishing to press something different may be heard as wishing for special treatment at the expense of others and/or an extension of the length of the meeting.

TIME, RULES, AND RESISTANCE The chair’s work does not necessarily ensure that the time rule is followed. It may set up an environment in which deviation is tricky, but people have a wide range of resources for resisting the imposition of strictures of this kind.


Chairing Democracy / 185 One of the points of our analysis of the specifics of this interaction is to catch the construction of constraints and the resistance to those constraints. Moreover, we can see the parties’ construction of versions of the process as democratic or authoritarian. We will consider the start and end of David Thielen’s contribution to the interaction. This extract, again, follows on from the previous one. Extract 4: The minutes 1 Chair: So:: er lemme call you up here 2 five at a time¿ 3 (0.2) .hh a:nd um (1.1) now we’ll get 5started. 4 First of all David Thi:elen, (0.1) then John 5 Ketling, (0.6) Esme Patterson, (0.7) Kate Morley, 6 (0.1) and Lauren Heger. 7 (2.9) 8 Chair: Come on up. 9 (9.1) 10 Chair: S’alright. 11 (1.3) 12 (I’m sorry one) 13 (2.5) 14 ((inaudible)) 15 (0.3) DT arranges 16 DT ˚Five minutes˚ notes 17 a:nd- >so I didn’t-< (1.2) 18 I planned for five 19 minutes and I’m sorry so I:’m gonna looks up 20 have to I guess (0.3) at chair 21 rush through this. 22 (0.3) 23 Chair: Well I’11 be gennle. 24 (.) 25 Chair: Bu:t* ah: (0.1) .hh (0.2) >ah w- i-< 26 it’s been two minutes for quite a 27 whi:le so do the best


186 / Potter and Hepburn 28 29 30

you ca:n to: er (0.5) stick to that. (0.7)

There is a range of interesting features of this stretch of interaction. Let us focus in particular on some features of the exchange between David Thielen (henceforth DT) and the chair. The earliest thing that DT can be heard saying on the audio is “five minutes” (line 16). It is quiet, but that is probably because he was moving into range of the microphone. Most likely he has started to say “I planned for five minutes” and then repeats himself (lines 18–19) when it becomes clear that people cannot properly hear. He continues, saying that he will be forced to “rush through” his speech (he shuffles through the notes while saying this). This is constructed in a way that manages a couple of things simultaneously. First, note the way DT constructs the hurried nature of his speech as a product, not just of his own preparation of five minutes worth of material, but also of the time rule (“I planned for five minutes and I’m sorry so I:’m gonna have to I guess (0.3) rush through this.” lines 19–21). In particular note the finessed way the constraint from the rule is constructed—“so I’m gonna have to I guess rush through this.” What the “I guess” does is present the link between the rule and effect on his speech as something contingent. It projects the possibility of new information or actions changing the state of affairs. In effect it places the chair in the position of being able to undo the problem or of sustaining the rule with its negative consequences. Note the way DT looks at the chair through lines 19–20—this highlights his potential relevance as a next speaker. So although DT begins with an apology, he is subtly attributing the problem elsewhere. It is not simply his fault but the fault of the school board’s autocratic time rule. He does not say he is being unfairly treated, but it is one way of hearing what he is saying. Inexplicit though DT’s actions are, the chair shows that he understands them. That is, he orients to the responsibility that is being placed on his own actions by suggesting that those actions will be “gennle” (line 23). This softening is combined with both a reassertion of the rule and the statement that the rule has been in place for “quite a while.” This picks up and counters the implication that DT is being treated unfairly, or specifically denied what


Chairing Democracy / 187 anyone could expect in these meetings, or what he personally could reasonably expect, in terms of time. Again, in terms of dilemmas of control and cooperation the chair manages this by both the soft construction of his control (gentle) and the reassertion of the rule as long-standing. More broadly, DT and the chair negotiate the nature and legitimacy of these institutional arrangements as they unfold. This is not an abstract and theoretical negotiation over participation and democracy, and how it can be sustained or denied, but a locally managed, rhetorically situated negotiation, located in the practical politics of everyday life.

PSYCHOLOGY, PERCEPTION, AND TIME So far we have noted in passing the role of a range of “psychological” categories and attributes—planning, being sorry, guessing, being gentle. We have tried to make explicit some of the practices they play a role in. One of the things that discursive psychology has focused on is the way that psychological categories are oriented to actions. Some of this work has looked at the use of psychological predicates and ascriptions.16 Other work has looked at more indirect psychological orientations and issues. For example, Charles Goodwin has done a number of studies of seeing as parts of practices such as air traffic control and oceanography.17 In the current materials we can consider the chair’s practical display of “hearing” in the context of the continued negotiation of the rules of timekeeping and, more broadly, the distribution of voice that is central to democratic participation.The timer goes off precisely two minutes and one second after the start of DT’s speech (this two minutes does not include the negotiation about time). The timer is relatively quiet, but clearly audible on the recording (at the start of line 1). At the point at which the timer goes off the video pans away from a poster that DT has placed in front of his podium and back onto DT’s face. This suggests that the camera operator is orienting to the timer. Extract 5: The timer 1 DT: .H+hh (0.3) we bemoa:n the lack of 2

children going in to

]+ signs mark duration of digital ]alarm


188 / Potter and Hepburn 3 science. Especially + 4 women and minorities.= 5 Chair: =Is- is that- (0.2) the timer? 6 (0.4) 7 Chair: Kay (0.1) u:m: (0.3) TAKE about 8 another thirty seconds ˚Mr Thielen.˚ 9 (2.6)

]+camera ]pans ]from ]poster ]to DT

Note here the delay between the timer sounding and the chair’s display of hearing. The chair has waited until what conversation analysts would call the end of DT’s turn construction unit before showing that he has heard the timer.18 That is, he waits for a place where orderly speaker transition between turns could occur. This does four things. First, it is less invasive than cutting in when the timer goes off, so it avoids an overly intrusive interruption. Note, though, that there is good interactional evidence that the chair expects DT to continue, despite the intonational and syntactic evidence that this part of the utterance is completed. It is often a feature of this kind of public speaking that closing and continuing intonation plus pauses are retained, despite the lack of formal need for them—perhaps it makes speeches sound more interestingly conversational.19 That said, no doubt DT can also hear the timer, and may be expecting to be interrupted. In any event, the chair comes in notably early (line 5), heading off any possible continuation that DT might produce. The second thing that the chair’s question does—“Is- is that- (0.2) the timer?” (line 5)—is that it allows DT the opportunity to orient to the timer himself, either more or less explicitly, for example, by answering the question. There is no evidence that he does this, although we can’t see him at this stage. He does not note the timer’s noise verbally, and he certainly does not stop when it is first audible in line 1. The third thing to note is that the chair presents himself as responding to the timer, but does so in a casual and flexible way. This flexibility is underlined by the concession of “about another thirty seconds” (lines 7–8)—the imprecision of “about” suggests one who is not overly constrained by the timer rule. This relates to the fourth point about the indirectness of the chair’s actions. Rather than saying “your time has run out” or “you must stop” his voiced display of possibly not hearing the timer (“is that the timer?”)


Chairing Democracy / 189 both allows DT the opportunity to police himself and produces the chair as someone not using the timer in a rigid and autocratic manner. Standing back again, the two parties have continued their delicate and indirect negotiation of the rules concerning time. The chair has continued to manage the dilemmas of authority and democratic participation with indirect and conciliatory moves.Yet DT’s resistance has earned him more time and, maybe, further helped display himself as a victim of school board actions. Let us consider a final part of the sequence to see how this negotiation over time and authority plays out. Here when the chair clears his throat on line 3, DT has been speaking for two minutes and fifty-six seconds from the start of his speech. Of course, a throat clearing could just be a throat clearing (just as within psychoanalytic therapy a cigar may sometimes just be a cigar), but its clear audibility suggests that it has been done for the microphone. And such throat clearing is a conventional way of drawing attention to something. Extract 6: The drift 1 DT: Where you have clearly violated her ri:ghts 2 to free speech: (.) this [ is what I w’s ] 3 Chair: [((clears throat))] 4 DT: to:ld by: >an attorney with the American 5 civil liberties union,< .HHH[ H a ]nd 6 Chair: [Okay tha-] 7 DT: you clearly violated her civil rights because she 8 was (0.1) u:m (0.3) this was done because of* 9 race. 10 Chair: We- (.) we get [your ] drift mi11 DT: [(and)] ]DT raises hand 12 Chair: mister thielen: (0.3) thanks very much. 13 (0.3) 14 DT: Um (0.2) I (0.2) am sorry that to the boa:rd 15 >issues this serious are< not worth (0.9) ]cocks head 16 a couple more minutes.= ]walks away 17 Chair: We:11 a number of us have spent quite a bit 18 of time on the phone with you Mr Thielen. ]camera to chair


190 / Potter and Hepburn 19 20 21

but (0.3) ANYway why’n’t you take (0.5) er the poster board with you. JOHN KETTling?

]chair points ]at poster ]grasps mug

In this extract we can see the chair making three increasingly explicit attempts to bring DT to a close. The first in line 3 is the throat clearing that we have already noted. The second is in line 6. The chair says “okay.” This is close to the transition relevant place after “union” where DT is rushing through and doing an in-breath with extra volume, both displaying his claim to continue holding the floor. By saying “okay tha—,” a receipting turn, the chair is reflexively constituting DT as having completed. Nevertheless DT produces what he says next as a continuation (constituting the chair as interrupting rather than receipting). This occasions a third and most explicitly terminal turn (lines 10–12). The chair’s turn is hearably critical. How does it achieve this? Part of what is going on can be understood from the sequential order of things—after the accusatory turns at the end of DT’s speech (lines 7–9) it is hard not to hear the chair as having a slot for a rebuttal or account. Put another way, the accusatory turn generates an environment where all the parties (DT, the other people there, the local TV viewers, and us as overhearing analysts) are likely to inspect whatever comes next for its role in rebutting, accounting and so on. Furthermore, we can speculate that the chair is indirectly admonishing DT for going on too long, perhaps trying to get more than his democratic due. He does not directly respond to the material in DT’s final turns, but makes a more general response. His formulation “drift” may indicate that the details are unimportant. Moreover, as an idiom it does not require specification of what the meaning or purpose of DT’s speech is that has been “got.” It does not show a specific understanding that might be contested. This extract, and the sequence as a whole, ends with a pair of turns that escalate the dispute even further. DT may be responding to the critical nature of the chair’s turn. He expresses disappointment (“I am sorry that to the boa:rd >issues this serious are< not worth,” lines 14–15). This is combined with a construction of what has produced the disappointment. This construction is contrastive—the seriousness of the issues (line 15) is set against the very small value placed on them by the board (“not worth (0.9) a couple more minutes.” lines 15–16). One of the central themes in discur-


Chairing Democracy / 191 sive psychology is the way constructions of mind and constructions of reality are produced to sustain particular actions, and how the one plays off against the other.20 This is a compact example of this in action. By constructing his mental state as “sorry,” he builds the solidity of what is generating that mental state—the actions of the board forcing him to curtail his speech. DT’s “psychological” response supports the seriousness of the board’s flawed response; the harsh nature of the response provides a warrant for his psychological response. Each plays off against the other. DT here produces the board as arrogant and presents himself as undermined and excluded. This subtly reworks the institutional procedures as strategic and pernicious rather than generic. Its legitimacy becomes a sham. At this point the chair does something interesting. Let us stand back a bit before considering it. There has been a lot of dispute in discourse studies about the nature of context, and how it should be analyzed.21 Many issues here are not easily resolved, and depend on the broader aims of the research. Nevertheless a conversation analytic and discursive psychological approach urges caution about claiming the relevance of contextual particulars without a careful analysis of how such particulars are oriented to, or how they become relevant, in interaction. One way of being cautious like this is to consider context as an issue for participants. What contextual features are invoked or constructed in the course of interaction? This is, of course, pervasive. Throughout his speech, for example, DT is working on a version of the relevant context for his actions. He constructs a version of his daughter’s science project, the nature of prejudice, the nature and history of science, and so on. What is notable on this occasion is that in response to DT’s criticism of the board, the chair constructs a fragment of context. He describes time spent on the phone to DT by board members (“us”) prior to the meeting. This does two things. First it claims that DT has been given time and has been taken seriously. Second, it implies that the chair has been acting properly by not revealing this until it becomes relevant to DT’s criticism. It is worth noting the detailed construction of the chair’s claim. A range of work in ethnostatistics and quantification rhetoric has started to outline some of the ways in which quantification is produced to rhetorical effect.22 While DT’s claim is a minimizing one with its “couple more minutes,” the Chair’s “number of us” (line 17, note the emphasis on number) and “quite a


192 / Potter and Hepburn bit of time” (lines 17–18) is both vague and at the same time maximizing. The power of vagueness of this kind is that it makes the claims hard to contest.23 More broadly, the different versions on offer paint different visions of DT’s involvement with the democratic process, emphasizing that he has been either indulged or frozen out.

PASSION AND PREJUDICE Up to now we have focused on struggles over the operation of the institution of the school board and the legitimacy, or not, of its actions. We will now move to another set of themes that are right at the heart of democratic processes and are played out in their specifics in this material. This involves a practical management of issues of race and prejudice, political correctness, and truth. Again, rather than attempt, as analysts, to define the nature of these things beforehand, we will consider the ways in which they arise in the interaction as both topic and issue for the participants themselves. We will start with DT’s speech after he has described his daughter’s experiment with the black and white Barbie dolls. Extract 7: The racism 1 DT: Ur:m (0.3) 5an-e-an it’s 7nod a terribly 2 surprising result an in my view nod a 3 terr-er not necerally a racist one either. 4 .Hhh um (.) the experiment was not derogatory, 5 it was not raciall(hh)y discr(hh)iminary, 6 (0.3) discriminatory, iit’s right there, 7 did not create racial animos- (0.2) animosity. .hh 8 (0.3) 9 DT: And it’s conclusion was incredibly inno:cuous. 10 (0.6) After describing what he calls the result of the experiment, DT goes on to gloss it in a number of ways. Several features are notable about these glosses. First note that the first 5 descriptions are negatives. It is not: 1. a terribly surprising result; 2. necessarily racist;


Chairing Democracy / 193 3. derogatory; 4. racially discriminatory; 5. it did not create racial animosity. Billig has highlighted the way such negative constructions orient to rhetorical alternatives.24 Indeed, they provide a way of bringing into analytic visibility what DT himself treats as the relevant rhetorical context. The denials counter the possibility that the experiment will be seen as surprising, racist, derogatory, and creating animosity. The list seems repetitive, but this may be because DT is repairing a delivery problem early in the list. In lines 2–3 he glosses the experiment as “in my view nod a ter-er not necessarily a racist one.” We can note three features of this gloss. First, the gloss is constructed as a “view,” implicating possible alternatives.25 This might be seen as a relatively weak counter, although it might reflect already existing disagreements. Second, there is an important repair here. DT was probably on the way to saying “nod a terribly racist one.” This might well have seemed to concede some degree of racism? Indeed, racism is often treated as something that is bad in all its degrees.26 Describing something as “not terribly racist” might seem to be trivializing precisely the delicate issue at the center of the debate. Third, the repaired version “not necessarily a racist one” also seems to have rhetorical problems. It seems to concede that the experiment could have been racist. This is trouble for DT’s general case that his daughter’s experiment should have been displayed. If it could have been racist, then that alone might be good reason for not showing it. We can speculate that the trouble may be a consequence of DT editing down a longer prepared speech. It is perhaps notable that just at this point he looks down at the podium where his notes are (line 2). This trouble may occasion the extended and repetitive list here. The repetitions clean up the earlier points. Rather than being not terribly or necessarily racist the experiment is now simply not derogatory, not racially discriminatory and did not create racial animosity. It has been worth considering the way this listing develops, as it would be tempting from an abstract rhetorical point of view to treat it as simply a persuasive repetition. From our perspective, the rhetorical organization is located in the unfolding of the interaction; we can see at least part of this repetition as an ongoing local management of problems caused by delivery difficulties. Note also the way this list is started and ended with a downgrading of the


194 / Potter and Hepburn significance of the experiment—not “terribly surprising” (lines 1–2), “incredibly innocuous” (line 9). This complements the denial of racism by treating the object of the controversy as harmless and predictable. The issue of racism is central here. Is the experiment racist? Does it promote racism? These are the kinds of considerations that might lead it to be pulled from the school science fair. And they are the sorts of reasons that might be offered to justify such an action. It is not surprising that DT returns to it in various more or less oblique ways in the course of his speech. Let us consider three more examples, two briefly and one in detail.

1. Galileo DT draws a strong parallel between what happened to his daughter and what happened to Galileo. This extract comes from the middle of his speech after a section on the nature of science. Extract 8: The censorship 1 DT: if certain >results are censored< it i:s (.) not 2 science. it cannot be science. 3 (0.4) 4 DT: .Hh (0.3) what ha:ppened was (0.2) s- (0.1) e5 >identical to what happened to Galileo when he was> 6 excommunicated from the Catholic church for proving 7 that Jupiter’s moo:ns revolved around Jupiter not 8 the Earth We do not want to make much of this, but note the way that the image of Galileo suggests the discovery of facts that counter prevailing orthodoxies. Galileo is the neutral scientist reporting what he has found, yet the Catholic Church is too blinkered to accept it. The implication of prejudice is neatly turned around and directed at the authorities. More broadly, and pertinently to the topic of democracy, the analogy that DT develops here builds his case that the school board has acted in a bigoted as opposed to open-minded fashion. DT presses the parallel strongly—what happened in the school was identical to what happened to Galileo. However, note the variation between the


Chairing Democracy / 195 Galileo example and his earlier gloss on his daughter’s experiment as unsurprising and innocuous. Descriptions of this kind are built for their local interactional environment. The job is a bit different for this extract and the previous one. Both are designed to do the local work, not to stand as abstract arguments that will work anywhere. Variability of this kind is a useful cue to the activities being done.27 Such variation is apparent to us as analysts as we can disrupt time to place side by side different sections of talk—it is much harder for participants to recover.

2. Women and Minorities A second example appears in DT’s speech just before the timer goes off. Extract 9: The women and minorities 1 DT: .Hhh (0.3) we bemoa:n the lack of 2 *children going in to ]sound of digital alarm 3 science. especially women and ]camera pans 4 DT: minorities.= ]from poster to DT 5 Chair: =Is- is that- (0.2) the timer? DT does not get to finish this point because of the interruption. However, its trajectory is clear. It is part of a general construction of the nature of science and the activities of the school board that presents his daughter as a victim. It is not surprising that women and minorities do not go into science if school boards act in the way they have. There is both an implication of hypocrisy—this concern is of the kind that the school board might have— and an implicit alignment with groups who care about the representation of women and minorities. Again, it works to discount ideas that he might be racist, or the science experiment was racist.

3. Passion and Racism The third example is far different. We are going to pay particular attention to both the content and the psychological display that goes along with it. This extract comes from the extra time that DT has earned after the timer has gone off.


196 / Potter and Hepburn Extract 10: The kids 1 DT: I’m sorry this was so: wrong in so

]counts on fingers ]shakes head

2 many ways. .Hhh (0.4) it was censorship 3 pl(h)ain and si(h)mp(h)le. Hh (.) .hh was 4 this ap5propriate for elementary schoo:1, ]turns page 5 (0.2).h >e5lementary kids as young 6 kindergartners in> ~Se(h)lma Alabama 7 marched u(h)p~ (0.1) .HHH ]raises head 8 ~ag(h)ainst 5wh(h)ite police officers with 9 [german shepherds] and fire hoses~. 10 Chair: [((clears throat)) ] 11 (0.5) 12 DT: And yet (.) we cannot ask (0.3) our children of 13 the sa:me age (.) .hh to address (0.2) or be 14 willing to be expo:sed to (.) racial issues 15 here

There is much complexity here. Let us just note some elements of the way the argument is put together before moving on to consider its management of issues of race. The logic of the argument here is that “kids” as young as his daughter have taken part in important and consequential protests against racism, so it is reasonable for “children of the same age” to consider such issues. It counters one argument that may be, and may have been, directed against him. We are more interested in features of DT’s delivery. As we have noted, one of the characteristics of our approach is to consider the way both features of “the world” and “mind” are constructed simultaneously as parts of actions, and the way one kind of construction can play off against the other. So far we have considered the use of terms that display psychological states and dispositions—planned, sorry, guess, gentle—as well as displays of hearing. In this example we can see displays of emotion. Emotions have typically been treated in psychological research as semiphysiological states that happen to the actor. They leak out and eat away at the rationality of actions.28 However, researchers in the discourse tradition have developed a very different image. Instead of emotion as some-


Chairing Democracy / 197 thing underlying discourse, and subverting its rationality, it is something described, managed and made accountable in discourse. Emotion is invoked, described, displayed for the purposes of actions.29 Derek Edwards has developed this line of thinking.30 For example, Abigail Locke and Edwards considered the way Bill Clinton’s emotion descriptions in his grand jury testimony help him build particular actions, and help construct a version of himself as caring, responsible, and sincere rather than mendacious and exploitative.31 Alexa Hepburn has extended this work by considering the way crying develops in telephone interaction, paying particular attention to its different elements.32 She notes that crying has a number of elements, often seen in different phases. These include whispering, sniffs and pitch changes, aspiration, wobbly voice, and full scale sobbing, as well as apologies from callers. If we consider extract 10 we can see elements of crying in DT’s speech. Note the loud inspiration (intake of breath) on line 2. This combines with his “sorry” (line 1).We have already noted his use of this expression of both apology and disappointment. Here it works alongside extrematizing formulations—“so: wrong in so many ways” (lines 1–2) that display the speaker’s investment in his claims.33 Further aspiration is interpolated inside the terms “plain” and “simple” in line 3. Richard Buttny has highlighted the way emotion claims and ascriptions are often bound up with moral issues.34 Speakers construct anger and upset as parts of complaints and justifications. In this case DT uses his display of emotion to present his criticism of censorship as morally lived. The crying features become more pronounced as he develops the analogy with elementary kids in Selma, Alabama.The strongly built image of the children protesting with the white police, dogs, and fire hoses is accompanied by the wobbly voice (lines 6–7, 8–9), loud inspiration (line 7), and interpolated aspiration (line 8). DT is here forcefully managing issues of his own potential racism by providing such a strong display of psychological investment and alignment. These are not just abstract analogies to him but powerfully felt feelings— powerful enough to lead a grown man to cry (or at least show elements of crying) in a public place. None of this is to suggest that DT is being inauthentic or strategic. Our analysis is not designed to address those concerns (although they may become live for participants, of course); it considers the practical way in which he manages the potentially problematic question of his own racism or lack of


198 / Potter and Hepburn racism. His talk is organized and psychologically realized in a range of ways to show he is against racism. In terms of ordinary democracy, by siding himself with the civil rights protesters DT again presents himself as a victim of an attack on democracy and its associated freedom of expression.

PSYCHOLOGY, INSTITUTION, AND INTERACTION In our analysis we have tried to show how the particularity of what is going on, with all the specifics of sequence, intonation, and so on, is fundamental to the analysis. The style of analysis used here treats rhetoric as central, but focuses on rhetoric as something located and developed within particular settings. This has involved working with the video record and a high-quality transcript. Such a transcript might seem to be unnecessarily complex, positivist even. Yet it is important to remember that the playscript that is often favored by analysts of rhetoric and interaction is itself highly conventionalized, and is threaded through with its own often-inexplicit assumptions about interaction and how it operates. The aim is not to reduce rhetoric to microinteraction (although it might seem like that at times). One of the features of work in this tradition is that it disrupts the familiar micro-macro distinction as well as the distinctions between action and structure and between psychology and institution. The aim is to see rhetoric as something that is brought alive in activities, and developed for particular audiences and for particular tasks. Both the richness and the complexity of this goal is seen by how much we have shown going on in a few components of just one part of the Barbiegate materials. The analysis is just the start of the journey but already points to some themes that may be central to ordinary democracy. What we have tried to do is show how issues of democracy and psychology are lived in the fine detail of these materials. Neither of these things is being treated in the analysis as a preexisting given; each is drawn on and reworked in interaction. In terms of classic sociological debates over the primacy of agency and structure, these things become practical issues for the participants as they reassert the structure and manage their own agency. Psychology here is something to be accomplished. Can the chair maintain control and reassert institutional procedures without being treated as tyrannical or authoritarian? Can David Thielen develop his critique of the school


Chairing Democracy / 199 board’s actions with respect to his daughter’s project without being treated as racist or reactionary? To understand what democracy is here—how participation is supported, managed, and constrained—we have had to pay attention to these concrete practices.

NOTES 1. For discursive psychology, see Derek Edwards, Discourse and Cognition (London: Sage, 1997); Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, Discursive Psychology (London: Sage, 1992); and Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, “Discursive Psychology,” in Alec McHoul and Mark Rapley, How to Analyse Talk in Institutional Settings: A Casebook of Methods (London: Continuum, 2001). For an introduction to conversation analysis, see Ian Hutchby and Robin Wooffitt, Conversation Analysis: Principles, Practices, and Applications (Cambridge: Polity, 1998). A discussion about the strands of discourse analysis that have influenced discursive psychology can be found in several essays by Jonathan Potter, including, “Discourse Analysis,” in Handbook of Data Analysis, ed. Melissa Hardy and Alan Bryman (London: Sage, 2003); and “Discourse Analysis as a Way of Analyzing Naturally Occurring Talk,” in Qualitative Analysis: Issues of Theory and Method, 2nd ed., ed. David Silverman (London: Sage, 2004). See Michael Billig, Ideologies and Beliefs (London: Sage, 1992); and Michael Billig, Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) for background on discursive psychology’s rhetorical roots. 2. Derek Edwards, Malcolm Ashmore, and Jonathan Potter, “Death and Furniture: The Rhetoric, Politics, and Theology of Bottom Line Arguments against Relativism,” History of the Human Sciences 8 (1995): 25–49; Jonathan Potter, Representing Reality: Discourse Rhetoric and Social Construction (London: Sage, 1996). 3. For example, see Gail Jefferson, “An Exercise in the Transcription and Analysis of Laughter,” in Handbook of Discourse Analysis, vol. 3, ed. Teun van Dijk (London: Academic Press, 1985). The transcription symbols used include: [] 57 Underlining CAPITALS ˚I know it,˚ (0.8)

Square brackets mark the start and the end of overlapping speech. Vertical arrows precede marked pitch movement. Signals speaker’s emphasis. Mark speech that is obviously louder than surrounding speech. Raised circles (“degree” signs) enclose obviously quieter speech. Numbers in round brackets measure pauses longer than 0.2 seconds.


200 / Potter and Hepburn (.) (a lot) ((text)) t* oh::: hhh .hhh Ye:ah, Ye:ah. ? >< = ~Alabama~ k(hh)ay hhhelp

A hearable pause of less than 0.1 second. Parenthesis indicates transcriber uncertainty. Double parenthesis—additional comments from the transcriber. Asterisks following consonant “hardens” the sound. Colons show degrees of elongation of the prior sound; the more colons, the more elongation. Aspiration (out-breaths); proportionally as for colons. Inspiration (in-breaths). Commas mark weak rising intonation, as used sometimes in enunciating lists. Periods (stops) mark falling, stopping intonation, regardless of grammar. Question marks signal question intonation, regardless of grammar. Enclosed speech is produced noticeably quicker than the surrounding talk. Enclosed speech is produced noticeably slower than the surrounding talk. Equals signs mark the immediate latching of successive stretches of talk, with no interval. Wobbly voice—enclosed by tildes. Aspiration in speech—an “h” represents aspiration: in parenthesis indicates a sharper more plosive sound. Outside parenthesis indicates a softer more breathy sound.

4. The full transcript used here is available at www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssjap/ index.htm. 5. Rodney D. Watson, “Some General Reflections on ‘Categorization’ and ‘Sequence’ in the Analysis of Conversation,” in Culture in Action: Studies in Membership Categorization Analysis, ed. Stephen Hester and Peter Eglin, (Washington DC: International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis and University Press of America, 1997). 6. Michael Billig, Susan Condor, Derek Edwards, Mike Gane, Dave Middleton, and Alan Radley, Ideological Dilemmas: A Social Psychology of Everyday Thinking (London: Sage, 1988). 7. Derek Edwards and Neil Mercer, Common Knowledge: The Development of Understanding in the Classroom (London: Routledge, 1987). 8. Alexa Hepburn, An Introduction to Critical Social Psychology (London: Sage, 2003). 9. For a discussion of focus groups, see Claudia Puchta and Jonathan Potter,


Chairing Democracy / 201 Focus Group Practice (London: Sage 2003). Analysis of ceremonial occasions can be found in J. Maxwell Atkinson, Our Masters’Voices: The Language and Body Language of Politics (London: Methuen, 1984). 10. Puchta and Potter, Focus Group Practice. 11. See Gail Jefferson, “On the Organisation of Laughter in Talk about Troubles,” in Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis, ed. J. Maxwell Atkinson and John Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Gail Jefferson, Harvey Sacks, and Emanuel Schegloff, “Notes on Laughter in Pursuit of Intimacy,” in Talk and Social Organisation, ed. Graham Button and John R. E. Lee, 152– 205 (Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1987). 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., trans. Gertrude E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958). 13. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1967). 14. Mick Roffe, “The Social Organisation of Social Work” (PhD diss., Loughborough University, 1996). 15. Micahel Billig, Fascists: A Social PsychologicalView of the National Front (London: Academic Press, 1978); Margaret Wetherell and Jonathan Potter, Mapping the Language of Racism: Discourse and the Legitimation of Exploitation (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). 16. Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter, “Discursive Psychology, Mental States, and Descriptions,” in Conversation and Cognition, ed. Hedwig te Molder and Jonathan Potter, 241–59 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 17. See, for example, Charles Goodwin and Marjorie H. Goodwin “Contested Vision: The Discursive Constitution of Rodney King,” in The Construction of Professional Discourse, ed. Britt-Louse Gunnarsson, Per Linnell, and Bebgt Nordberg (London: Longman, 1997). 18. Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson, “A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation,” Language 50 (1974): 696–735. 19. J. Maxwell Atkinson, “Understanding Formality: Notes on the Categorization and Production of ‘Formal’ Interaction,” British Journal of Sociology 33 (1982): 86–117. 20. Edwards and Potter, Discursive Psychology. 21. Michael Billig, “Whose Terms? Whose Ordinariness? Rhetoric and Ideology in Conversation Analysis,” Discourse and Society 10 (1999): 543–58; Emanuel Schegloff, “Whose Text? Whose Context?” Discourse and Society 8 (1997): 165–87; Emanuel Schegloff, “Reply to Wetherell,” Discourse and Society 9 (1998): 413–16; Emanuel Schegloff, “‘Schegloff’s Texts’ as ‘Billig’s Data’: A Critical Reply,” Discourse and So-


202 / Potter and Hepburn ciety 10 (1999): 558–72; Margaret Wetherell, “Positioning and Interpretative Repertoires: Conversation Analysis and Post-Structuralism in Dialogue,” Discourse and Society 9 (1998): 387–412. 22. See Robert P. Gephart, Ethnostatistics: Qualitative Foundations for Quantitative Research (London: Sage, 1988). For discussions of how quantification is used rhetorically, see Donald McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1985); Potter, Representing Reality; and Jonathan Potter, Margaret Wetherell, and Andrew Chitty, “Quantification Rhetoric—Cancer on Television,” Discourse and Society 2 (1991): 333–65. 23. Potter, Representing Reality. 24. Billig, Arguing and Thinking. 25. Michael Billig, “The Argumentative Nature of Holding Strong Views: A Case Study,” European Journal of Social Psychology 19 (1989): 203–23. 26. Wetherell and Potter, Mapping the Language of Racism. 27. Potter, “Discourse Analysis.” 28. Joseph P. Forgas and Gordon H. Bower, “Mood Effects on Person-Perception Judgment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53 (1987): 53–60. 29. Richard Buttny, Social Accountability in Communication (London: Sage, 1993); Rom Harré, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford: Blackwell 1986). 30. Edwards, Discourse and Cognition; Derek Edwards, “Emotion Discourse,” Culture and Psychology 5 (1999): 271–91. 31. Abigail Locke and Derek Edwards, “Bill and Monica: Memory, Emotion, and Normativity in Clinton’s Grand Jury Testimony,” British Journal of Social Psychology 42 (2003): 239–56. 32. Alexa Hepburn, “Crying: Notes on Description, Transcription, and Interaction,” Research on Language and Social Interaction 37 (2004): 251–90. 33. Edwards, “Emotion Discourse.” 34. Buttny, Social Accountability in Communication.


iii After Words



8 Understanding Ordinary Democracy The Intersection of Discourse and Rhetorical Analysis Mark Aakhus

If ordinary democracy is something people do, then how do they do it? The authors in this volume answer this question by dealing with the details of democracy. They do not retreat to abstraction coupled with convenient hypothetical examples. There is no maudlin wallowing in cases that prove either the death or reawakening of democratic action. Instead, each chapter renders ordinary democracy analyzable. What we gain from this rendering is insight into the talking, participation-structuring, and agenda-setting practices of ordinary democracy—the practices that shape the content and direction of democratic action. Just how the authors accomplish this rendering of ordinary democracy is my focus in this chapter. Thus, if ordinary democracy is something people do, then how do we analyze it? This volume on ordinary democracy provides a unique vantage point from which to see what happens when practitioners of rhetorical and discourse analysis do their work. The reader of this volume is presented with two important opportunities. One is to engage the insights offered by the expert practitioners; the other is to see the choices the expert practitioners make in producing their expert judgments. This is an important vantage point for learning how to do something new like investigating ordinary democracy. It is something like getting the chance to watch as several interior designers are given the same old house on which to work their charms or several therapists are given the same patient on which to work their magic. A significant


206 / Aakhus contribution of this volume, due to its design, is that it allows us a glimpse of the authors’ analytic work in action and, to some degree, in interaction with other practitioners. Thus, it seems sensible to begin this reflective chapter by asking, “what’s going on in this volume?” This volume is a meeting of sorts. The ostensible purpose of this virtual gathering, and its design, is to test the commonplace that ordinary democracy, which is taken to be the heartbeat of democratic society, is dead or at least in a terminal state. It is a gathering of expert practitioners of rhetorical and discourse analysis who engage in a postmortem inquiry on a case of ordinary democracy. Each participant takes an extended turn reporting a diagnosis of the “Barbiegate” case from which conclusions are drawn about the case and insights about ordinary democracy are put forward. The starting points for this meeting are three presumptions: (1) that ordinary marks terrain familiar to the discourse analyst, while democracy marks off territory familiar to the rhetorician; (2) that reflecting on ordinary democracy is vital to understanding the faculty of civic judgment in contemporary society; and (3) that ordinary democracy is a practice that neither discourse analysis (DA) nor rhetorical analysis (RA), as fields of communication expertise, have adequately addressed on their own. Given these starting points, the volume pursues the question: What would happen if practitioners of DA and RA are allowed to engage a case of ordinary democracy and each other? While the virtual gathering could have become a clash of perspectives aimed at resolving who brings more to the table for understanding ordinary democracy, it did not develop in that way. What is evident in the contributions to this gathering is a collective attempt to make sense of democracy in contemporary society and a commitment to showing how, using either RA or DA, such sense-making could be accomplished. The conclusions drawn about Barbiegate and ordinary democracy are interesting and varied but equally interesting are the ways in which these expert practitioners draw their conclusions and formulate their contributions to this inquiry on ordinary democracy. What is going on in this meeting appears to have less to do with exploring the differences between rhetorical and discourse analysis and much more to do with bringing these forms of analysis to bear on the phenomenon of ordinary democracy. The outcome is a more discourse-oriented rhetorical analysis and a more rhetorically oriented discourse analysis. These points are


Understanding Ordinary Democracy / 207 developed by first articulating the analytic work performed by the authors to identify themes in conducting research on ordinary democracy: What is going on in terms of professional analytic practice? Second, this chapter reflects on the intersection of RA and DA present in this volume, especially as this relates to developing methods to address the puzzle of ordinary democracy: What is going on at the intersection of discourse and rhetorical analysis?

WHAT’S GOING ON IN TERMS OF PROFESSIONAL ANALYTIC PRACTICE? The volume presents five approaches for making sense of the Barbiegate situation and the broader phenomenon of ordinary democracy. Each approach is a specific solution to the analytic problem of diagnosing the puzzles of ordinary democracy in the given case. What is going on in this volume can be answered by reconstructing from each chapter the analytic work each expert performed in diagnosing the case of Barbiegate and commenting on ordinary democracy. Only so much can be understood based on the final product of their work, but given that each author was working from the same corpus of data, it is possible to make some distinctions about the analytic focus, the selection of evidence, the choice of tools, the analytic reconstruction of the evidence, the conclusions drawn, and the warrants for those conclusions. The differences are rendered in table 8.1. The authors’ approaches to analyzing the case are not entirely different from one another even though grounded in distinct traditions. Two overlaps are evident in the analytic work performed: (1) The role of dilemmas and micropractices in analysis and (2) the creative crossing of the DA-RA boundary. The overlap reflected in these themes is not taken to mean that DA and RA are more alike than may be ordinarily assumed but that analysts starting from different traditions have converged on some common strategies for diagnosing a case of ordinary democracy.

The Role of Dilemmas and Micropractices in Analyzing a Case of Ordinary Democracy The chapters by Simons, Potter and Hepburn, and Haspel and Tracy focus on the dilemmas participants faced when participating in the Barbiegate



Contradictions & Dilemmas

Hybrid Genre

Essential Dispute

Dilemmas of interaction

Dilemmas of interaction

Simons

Gronbeck

Hicks

Haspel & Tracy

Potter & Hepburn

Analytic Foci

Meeting chair’s opening comments

2 speeches from meeting & 2 historically important speeches

2 speeches

Speeches by all the parties

The record of texts

Evidence Selected

Table 8.1 Analytic work performed by authors

Conversation Analytic Transcription

Identi¤ed micropractices (e.g., reference, contrast, repetition, lists)

Identi¤ed accounts and practical reasoning

Identi¤ed sociolinguistic maneuvers

Identi¤ed anomalous/ immoral ways of talking

Tools/Mode of Analysis

Micro-practices for managing the dilemma of authority and participation

Functions of micro-practices in managing multiple demands of setting

Nascent, native theories of rhetorical effectivity

Framing & Social dramas

Analytic Propositions

Analytic Reconstruction

Understanding O.D. involves attention to concrete practices

Ordinary democracy is evident in the way citizens use common modes of discourse for uncommon ends

Communication is an object and instrument of liberal governance.

Public proceedings generate personal and collective re®exive thoughts about identity, truth, and direction – not policy.

Barbiegate exists because Boulder is vulnerable to not living up to its own values

Conclusions about O.D.

Public Analysis & Accessible Primary Materials



The analysis is made public in the writing of the chapter and the audience has access to the primary materials

Credibility of the author – as evident in the modi¤cation of his own values

Warrants

Understanding Ordinary Democracy / 209 event. Using this approach, these authors articulate features of the situation toward which participants’ actions orient and not just features that caught the attention of the analyst. For example, Simons discusses how the ideals that draw people together in the Boulder community also divide them. Simons’s analysis highlights how the actions of the participants are organized by the contradictory nature of their common sense and that the strategies for practical reasoning about an issue like Barbiegate are embedded in the social-cultural-political context of the Boulder community. Potter and Hepburn select a much smaller slice of the event to analyze but nonetheless draw upon the dilemma between authority and participation in democratic participation. They are able to show how the contradictions embedded in the idea of democratic participation are realized and managed in the smallest details of the interaction, and thus the dilemma plays a role in the organization of interaction. Haspel and Tracy work the ground between Simons and Potter and Hepburn by identifying dilemmas that arise between building unity and respecting difference when talking about race. They are able to show how basic design features of two speeches manage the multiple demands of the setting. The chapters by Gronbeck, Haspel and Tracy, and Potter and Hepburn focus on specific uses of language as methods of participation. Each shows how language use contributes to shaping the interaction participants’ experiences. Gronbeck’s attention to sociolinguistic maneuvers, for example, shows how participants frame the controversy and produce the social drama of Barbiegate. Potter and Hepburn’s attention to the details of interaction shows how participants continuously maintain the interactional context of a public meeting and the opportunities and constraints that arise from that. Haspel and Tracy’s attention to the way speakers design their speeches shows how participants make race a discussable topic even though it can be a difficult topic to discuss. The use of dilemmas and micropractices in the analysis of Barbiegate points to a general strategy for examining cases of ordinary democracy. From the discourse analysis perspective, such an approach has merit. The use of dilemmas, for instance, is an approach that grounds the commentary in the context of the actions of the participants. The analyst can be expected to show how the dilemmas identified are relevant to the actions participants produce. There is then the basis for a procedure by which others can judge


210 / Aakhus the quality of the analysis. Likewise, a focus on the micropractices involves a commitment to detailed description of what transpired in an encounter. This results in a record of the event and the analytic reconstruction performed by the analyst. Again, this provides means by which others can judge the veracity of the analysis. In addition to these methodological concerns, the use of dilemmas and micropractices to orient analysis has at least two additional benefits. It draws attention to how everyday rhetoric is not just about appeals and explicit reasoning grounded in the manipulation of the symbolic realm but how persuasion in everyday life is bound up in the way people attempt to shape structures for next possible actions. Rhetoric—in the classic sense of finding the available means of persuasion—is built into the way people talk and design their actions in a particular setting.

The Creative Crossing of the DA-RA Boundary Another theme in this volume is found in the way some of the authors creatively cross the boundary between DA and RA. For example, Gronbeck describes sociolinguistic maneuvers as a way to unpack the shaping of the event experienced. This approach retains the quality of rhetorical analysis while drawing upon the type of analytic move typically found in discourse analysis. There are two other cases of an interesting blending of discourse and rhetorical analysis. The first is by Haspel and Tracy. They use a DA orientation and methods in a manner that delivers what looks like traditional speech criticism. They even draw parallels to the rhetorical devices used in famous speeches dealing with race and the devices everyday orators use in the public meeting to talk about race. This creative analytic move not only preserves their discourse analytic grounding while delving into rhetoric, it also shows how everyday rhetoric and grand rhetoric potentially derive from the same fount of linguistic resources and interactional dilemmas. The second creative crossing is by Hicks. His analysis makes rhetoric a topic rather than an explanation. This nifty move involves explicating what makes each speech persuasive, a traditional rhetorical analysis, while showing that the resources for invention and persuasiveness come from native theories of communication, a type of analysis that can be found in discourse analysis. The creative cross-


Understanding Ordinary Democracy / 211 ings show how researchers can venture into the territory of others to make interesting analytic points.

WHAT’S GOING ON AT THE INTERSECTION OF DISCOURSE AND RHETORICAL ANALYSIS? The intersection of rhetorical and discourse analysis in this volume does not proceed from broad, sweeping generalizations about rhetorical and discourse analysis but from particular acts of doing such analysis on the particular phenomenon of ordinary democracy. Ordinary democracy is an intriguing object of reflection—an object of reflection constructed in the act of producing this volume. The previous section highlights how rhetorical and discourse analysts handle part of the task of reflecting on ordinary democracy. Each contributor embraced the task by applying the analytic skill each has mastered in rhetorical and discourse analysis. The result is an articulation of ordinary democracy and a set of solutions for analyzing ordinary democracy. These solutions share important commonalities despite the differing disciplinary orientations of the analysts. Yet, there is more going on at this intersection of rhetorical and discourse analysis because ordinary democracy presents an intellectual and methodological puzzle for those interested in understanding it. McDaniel and Gronbeck begin identifying the puzzle when they point out that understanding ordinary democracy is an inquiry into the civic judgment that happens in the actions of ordinary citizens assessing their own political interests and moving others toward specific decisions. Such inquiry is no easy task because civic judgment “is not either entirely subjective or objective, an operation of mind or matter, but something of both.”1 Unfortunately, many have simply missed this interesting character of ordinary democracy by assuming that big is better, while others cannot bear to dirty their hands on the mundane, ordinary social interactions constituting ordinary democracy for fear of missing something big. Yet, the seemingly small manifests something bigger—that is, how are the material aspects of interaction and structure coupled with the ideal aspects of democratic action? Indeed, two of the major theorists of discourse and society, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, emphasize one aspect over the other. McDaniel and Gronbeck


212 / Aakhus see this gap between Foucault and Habermas as a theoretical puzzle to be embraced, not a theoretical impasse to be avoided. As they point out, in ordinary democracy there is an interesting mix of the materiality of action and ideals for action: “civic judgment operates within social structures marked by uneven distributions of power or cultural capital” and “citizens routinely violate norms of ideal speech situations that might make better worlds.”2 Thus, the opportunity in attending to the everyday and the ordinary is the chance to see “how ordinary democracy depends on citizens inventively negotiating power asymmetries and developing norms in action.”3 It turns out that everyday people manage, in one way or another, what many have otherwise treated as a theoretical impasse. An important challenge for research on ordinary democracy lies in responding to ordinary democracy’s puzzle with methodological approaches that do not gloss either the normative or material aspects of structure and interaction. The response proposed by McDaniel and Gronbeck is a simple but wise move: “illuminate signs of the vernacular intelligence with which ordinary social actors perform at times extraordinary things with language.”4 They propose a turn toward better description of rhetorical practice as found in ordinary circumstances. The analysis chapters heed this call and in so doing turn rhetorical analysis toward matters of language and social interaction more generally and discourse analysis in particular.5 In the 2005 Handbook of Language and Social Interaction, five traditions are identified: (1) discourse analysis, (2) ethnography of communication, (3) conversation analysis, (4) language and social psychology, and (5) language pragmatics. The turn toward matters of language and social interaction is evident in several ways as each author attempts, in one way or another, to articulate dilemmas and practices of ordinary democracy. First, the speeches are not examined simply as texts but as rhetorical moves bound up in a rich social and local context; such matters are typically addressed in the ethnography of communication. Second, as typically addressed in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, the analyses in this volume are sensitive to the interactional underpinnings of persuasion and how the speeches, as well as other interactional moves, are both shaped by the local context and shape the local context of speech making. Third, the rhetorical exigencies of the Barbiegate situation are not treated by the analysts as given but as constructed in the way the participants display their orientation toward the situation and one


Understanding Ordinary Democracy / 213 another in their language choices; such matters are typically addressed in language and social psychology and discourse analysis. Finally, the analyses, at least to some degree, show or assume that the participants in Barbiegate orient toward expectations about what constitutes a valid contribution to the event and that the participants use those expectations when formulating their own contributions. Such matters are typically addressed in language pragmatics. Each of these subareas of language and social interaction has methodologies linking the empirical and the theoretical. The turn toward matters of language and social interaction in this volume is suggestive about the possible relationships between RA and DA for understanding everyday rhetoric and ordinary democracy. McDaniel and Gronbeck’s call for closer attention to ordinary democracy’s puzzles invites better description of what happens in everyday rhetoric. Indeed, it may seem that the obvious reason to align RA and DA is that DA, and its related traditions in language and social interaction, provide strong methodology for describing and analyzing the uses of language in context. However, unifying RA and DA for this reason does not appear to be what happens in this volume, as the distinctiveness of these approaches is used to advance understanding of ordinary democracy. McDaniel and Gronbeck’s call for closer attention to ordinary democracy also introduces a normative dimension. This is expressed in their asking for better understanding of “vernacular intelligence”: issues of what is good, what is smart, and what happens in everyday rhetorical situations when ordinary people do extraordinary things with their language. It may seem that aligning DA with RA in this volume, then, is a subtle attempt to unify the two areas by supplying DA with the rich normative-critical tradition available in RA. However, this does not appear to be happening in this volume. Rather than presuming that any unification of RA with DA is needed or wanted, this volume simply calls for RA to bring into focus the ordinary, while DA should bring into focus the rhetorical.6 A good example of sharpening the focus of RA and DA in the spirit of this volume is found in Scott Jacobs’s development of “ethno-rhetoric.” Ethno-rhetoric is an approach that brings discourse analysis to the examination of rhetoric as practiced in everyday life. In so doing, Jacobs problematizes the language theories underpinning classical versions of rhetorical criticism and puts forward an alternative that achieves rhetorical criticism but does so from a discourse analytic


214 / Aakhus base.7 There is little doubt, then, that RA and DA can be brought into a productive relationship. Yet, what that relationship can be for understanding a phenomenon like ordinary democracy requires further attention. Understanding ordinary democracy is neither a descriptive nor a normative-critical enterprise; it is somehow both. To treat ordinary democracy with purer and purer forms of normative-critical or descriptive theory and research probably misses something important, along the lines of what McDaniel and Gronbeck argue. Something else may be needed for the task at hand. Recent developments in DA have emphasized a reflective stance toward the relationship between normative and descriptive commitments involved when investigating a communicative practice, such as those associated with ordinary democracy and everyday rhetoric. One well-developed approach is action implicative discourse analysis, and another is an emerging discourse design approach. Both approaches emerged within DA, both are reflective about descriptive and normative commitments in research, and both draw inspiration from Robert Craig’s position that Communication is a practical discipline. The goal of inquiry in a practical discipline is to cultivate practice, which stands in contrast to empirical science inquiry that produces descriptions and explanations of empirical phenomena.8 Research in a practical discipline is not simply concerned with a theory’s application to practice but for the theory’s consequence for practice—that is, such research should not just ask “How do people behave?” but “If people understand this theory, how will they then behave?”9 Thus, a research endeavor should be a reflective endeavor that attends to its potential for altering practice, even though such consequences might be unintended by-products. For example, persuasion research might be seen as an objective analysis of the cause-effect relationship between message strategies and persuasive outcomes. One practical outcome of such an endeavor is the production of a technology of influence that shifts attention and shapes practice away from critical ideals of rational discussion.10 The drift in collective attention to a phenomenon over time coupled with the way research tools and procedures constrain and enable research ought to be objects of collective reflection within any research enterprise. The study of ordinary democracy and civic judgment might be effec-


Understanding Ordinary Democracy / 215 tively understood as inquiry aimed at cultivating practice, such as the vernacular intelligence involved in everyday rhetoric that rises to the demands of everyday settings. Action-implicative discourse analysis and discourse design are approaches in the mode of practical theory that are suited to the puzzles ordinary democracy presents. Action-implicative discourse analysis is a methodological approach that extends the idea of practical theory. It “takes communicative practices as its central focus and seeks to describe the problems and dilemmas of practices, the conversational moves within practices that reveal and manage problems, and the situated ideals that participants in practices have about good conduct.”11 By doing this, action-implicative discourse analysis generates materials for active, productive reflection on the conduct of a communicative practice. As such, it is both a descriptive and a critical-normative enterprise.12 It is important to recognize that action-implicative discourse analysis does not apply external, abstract normative models but instead articulates the situated ideals relevant to the participants engaged in the practice. Thus, this discourse analytic approach can improve practice because it fosters invention of new techniques for a practice, a reframing of the problems of the practice, and brings new norms to bear on a practice. Discourse design draws attention to how deliberately designed discourse systems shape or otherwise discipline interaction.13 The procedures and technologies people invent to support human interaction and reasoning, such as meeting agendas, rules of conduct, and information technologies, provide ways to shape, condition, and discipline interaction and communication. Technologies and procedures are understood to be communicative solutions designed, crafted, or engineered to make idealized forms of communication possible in less than ideal conditions. As such, procedures and technologies are hypotheses about how communication works and how it ought to work. The task of discourse design is to articulate the assumptions about communication intentionally (and unintentionally) built into procedures and technologies for communication; to examine the “problemsolving validity”—that is, how a design solves the problems people face— and the “intersubjective validity”—how a design resonates with normal patterns of communication;14 and to invent new procedures and technologies to realize forms of interactivity not previously conceived or understood to


216 / Aakhus be possible.15 Discourse design draws upon theories of language and social interaction, in particular, for models to understand and create designs for discourse.

CONCLUSION This volume has less to do with figuring out the differences between rhetorical and discourse analysis and more to do with developing an approach to understanding ordinary democracy that draws upon the resources of rhetorical and discourse analysis. The act of creating this volume brings together theoretical and methodological materials that, while stemming from different traditions, when combined provide theoretical and methodological grounding for further attempts to examine the role of rhetoric and discourse in constituting and regulating democratic action. This is in part due to the design of the volume, which helps highlight the process and product of the work by practitioners rather than merely highlighting their conventional identity as discourse or rhetorical analysts. The opportunity for understanding the intersection of rhetorical and discourse analysis begins not from broad, sweeping generalizations about these two different enterprises but from particular acts of doing such analysis. The result is a more discourse-oriented rhetorical analysis and a more rhetorically oriented discourse analysis.

NOTES 1. See James P. McDaniel and Bruce Gronbeck, chapter 2 this volume. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. A more extensive discussion of the state of the art in the area of language and social interaction, in general, and discourse analysis, in particular, can be found in Kristine Fitch and Robert Sanders, Handbook of Language and Social Interaction (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 2004) and in Karen Tracy and Kathleen Haspel, “Language and Social Interaction: Its Institutional Identity, Intellectual Landscape, and Discipline-Shifting Agenda,” Journal of Communication 54 (2004): 788–817. 6. Scott Jacobs, “The Rhetoric of Witnessing and Heckling: A Case Study in Ethnorhetoric” (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1982).


Understanding Ordinary Democracy / 217 7. One of the insights Jacobs presents is that classic modes of rhetorical criticism, such as genre analysis and dramatism, either assume or are often conducted in a manner that presupposes that meaning is objectively evident in the text of a speech and that people in rhetorical situations share a common understanding of the situation. The ethnorhetorical approach is an alternative to the objectivist stance that is often taken up in the conduct of rhetorical criticism. The approach draws on theories and methods in language and social interaction to bring ordinary communicators’ perspectives about rhetorical situations into the act of speech criticism. 8. Robert T. Craig, “Communication as a Practical Discipline,” in Rethinking Communication, vol. 1, Paradigm Issues, ed. Brenda Dervin, Larry Grossberg, Barbara O’Keefe, and Ellen Wartella, 97–122 (Beverley Hills, CA: Sage, 1989); Robert T. Craig, “Communication Theory as a Field,” Communication Theory 9 (1999): 119–61. 9. Robert T. Craig, “Galilean Rhetoric and Practical Theory,” Communication Monographs 50 (1983): 395–412. 10. Craig, “Galilean Rhetoric.” 11. Karen Tracy and Kathleen Haspel, “Language and Social Interaction: Its Institutional Identity, Intellectual Landscape, and Discipline-Shifting Agenda,” Journal of Communication 54 (2004): 788–817; see also Karen Tracy, “Reconstructing Communicative Practice: Action-Implicative Discourse Analysis,” in Handbook of Language and Social Interaction, ed. Fitch and Sanders, 301–22. 12. For examples, see Robert Craig and Karen Tracy, “Grounded Practical Theory: The Case of Intellectual Discussion,” Communication Theory 5 (1995): 248– 72; Karen Tracy and Catherine Ashcraft, “Crafting Policies about Controversial Values: How Wording Disputes Manage a Group Dilemma,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 29 (2001): 297–316. 13. Mark Aakhus and Sally Jackson, “Technology, Interaction, and Design,” in Handbook of Language and Social Interaction, ed. Fitch and Sanders, 411–36. 14. These two forms of validity for procedures are discussed by Frans van Eemeren, Rob Grootendorst, Sally Jackson, and Scott Jacobs, eds., Reconstructing Argumentative Discourse (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993). 15. For examples of discourse design research, see Sally Jackson, “Disputation by Design,” Argumentation 12 (1998): 183–98; Mark Aakhus, “Science Court: A Case Study in Designing Discourse to Manage Policy Controversy,” Knowledge,Technology, and Policy 12 (1999): 20–37; Harry Weger and Mark Aakhus, “Arguing in Internet Chat Rooms: Argumentative Adaptations to Chat Room Design and Some Consequences for Public Deliberation at a Distance,” Argumentation and Advocacy 40 (Summer 2003): 23–38.


9 Amateur Hour Knowing What to Love in Ordinary Democracy Robert Hariman

Five minutes—and I didn’t—I planned for five minutes, and I’m sorry. So I’m going to have to—I guess rush through this . . . Um, . . . that’s the two minutes I take it? Oh, I’m sorry, OK. Uh, uh . . . I am a teacher at ele—Mesa Elementary, . . . We are disappointed common ground and modifications were not reached with the family in order to display the project. This could have modeled a more positive way to handle disagreement and perhaps would have been an excellent lesson in tolerance and compromise . . . So I’d just like to take this time to tell you that we support our staff, we love our teachers. And I think they do an incredible job each and every day, . . . I just brought one person with me, but we will come back. We’re not afraid of the ACLU. ACLU, that wi- that threat you made, we are not afraid of that. Hi.


Amateur Hour / 219 Read it and weep. The leading advocate, a man defending his own child, the man so motivated that he is the first one signed up to speak, carefully prepares a speech for over twice the allotted speaking time. Other speakers also run up against that limit for the simple reason that they are rambling. And why the limit: isn’t it a patently artificial rule that makes public discussion fragmented, disjointed, and obviously subordinate to governmental procedure? Not surprisingly, the teachers’ representative mouths a bureaucratic prose, demeans the public hearing, and uses the language of tolerance and compromise to slam the parent for not knuckling under in private. The model parent still talks like a teenage cheerleader as she invokes school spirit to wish away all error and all conflict. Another speaker who feels threatened responds by making a counterthreat. Not to worry, as he’s already told the crowd that he’s from outside the relevant jurisdiction. And through it all, speakers backtrack, digress, and otherwise stumble through their speeches, which are, to say the least, not memorable. Worse yet, the speakers seem only dimly aware, if at all, of their lack of eloquence, perhaps because everyone is exceedingly anxious to pay homage to the god of social acceptance. No wonder the sophists could make a killing writing speeches for those citizens who had to defend themselves in democracy’s first public hearings.1 At least the Greeks knew that they needed help. I doubt there was a run to the public speaking classroom before or after Barbiegate, while the protagonist has proudly memorialized the event at his personal Web site.2 Perhaps Plato and other aristocratic critics are right: democracy is ugly, a race to the bottom that rewards pandering, conformity, and stupidity. One way or another many readers are likely to be thinking, “Hey. Way too harsh.” Speaking ill of ordinary people in a democratic society invites social censure. That reaction is part of the problem, and those who support ordinary democracy seem to be in the role of the cheerleader. We love our citizens, who are just incredible, no matter what, and who don’t deserve any criticism because that will hurt their morale. Support the little people, support the troops, it’s all the same. And a sure reaction in a democratic society. So it is that the study of ordinary democracy is at war with itself. On the one hand, the intention is to identify and celebrate the distinctive character of democracy as it is actually practiced to sustain and improve local commu-


220 / Hariman nities. On the other hand, by focusing on the raw particularity of what ordinary citizens actually say in a local setting, the inquiry shreds the illusions that sustain democracy as a political ideal. One studies ordinary democracy out of a love of democracy, and one finds little that is loveable. The choice seems to be between delusion and cynicism. Many scholars of democratic politics choose cynicism. To their credit, those committed to understanding ordinary democracy resist that option. The question remains whether they have to be deluded to do so.

WHAT’S UP Let me put my cards on the table. This afterword is also a diatribe, and one written because I am committed to grassroots, ordinary, participatory democracy. The United States and much of the rest of the world need not less but more democratic speech by ordinary people in local settings. This fine volume provides important intellectual work toward understanding, valuing, and sustaining that practice.The volume’s structure might suggest a concluding discussion of the relative merits of discourse analysis and rhetorical criticism, but the subject of ordinary democracy is too important to be reduced to a study in method. One might ask what the fuss is about. Because the United States is a large, pluralistic society, and because liberal-democratic institutions allow any topic to become a subject of public discussion, and because different topics activate varied interests, discourses, and audiences, democratic speech follows no one standard. In addition, democratic debate occurs in multiple forums. These include federal, state, and local legislatures; federal, state, and county courts; electoral campaigns and elections at every level; the press in its many forms ranging from newscasts to letters to the editor; small scale institutional settings such as church boards and garden clubs; discussions among co-workers and neighbors; blogs and other Internet forums; and so on. No one should try to tailor a single set of norms to cover this wide and complex discursive field, so why not leave questions of judgment to those involved in each setting? In fact, recognizing the plurality of settings, topics, interests, and constituencies should take some of the pressure off of the ordinary democracy project. One need not assume that the citizen action in the local setting is the only authentic democratic practice, or that things have


Amateur Hour / 221 to be done very well there if democracy writ large is to be legitimate. Perhaps there could be a compromise: if the other authors in this volume will grant that the local setting is just one among many, I’ll forget about criticizing what happens there. After all, it’s a big country, and the little folks are muddling through well enough in respect to constraints not faced elsewhere, so what’s the big deal? My response includes a couple of intuitive reactions, an analytical claim, and a normative argument. One intuition, which could be completely misplaced, is that the Barbiegate hearing reflects a weird distortion in mass-elite relations in the United States. Because of American egalitarianism in social relations and a corresponding aversion to slick speech, rhetorical leveling is a proven basis for identification. Thus, roughness in speaking can become the surest form of manipulation. So, this reaction is at some level blue state ressentiment regarding George W. Bush, but the concern is not merely that another fox has gotten into the chicken coop. As standards for public speech decline, elites benefit while ordinary people lose yet another form of political agency. If elites are allowed to speak poorly, they simultaneously become less accountable and more appealing; as ordinary people unconsciously adopt those standards, they become more easily manipulated and less persuasive. A second intuition is that a basic problem shared by both the practice and the academic study of democracy is that knowledge begets cynicism.3 One need not believe in nondemocratic regimes to obey, work within, or direct them. Indeed, cynicism has survival value. Democracy, however, depends on some level of commitment to and sacrifice for democratic values and procedures.4 Cynicism still has survival value, but it also can hollow out civic life. James McDaniel and Bruce Gronbeck are among those who are correct in pointing out that the cynical view of American politics depends in part on a hierarchy of scale that undergirds much of the social sciences.5 Little people don’t match up well against institutions, capital, and historical forces, while polling and other empirical methods are well suited to discover ignorance, inconsistency, and other deficits.6 It does not follow, however, that careful attention to small things will restore one’s faith in democracy. What does follow is that the local setting becomes a test case.7 Will the people say what needs to be said? Will the state listen? Too often, it seems, the smart money is elsewhere.


222 / Hariman The analytical claim I want to advance is that liberal-democratic public speech works by stitching together distinctively public and social identities. This claim builds on the achievement of this volume about ordinary democracy. The question taken up in this volume is to what extent democracy works at the local level as a process of communication. At least two basic questions arise: First, are the speakers in the public hearing doing the ground-level political work of voicing experience, crafting consensus, motivating collective action, and maintaining civic accountability and legitimacy? Second, are they attending to other tasks or enacting other forms of communicative action that also prove to be important to sustaining democracy as a local, reasonable, equitable, and shared practice? One contribution of the volume is that it suggests that the second question requires serious consideration: that is, if one starts with a close reading of the actual public speech of ordinary citizens negotiating controversy in a local setting, then democracy may prove to be something other than it was thought to be. One might find neither the mythic ideal of the New England town meeting nor a deluded public appealing to distant institutions. The individual chapters of The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy are devoted largely to demonstrating how actually existing democratic speech is doing important civic work despite lacking most of the qualities of deliberative discussion or public oratory. They do a good job of identifying a number of discursive maneuvers that are undertaken to negotiate controversy and maintain civility. The book succeeds at demonstrating that textual analysis can reveal how ordinary speech is a rough, messy, complicated, intelligent, artful, and effective medium for democratic discussion. One programmatic conclusion—which was the initial assumption, of course—is that understanding, appreciating, and improving democratic participation is impeded by both the rationality standards of deliberative democracy theorists and classical rhetoric’s ideal of eloquence. Instead, one should discern what democracy actually is when it is done well by ordinary people in local settings, and then do whatever is needed to support them as they do that. I hope to add something to this argument by claiming that democracy depends on crafting in speech and writing a distinctive form of consciousness that is simultaneously—and often awkwardly and even contradictorily—public and social. Furthermore, only by admitting to the tensions within this hybrid subjectivity can one fully explicate public ad-


Amateur Hour / 223 dress and understand crucial choice points for determining more and less successful articulations of ordinary democracy. This task of seeing how to negotiate often-conflicting social and public demands in civic speech leads directly to normative judgments about the better and the worse. My normative argument presumes that ordinary democracy includes anxiety about speaking in public, occasional debate about the standards of public speech, and a range of judgments that are entangled with these conditions. One reaction is censoriousness, an option used by but not limited to social elites, lower-middle-class respectability guardians, and the grammarians who are always among us. Another reaction is to endorse pervasive leveling or the abandonment of explicit standards in the name of democratic inclusion. This is often a genuinely progressive move. If it is always used, however, it leads to misrecognition of and an actual loss of power within ordinary democracy. Rather than wishing away anxieties that will not and should not go away, I believe it is better to keep debate about the standards of public speech a part of democratic practice. Professionals do it all the time, so why shouldn’t amateurs be allowed the same social capital? In fact, ordinary people regularly participate in highly sophisticated artistic discussions and judgments in every other part of life, including music, sports, food, and every hobby one can imagine. The same should be true for the art of democracy. Let me be perfectly clear: Most of us most of the time, myself included, do no better than the speakers in the hearing. And that’s OK, most of the time. As Benjamin Barber has said, “democracy is government for, by and of the flawed and the fallible.”8 As he goes on to say, “paradoxically, its strength lies in its acknowledgement of weakness and its adequacy derives from its recognition of insufficiency. That very insufficiency, because it is shared, becomes the basis (if not exactly the foundation) for our equality.” Such are the normative and psychological conditions of ordinary, participatory democracy. But this is not the whole story. One should not assume that ordinary people are merely underappreciated rather than actually “below the political poverty line,” not to mention lacking other forms of social capital while being tired, stressed out, frustrated, and generally overwhelmed.9 Of course, one must understand how some standards are unfair to those who are struggling to be citizens against the odds. To give up on eloquence, however, is to give up on them.


224 / Hariman The easy choices are cynicism and romanticism. The people are an embarrassment or the people are the salt of the earth. Either position allows righteous indignation, whether against the people or against those who fault them. Although I have acted indignant (and will again), my objective is to mark out a middle ground: Ordinary democracy exhibits both bad and good features of democratic life, and “we” collectively and individually would be better off if citizens could speak more effectively more often, and we will be worse off if they do not. Therefore, an honest appreciation of democratic citizenship necessarily commits one to making judgments—with others— about the quality of public speech.10 There is no one standard, but there are good reasons to argue with one another about whether specific speakers are better or worse, inappropriate or effective, sophistical or eloquent. A vital democratic society will be one that argues about the standards of public speech, works out the right standards for specific settings, and learns from both embarrassing and innovative performances. The same is true of any art. If someone says that he doesn’t care what he eats, we might conclude that he is easy to get along with but not that he should be in charge of dinner. If someone says that she doesn’t care what she drives, we might applaud her freedom from American commercialism but we won’t expect good advice when we are shopping for a car. If someone says he doesn’t know a lot about art but knows what he likes, we would be mistaken to conclude that he is stupid or unappreciative, but we would know that he doesn’t care a great deal about art. There is a relationship between attentiveness and care, and to care about democracy is to care whether and how citizens speak. If they are careless with their speech, they are being careless with their citizenship. Citizenship is not just compliance with the laws and the observance of civic duties such as military service, jury duty, and voting. Democratic citizenship is a way of life, one that includes how we dress, how we drive, how we look at one another and watch out for one another, and how we speak.11 That is why ordinary democracy is important as both a practice and a test case. It also is why I am not endorsing comprehensive reform, strict rules, or selfcensorship. Democratic speech will always be subject to accusations that it is too “loose,” excessive, or rhetorical, for the unavoidable reason that it is grounded in the informal negotiations of everyday life and optimized through public performance. At the same time, ignoring such concerns is to


Amateur Hour / 225 assume that everything is fine and that self-scrutiny is not needed, while it misses an opportunity for recommitting oneself to democratic values.

LEVELERS AND WEAVERS The aesthetic virtues and vices of ordinary democracy point to a common problem, which is the profoundly unsettled relationship between social identity and political identity in a modern, liberal democratic society.The proponents of ordinary democracy define the project’s focus on embodied interaction against the self-abstraction of the autonomous liberal subject, but the fact is that any citizen is both an “unencumbered self ” in a “procedural republic” and somebody encumbered with a host of obligations and desires formed by membership, not always voluntary, in social groups.12 Everyone is at once a member of a res publica and a societas, a modern state defined by the rule of law and a web of personal associations defined by custom, and none of these terms captures the range of differences. One sign of the tension between these two powerful forms of selfconstitution is that social and political theory often succeeds by providing a powerful articulation of one principle at the expense of the other. Some promote the autonomy of political freedom and public deliberation. Thus, Hannah Arendt defends the polis against the rise of the social in modern capitalist societies, and Jürgen Habermas insists on bracketing social status as a precondition of public communication. Others feature the totality of the social in modern societies as something that transforms the production of power while eliminating conventional political agency. Louis Althusser’s ideological state apparatus and Michel Foucault’s disciplinary mechanisms are forms of social domination that leave little reason to invest in public speech. Interestingly, Habermas maintains a commitment to smallscale sociality in the bourgeois family and the conversational locales of civil society, and Arendt celebrates small-scale political interaction, while each fears large-scale social forces such as the reorganization of labor and the development of the modern mass media. Likewise, Althusser and Foucault provide powerful methods for explication of the micropolitics of ordinary interaction in routine settings, but they recover political agency primarily as resistance to otherwise totalizing structures of domination. In none of these accounts of modern political communication is there an appreciation of how


226 / Hariman public and social authority are continually being stitched together in ordinary speech in order to create communicative action. As the transcript and textual analyses in this volume demonstrate, both the beauty and the ugliness of ordinary democracy issue from precisely this condition of modern political discourse: from having to weave together social membership and citizenship. To speak as an ordinary person in a local setting, one has to speak simultaneously as two subjects to two audiences. People have to speak as both citizens and neighbors, and speak to both their neighbors and the public. Communicative artistry in this situation has to be something different from (though not exclusive of ) either deft strategic maneuvering or beautiful evocation of common values. Artistic speech also will make self-abstraction and institutional procedures habitable, and translate the rule of law into a way of living together. Even this summary is too simple, however. As the authors of the essays in this volume make clear, there are many potential conflicts between and within civic norms and social membership. It is difficult enough to negotiate those differences in private. Doing so in public before others who embody the differences is more difficult yet. Doing so to obtain their agreement on a controversial matter can become an exceedingly complex task. By attending to how they speak, one can begin to identify some of the artistic norms that have developed to manage the problem of being simultaneously social and civic. The speakers in Barbiegate are not uniformly skillful, but they each succeed well enough at the first task of speaking, which is to establish that one can speak in that setting. (There are occasions when speakers are treated as incompetent, alien, dangerous, crazy, and so forth.) As they do so, they demonstrate a paradox of American life, which is that artlessness is an important form of artistry.13 Informality is the dominant form. So it is that by far the most uniform characteristic of the speeches in Barbiegate is their superficial artlessness. No one seems even to aspire to eloquence, while the speech is relentlessly plain, common, halting, and rambling. On the surface, it seems that no one can be accused of talking down to people or claiming higher social authority; nor is anyone saying anything that would lead others to conclude they are too high up the social ladder to be a member of the community. The irony is that Boulder is a university town and that most of the speakers are well educated, including several PhDs, helps make the


Amateur Hour / 227 point.When speakers draw on their expertise, they also clothe it in common speech. Note, for example, Angelika Schroeder: And if I understand it correctly and I think I was part of approving it, it relates to the natural sciences. However, having done a dissertation in the social sciences, I will not say that it’s not science. But I will say that it is different, it is more complex. And one of the greatest criticisms of social science research is that there are variables that affect the results that haven’t been included in the discussion or that haven’t been measured. So it’s very complicated stuff. And I don’t um see that it could possibly be effectively directed at an elementary level. Schroeder artfully brackets her upward move of appealing to expert authority and demonstrating her command of social scientific methodological discourse with downward moves back to the presumed low level of her audience. First, she qualifies her understanding and memory—and isn’t it odd that she only “thinks” she approved a policy pertaining to the controversial decision? Second, she summarizes the higher discourse as “complicated stuff,” just what one might say if concluding one did not and could not understand it. When she then moves from the general point to the specific case, she hesitates when selecting the verb. The choice of “see” is relatively weak when opposed to, say, “know,” but seeing is something that ordinary people do. This is but one example of a comprehensive informality that is a discourse of social leveling. Demarcations of class and other hierarchies are present, but they have to be translated through the norms of social informality. As the speakers inhabit and maneuver within that discourse, they meet the first condition of intelligibility and acceptance in American public speech: performing equality. Artful artlessness can be categorized as one version of Aristotle’s dictum that the persuader should always hide the artistry of the speech, but there is more to it. For one thing, Aristotle was wrong on that point: not all artistry should be hidden all the time. More important, discursive adaptation is a complicated social process that is largely outside of the speakers’ awareness. It also reflects a complex structure of taken-for-granted beliefs and practices


228 / Hariman about public speech, including a fear of demagogy, a myth of the common tongue, and near-complete deficits in training and practice. Most important, however, it is the first means by which speakers negotiate the paradox of speaking well in an egalitarian society. It is a self-limiting aesthetic if there ever was one, but it also has its own form of productive power. At the least, prior social status is bracketed (somewhat); more important, disadvantaged people and groups can draw on their own experience as sources of invention rather than always having to imitate a higher form for which they would have inadequate training. This comprehensive artlessness is only part of the distinctive artfulness of ordinary democracy. Some concomitants are obvious: for example, the speakers all appear as amateurs rather than professionals. (For a clear sense of contrast, witness Richard Clark’s presentation in the public hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, May 24, 2004.) Even the professionals who speak, such as the two ACLU lawyers, are very informal while also taking pains to establish their personal relationships with those in the community. The amateurishness of their diction bespeaks a second sense of amateur: one who is speaking out of love, that is, out of a desire for mutuality rather than to use another in one’s self-interest. Gorgias and Plato enshrined love as a metaphor for persuasion, and it may be that speech in ordinary democracy is repeatedly directed to perform an ideal mutuality. Again, there has to be a performative contradiction, for in a democracy the ideal can only be realized in obviously imperfect forms. Mutuality is the central ideal informing the Barbiegate speeches and therefore the end defining the artistic means. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, the forum, for all of its failings as a setting for deliberation, demonstrates a dynamic constitution of consensus and community through persistent coordination between others. This is done amid controversy, and so civic speech becomes a tearing and repairing of the social fabric to both maintain and improve that complex network of interaction and identity. Because the individual chapters demonstrate significant elements of the remarkable range of tactical inventiveness of the Barbiegate speakers and the complexity they are managing, I won’t belabor those points. I will emphasize, however, that there can be differences between the strategic and tactical registers of ordinary speech. The tactical maneuvering seems largely to be directed to the social context: reflexive awareness of how the embodied


Amateur Hour / 229 speaker is likely to be perceived, habitual gestures of orientation toward the audience, sensitive selection of words when potential controversy or misunderstanding is likely, and so on.14 As the discourse analyses make clear, attention to the hesitations in the discourse alone provides a map of many of the hot spots in American society, race not least among them. By contrast, the strategic designs in Barbiegate are harder to identify, in part because the speakers are less organized and more inconsistent at the level of propositional argument about matters of policy. This difference between the two registers reflects the tension between state and society; they don’t fit together seamlessly (and rightly so, as that would be a totalitarian relationship), and they carry different forms of agency. The speaker can do little to change the law in two minutes, while one can seriously damage oneself or other members of the local community in that time. Likewise, the audience responds to the law largely through compliance, while their contribution to maintaining social cohesion can be much more active in face-to-face settings.The gap between strategic and tactical speech requires different approaches to aesthetic judgment. If viewed from a strategic, top-down approach, the Barbiegate speakers don’t do well, in part because the norms of traditional eloquence assume a speaker’s seamless command of all parts of the speaking situation in a coordinated manner. Thus, eloquence often is equivalent to grand strategy in military theory, whereas the Barbiegate speakers are in a situation akin to getting through the day. Controversy is invigorating at the strategic level, in part because the social friction has already been highly contained through socialization into the institutional setting with its roles, procedures, and authority, all of which protect the participants from messy conflations of public and private life. In a tactical encounter, controversy is frightening because it is potentially hurtful. Conflict automatically sets off defensive reactions (some of which are aggressive), rigidifies social boundaries, and threatens to spread quickly beyond the immediate situation and so cause additional damage. Speakers in an open meeting in a local community are acutely aware of their vulnerability. They are wise to suggest as much, for those who appear incapable of being sensitive to social pressure are defined as outsiders who should not be allowed to be persuasive. (The trial of Socrates provides a notable example of this reaction.) It is precisely because of this social pressure that cour-


230 / Hariman age should be the highest value of civic speech, and why it is seen so rarely. Strong stands are taken much more easily in print than in person. Thus, civic speech needs and supplies both courageous defiance of social conformity and continual maintenance of social cohesion. We see some of the first virtue and a great deal of the second in the hour-long hearing. All of the speakers have to supply some of each, as it takes some gumption simply to speak at all. Most are perhaps excessively attentive to maintaining cohesion by suppressing controversy, something that seems to be endemic to any public criticism of the schools in small-town America. Even so, however, the hearing is perhaps “good enough” civic speech in that the energy devoted to social cohesiveness is typically expended in conjunction with speaking within civic roles to discuss matters of educational policy. Even Jordana Ash manages to sketch out positions on the deliberative process, the social studies curriculum, and the quality and mission of the schools. Not bad for someone who begins by saying “Hello, . . . I don’t have any prepared notes here tonight,” and who “just wanted to thank” the school personnel for the “incredible job” they do. Ash, who could have spoken much more authoritatively in her role as “President of the uh Mesa Parent/Teacher Organization, PTO,” provides one extreme of how any speaker has to speak in a local setting. The speech of ordinary democracy will always be a rough amalgam of two forms of identity, each of which has its own complexity as well.Whether official or vernacular, public or private, institutional or neighborly, the specific articulations are all variations on a fundamental binary of political and the social identity that is characteristic of modern civil societies.

THE DOWN SIDE That’s the good news. If the Barbiegate speakers are demonstrating a certain level of rhetorical competence, then there are still good reasons to have serious reservations about the character and effectiveness of ordinary democracy. Four problems need to be highlighted: bad speech, the authoritarian format, institutional sovereignty, and social tyranny.When these factors converge in a public hearing, it is highly unlikely either that the better arguments will prevail or that those present will receive the “democratic education” that citizens need if they are to do more than obey and complain. Someone has to say it: the Barbiegate speeches are awful. The speakers


Amateur Hour / 231 stumble and stutter. They tack back and forth without moving forward. They discuss complex issues with the diction, syntax, ideas, and organization— but without the wit—of face-to-face conversation. In the words of the board vice president Bill de la Cruz: So that’s my piece on that whole arena. And as far as the achieving- the achievement gap um I’m really supportive of that to look forward to talking about that. And last week we were at a press conference with the governor and the attorney general. It was mostly a, a- what do I call it- a dog and pony show but it was, it was um bipartisan we had both um Representative Dean and Senator Mansanaka there. And they’re putting together a resolution to take uh to the legislature that would basically state that they’re gonna put closing the achievement gap as one of their highlights of education reform. And they’re pretty sure it’ll pass. Of course, it’s a resolution, it has no teeth. It just says, yes we think this is a really good idea. So, so that’s- that’ll be the next steps that we’ll see. But I think the positive there again is that the discussion is all the way up at that level, . . . And, but I think it’s in line a lot with what we’re doing. So, uh that’s it. So thank you. De la Cruz has many virtues as a speaker and political leader, but this speech is a disaster, from basic grammar to the sad irony that, as pointed out by Darrin Hicks, he closes by perpetuating the racial stereotyping that the administration invoked to justify censorship of the third-grade girl’s science fair project. Along the way he stutters, rambles, blows smoke, and otherwise dumbs down everything he touches. Moreover, every virtue one might attribute to him—including an artful artlessness—could be achieved through far more articulate speech. Now, I also could argue that de la Cruz’s speech is the best of the bunch, and so he provides an additional distinction that should inform judgment. I would not commend a speaker who gave beautiful expression to bigotry or used the powers of speech to humiliate those already weak and in need. Likewise there can be great beauty as someone struggles to voice their experience on behalf of tolerance, justice, and care for others. This is rarely easy to do, and to be effective it has to be done in a manner that can overcome resistance to the message. Some of the time, de la Cruz meets this standard.


232 / Hariman Thus, his performance is representative for many of us: trying to do the right thing while meeting contradictory demands, all of them legitimate, while lacking the education, experience, or time to do it smoothly. Just as there is no one setting for democracy, there is no one standard within any setting. One must, as it were, love the sinner yet hate the sin. These include sins of omission. One problem of the Barbiegate speeches is that they also could have done work that was not done at this hearing. This is the biggest problem of bad speech. One can always play the relativist and say the people are welcome to talk as they like, but one also has to recognize that every discursive norm is both productive and restrictive in very specific ways. The cognitive problem of inarticulateness is that so little can be said that needs to be said in order not only to deliberate well but also to create more tolerant, vital, and enriching social interaction. There is a political problem as well. A low level of articulateness does not help the common people; quite the contrary, it aids entrenched power, particularly in a democratic society. As James Bohman has said, “not to consider differences in public capacities endorses the inegalitarian consequences of egalitarian procedures and practices.”15 In order to maintain power, all the school board has to do is appear to be “just folks” who are vaguely responsive to community sentiment, and that is exactly what de la Cruz does. Thus, the first problem feeds the second, which is that the school board hearing has an authoritarian format. This is a tricky problem: as Kathleen Haspel and Karen Tracy describe clearly, the procedural rules are the result of a complex set of contradictory demands, each of which reflect some application of either the civic norm of equality or reasonable requirements for careful deliberation. Moreover, they can suffice for public debate.16 So they are democratic rules, but the result, in fact, is extreme constriction of democratic speech. This is evident in several senses. Two minutes is not enough time to develop extended arguments based on sufficient evidence. Because there is not enough time to question others and no opportunity to speak again in response to criticism, there is very little accountability or a clear basis for comparing claims and speakers directly. The one-hour rule is a joke, albeit one we have to admit to making on ourselves, for who today does have time for three-hour meetings or meetings on successive nights? The 1960s are over, two-worker families are tapped out, and the lack of time for democratic speech is a social fact. Like all the other rules for the hearing, it also


Amateur Hour / 233 is a fact that maintains board power. Indeed, the more speech allowed, the more likely it would be that additional information about the schools would be made public, board members’ lack of knowledge of the system they supervise would become evident, alternative policies would become plausible, and so forth. Not to worry, the rules ensure that information flow remains restricted while asymmetrical power relations remain intact. Like public access television coverage of city council meetings, such publicity helps the public obtain a smidgen of institutional accountability but at the cost of accepting a poor substitute for what could be more robust practices of participation. The political importance of the restrictions on public speech in the hearing is underscored by the fact that the board members are exempt. They speak last and at length. No two-minute rule for them. No chance of being contradicted by a citizen. Although discourse analysts demonstrate how much institutions depend on their repeated discursive enactment in ordinary speech, it also is true that such speech is already highly structured by institutional roles, procedures, and habits. The speech reproduces the institution, which reproduces the speech, and so on. This need not be a chicken or egg dilemma, but rather a practical question of where the bias toward agency lies in the particular case. The fact that the board speakers need do so little to voice their institutional roles suggests that their institutional authority is already taken for granted. Indeed, the bureaucratic institution is sovereign. Parents have very little control over school policy, which is protected from democratic control, in part, by a densely layered system of administration, state and federal statutes and funding requirements, and professional certification agencies staffed by administrators and teachers. You don’t have to be a blue voter in a red state to see that there is much value in this system, but any celebration of ordinary democracy should also be tempered by a clear-eyed acknowledgment that democratic participation and decision making has a highly delimited role in what is an important and all too typical example of state administration. Much of the time any potential abuse of power is constrained by a number of factors, including internal checks and balances, a large number of highly dedicated personnel, and over-extension and under-funding. Some of the time, however, mistakes are made and not dealt with justly. The sovereignty of the school system is constructed discursively through-


234 / Hariman out the hearing, from the rules of engagement to specific speech acts to the procedural and other system barriers between public discussion and institutional practice. The location, seating arrangement, administration of the meeting, rules for speaking, dress, and everything else in the setting construct a uniform homology of institutional authority. That authority is aesthetically egalitarian from start to finish, but it also maintains a clear asymmetry in respect to all matters of procedure, policy formation, and implementation. A look at the videotape of David Thielen’s first speech is instructive in this regard: The board president sits in a swivel chair at a table, has both a bottle of water and a cup of coffee, holds a document, wears a suit coat and tie, and looks down on the citizens assembled before him. Thielen stands at a lectern that is too small for him, has only what he was able to carry to that provisional space, is dressed informally, and looks up at the board. The speaker stands between the audience, who is sitting on stackable chairs or milling around behind him, and the board, underscoring his identity as a citizen; the president sits with the wall at his back, underscoring his role as representative of the educational system. This asymmetry is reproduced in the discourse of the hearing. The coorientation that is celebrated in a number of the chapters follows from the initial condition. For example, board members have to “dress down” in their speech while speakers strive to “speak up” to the board by introducing higher-order discourses that should mandate board accountability. As Jonathan Potter and Alexa Hepburn point out, there is a great deal of very skillful, “delicate and indirect” negotiations between the chair and the speakers, in part due to the chair’s tacit recognition that he has to construct his authority through speech that is both institutional and socially responsive. True enough, but as they also point out, the speeches include a harsh struggle for legitimacy on each side, and one that ends up with the chair having the last word. And what a finish it is: “Well a number of us have spent quite a bit of time on the phone with you Mr. Thielen but at any rate, why don’t you take the poster board with you? John Kettering.” This is a classic administrative put-down. The claimant is revealed to have already exhausted the administrator’s patience, the most important resource in the system, while having received his time in private, the most important locale in the system. The claimant is not aggrieved but rather quarrelsome and stiff-necked. Those who spoke with him were not people having to fulfill their chosen respon-


Amateur Hour / 235 sibilities, but rather long-suffering administrators who are simply trying to keep the system, like the meeting, running as it should, and who are not above threatening that additional disclosures of the client’s private irksomeness might be necessary to meet those objectives. The dismissal that follows involves three cuts: “at any rate” signals that regardless of the merit of the complaint, institutional procedure is sovereign; referring to the poster marks the provisional position of the citizen speaker while also suggesting (again) that his case is an impediment to the proper operation of the system; with the abrupt segue to calling of the next speaker, Thielen is history. Like a truant student, he has been dismissed. This sovereignty is not only performed but also relied on more tacitly. Here I refer to the several references in the speeches to how discussions of racial prejudice and similarly controversial topics should occur or would occur or already have occurred in the schools in a properly supervised and pedagogically effective manner. Perhaps the Boulder school system is radically different in this regard from those I have known, although the Barbiegate case argues against that conclusion. If it is not atypical, then these claims are sheer nonsense to anyone who has had any experience with American elementary and secondary education. There are exceptions: I can name two absolutely outstanding social studies teachers in my children’s high school experience, and only one of those teachers was punished by the administration for his good work. It is telling that in the Barbiegate speeches the references to settings other than the science fair are always made to justify the censorship or avoid public debate. They always involve moving the discussion of prejudice back into a more tightly controlled school setting where the administration and teachers are in charge and the public cannot speak. No one provides evidence that vital discussions have actually occurred, nor does anyone challenge David Thielen’s claim that discussion would not have happened without the controversy created inadvertently by the censorship. It is also telling that the science fair was not held the following year.17 Thus, the discourse of Barbiegate suggests how public speech and citizen education can be curtailed by relatively sovereign local institutions even as they maintain the guise of democratic participation to legitimate themselves. This sovereignty is created and maintained through discourse, and it is in principle revisable at every step of the long march through the institution, but taking seriously the relationship between institutions and public speech requires at


236 / Hariman some point recognizing how discursive constitution can operate in tandem with a complex set of relatively autonomous practices wherein people have the power to not change. That power can be both good and bad for democratic life, depending on the issue and the source of the external pressure, but it should not be forgotten by those immersed in textual analysis. Sovereignty need not be tyranny, and in Barbiegate we find that elsewhere. As McDaniel and Gronbeck point out, ordinary democracy often operates under the radar of theorists of either deliberation or governmentality.18 Ordinary democracy is a highly situated, embodied, interactive discourse that creates something quite different from either the self-abstraction of the liberal subject or the totalizing internalization of a regime of instrumentality. In place of either individual autonomy or architectural determination, one finds local places, real time, performative improvisation, and social knowledge. Likewise, a number of the chapters in this book demonstrate how the hearing functions to reweave the social fabric that had been torn by public controversy, and how the interactions within the meeting constructed multiple bases for articulating both individual agency and social trust. All true, and also good and beautiful. If there is hope for democracy, surely it resides here. That hope will not be realized until one faces a problem that is endemic to the conditions being celebrated. The authors of this volume do not give sufficient recognition to the enormous pressure of social acceptance and conformity in small societies. Alexis de Tocqueville placed this fact at the center of his analysis of American democracy, but it is easily forgotten in the relatively cosmopolitan world of the university. The speakers in the hearing had not forgotten, however. From the explicitly social first words, to the many small self-deprecations and apologies, to the careful zoning of the sayable and the unsayable that occurs across the hour, the speakers are acutely sensitive to social acceptance. As usual, the marginal speaker, Alvertis Simmons, the self-identified black man who had driven up from Denver, recognizes the stakes most explicitly. “I almost didn’t get here, couldn’t find my way. Y’all had no signs to tell us where to go. What’s up with that?” In a stroke, Simmons identifies the tacit restriction to social membership.19 Why post signs when strangers are not wanted? Why think of signs when one is already thinking in terms of those who live among one another? What is technically


Amateur Hour / 237 a public meeting, open to anyone, is also a meeting circumscribed by tacit social membership. Simmons sees in the absence of signage the borders that the locals assume but can’t see. He is well aware of the fact that he is twice an outsider in white Boulder, and that this embodied status is not going to be bracketed, and that he has to manage it discursively, and that he can also use it as a means for persuasion. He is not going to enforce the norms of social membership, of course; that job is left to the women in the room.20 Jordana Ash doesn’t need “prepared notes,” for she is not really there to engage in public speech; instead, she is reasserting the primacy of the social over the public realm. What is the most salient aspect of the public controversy and especially its circulation in the public media? “. . . an incredible amount of um harassing and really disturbing phone calls and e-mails from the community, the nation, and actually even internationally.” What might be taken as indirect evidence that one had violated a norm of public speech and democratic education is figured as an attack by outsiders on the private spaces of the local community. And its gravest result is “serious damage to the morale of this incredible school.” Morale is a completely social phenomenon and one that can generate easily from false perceptions. My point is that a question of public policy is being displaced by a quality of social interaction, not that morale should not be taken seriously. What is equally telling is that Ash’s report on the phone calls and their effect on morale is entirely insider’s knowledge, something not available publicly prior to her speech. Other women continue down this road. Clare Schoolmaster socially censures the Thielen family, spreads the fear of social contagion (as Darrin Hicks demonstrates), and appeals to norms of propriety while zoning racial controversy out of public discourse. Teresa Steele picks up the theme of external threat while celebrating a social network. Jean Bonelli defends the Mesa teachers’ refusal to speak to the public media and faults the adults who addressed the controversy for failing in an in loco parentis responsibility that makes sense only in a village rather than a civic space. And the effect on the teachers’ morale probably has gotten worse, as they now have been “crucified.” As Tocqueville recognized, the self-identified individual is never a selfsustaining individual, and the possibility of always needing others who need not recognize you produces enormous anxiety at the heart of the democratic


238 / Hariman project.21 One of the great advantages provided by public media and institutions is that they provide some distance—although not escape—from this condition, but it returns with a vengeance in the local setting. When a syndicated columnist writes for the national media, she doesn’t have to worry about her child not being invited on a trip that another mother is organizing, or being shut out of information about teachers or doctors or merchants or informal summer sports organizations, or what the banker will think and whether the family business will suffer, or what her mother-in-law will say to whom. When one speaks at a local hearing, these and many similar concerns have to be on one’s mind. To put it bluntly, small towns are celebrated as the authentic havens of democracy primarily by those who do not live in them.

THE BACKSTORY The achievement of ordinary democracy is that it works at all. Citizens come together in good faith to resolve a conflict peaceably, to do so in a way that grants respect to each equally before the law and one another, and to sustain themselves as a community organized in a condition of liberty and according to collective deliberation regarding the distribution of common resources. They do so while saddled with degraded speech and the low social capital and poor education it reflects, an authoritarian format for civic discussion that has developed out of the complex contradictions and organizational achievements of their own society, institutions that despite their public funding are only obliquely accountable to public reason, and powerful social pressure to remain silent to preserve social cohesion. The texts and analyses in this volume demonstrate how well speakers succeeded in a particular case at overcoming these and other obstacles to citizen participation in democratic governance. One question that remains is whether their participation worked well enough to contribute to its being a sustainable practice. More to the point, does the hearing serve well as a forum for democratic education? Again, the source for the question is Tocqueville, who argued that political associations provided “free schools, where all the members of the community go to learn the general theory of association.”22 By placing citizens into forums where they could listen and speak on public issues, they would acquire the skills, norms, and commitment re-


Amateur Hour / 239 quired for vital democratic government. I doubt that many of the citizens in the Boulder audience had also spent time recently in a union hall or public speaking club, although a few may have been at interest group meetings sponsored by environmental and other progressive organizations. Because of the decline in many forms of civic and political association, the public hearing assumes greater importance as a form of democratic education.23 And that is the problem. The combination of egalitarian norms (which are good to have) and professionally staffed schools (which are good to have) and bureaucratically organized government (which is good to have) and rooted communities with rich social networks (which are good to have) conspires to produce a simulacrum of democratic speech. To be fair, one has to recognize how the critique of ordinary democracy always depends in part on methodological distortion. McDaniel and Gronbeck have pointed out how distortions occur due to differences in scale: from structural and other grand theoretical perspectives, one misses the great deal of political work being done in the details of discursive interaction. It is not enough to think small, however. The perspectives taken in this volume also make the hearing appear worse than it might be. The most significant distortion is one that I have relied on extensively: a transcript of oral speech makes it appear worse than it sounds to those who are the immediate audience. The reader cannot help applying the standards of print production; as a result, the transcript highlights “mistakes” that often are not noticed in face-to-face interaction or are not mistakes at all but rather acts of social adjustment. Oral and written usage follow different linguistic rules, and transcription of actual speech makes it easy to apply the wrong criteria. In addition, the transcription excludes intonation, cadence, and other performative information that is vital to oral discourse. Personality, emotional tonality, flow, and many other factors are evident in the several registers of oral performance but often do not transcribe into print. This loss of information is compounded by focusing on the forum alone rather than also documenting prior and subsequent behavior in the school system. Without that information, one is disposed to see the hearing as a spectacle rather than as a mode of action. By focusing exclusively on the forum, the often-extensive negotiations that occur before and after such hearings are not recorded. The subsequent negotiations are particularly important in respect to both the general social dynamic of saving face and how


240 / Hariman it plays out in specific institution-society relationships. (More than once I have seen a university administrator tell an outsider that a complaint cannot be addressed directly, only subsequently to tell others in the institution that changes must be made.) There is an important sense in which democratic practices are self-validating performative speech acts, but to assume that is the most important result of the hearing begs serious questions about discursive efficacy and institutional legitimacy. The problem, however, cannot be solved simply by doing more—widening the scope of the research, interviewing people, and so on. The study of ordinary democracy runs up against two problems in the human sciences. The first is locating agency in a complex, liberal-democratic society. The second is the “impossible conundrum of a ‘science of the concrete.’”24 These problems ought to be taken more seriously than often is the case, and it is to the credit of this volume that it brings them to the fore.The project also suggests several themes that might direct further attention to these problems. The strengths of the project include its focus on the particularity of civic identity, the association of rhetorical competence with social interaction, and attention to micro-macro relationships in modern polity. The focus on particularity has a number of important implications. First, it allows citizenship to become closely integrated into other forms of life. Precisely because the setting is local, the speech has to be situated locally, and people cannot help but be many things at once and see one another accordingly: as citizens and parents and neighbors, and as people of different classes, races, regions, and religions. Second, it is through the specific fusions of multiple forms of identity, particularly as they are accomplished in the minute adjustments of ordinary discourse (and not through more costly mechanisms of eating together, sharing wealth, etc.), that discrete cultures of democratic practice emerge. The model of deliberative practice turns out to be the specific culture of the upper-middle-class Northern Protestant, while democracy has as well who knows how many varieties of Southern Baptist locality, Midwestern agrarian community, Western independent associationism, West Coast populist individualism, urban ethnic precinct networks, and on and on. This is not news to politicians or novelists, but it remains to be fully explored in the human sciences. To understand how local democracy works communicatively, one must see how it involves weaving


Amateur Hour / 241 together governmental and social imperatives, local and more abstract obligations, into workable forms of identity and practical activity. Through intuitive and occasionally reflexive attention to styles of speech and interaction all humans are able to speak in multiple languages, discourses, voices, and registers. Code switching between languages is the most obvious form of something speakers in a modern society do all the time: shift back and forth between multiple discourses, each of which is experienced much of the time only in fragments. This polyvocality is an essential and unmarked requirement for reading a newspaper, for example. The transcripts of ordinary democracy reveal that this code switching occurs and that it is itself something that has to be marked and managed at times as part of a larger process of social coorientation. Thus, rhetorical skill in situated discourse has to include an ability to fit other, more etic discourses into a social setting. This is more than a study in technique. If examined further, I believe one might discover an important dimension of the distinctive subjectivity of public speech. To do so, it is not enough to apply the concept of decorum in broad strokes, but rather to identify exactly how speech is being used to move in and out of more and less formal discourses while also renegotiating relationships with multiple interlocutors. As this is accomplished, a form of agency emerges: the speaker acquires the ability to persuade by demonstrating that he or she, and the audience, can inhabit a particular discourse or set of discourses. One task of ordinary democracy is continually to renew citizens’ sense that they rightly, comfortably live within the institutions, procedures, and language of government. That this is enough sometimes allows manipulation and deferral; it also can be the means by which democracy is made and remade out of nothing more than people speaking together. As citizens create a Creole language of impersonal and social discourses to identify with and perhaps exercise control over institutions, they have to live in both the local setting and a larger society.Thus, micro-macro relationships are important. It is not enough to see either large forces and structures or the particular negotiations that occur in local settings. One must identify how the larger modality operates in the local setting, both as a determining factor and as a source of invention. Speakers are constrained by laws, and they appeal to laws; they speak in their own words, and they imitate those in the media; they draw on local knowledge, and they defer to au-


242 / Hariman thorities they have never met; they speak as neighbors and southerners and Americans and eBay shoppers, and they appeal to a shared history and the Bible and the Constitution and the Corps of Engineers water supply report. Thus, a full account of ordinary democracy must integrate the focus on the particularity of the local setting with study of the public media. Currently, one finds at one extreme a focus on broad circulation and “stranger relationality,” and, at the other extreme, minute tactical negotiation between specific individuals. Note, for example, how media coverage of the Barbiegate decision receives little attention in this volume, despite being essential to the existence of the controversy and criticized in some of the speeches at the hearing. One can’t do everything at once, of course, and the volume addresses a huge imbalance in the other direction, but the fact remains that the study of democracy still needs to work out a strong account of the relationship between two quite different conceptions of public discourse. Habermas’s coupling of publicity and coffee shop conversation is the best-known attempt at doing so, and one that doesn’t come close to accounting for either actual speech or small-scale governmental practices such as the public hearing. The task remaining is to see not only how speakers negotiate their relationships with one another, but also how they work out relationships between the local setting and larger frames of reference and obligation.

EXTRAORDINARY DEMOCRACY It is odd and perhaps symptomatic of the demands of democratic speech that Aristotle could not think of a name for the distinctive virtue of finding the right balance between social demand and civic autonomy. As Danielle Allen summarizes this virtue, it is the ability to conduct oneself with propriety toward others. For citizens to behave accordingly, they have to avoid acting like acquiescent people who accept everything in order to offend no one, and they have to avoid acting like domineering people who will make any and all demands without regard for others. “The central virtue of citizenship, then, is a midway point between acquiescence and domination.”25 This ethical virtue without a name is both a rhetorical and a civic imperative: necessary for persuasion among equals, and for keeping civic life free of tyranny. The precise midpoint between the two extremes will be constantly shifting. Tocqueville saw that American democracy succeeded because it became


Amateur Hour / 243 a way of life. That life included attachments to small things, common opinions, and popular arts, and it is the only life capable of providing freedom, dignity, and security for all. For democracy to sustain itself, it has to be continually renewed at the local level, for that is where “laws” and “manners” are brought into closest contact with one another. Without that close, continual, reciprocal readjustment of official procedures and social experience, law and society will diverge. The result eventually can be increasingly repressive or ineffective policies and the profound schism between public and private identity that is inevitable in authoritarian systems. Without ordinary democracy, eventually there will be no democracy at all. This is the point at which the study of ordinary democracy, participatory democracy, deliberative democracy, citizen competence, political emotions, the rhetorical republic, and all other “postliberal” theoretical projects intersect. As James Bohman has argued, “The proper criterion for deliberative democracy is equality of effective social freedom.” For that freedom to be effective, it must be “communicative freedom,” which is the capability to persuade and to judge others’ attempts at persuasion.26 Many of these critics of liberal governmentality can agree on the remedial measures that are necessary, not least in institutional procedures and educational practices. (They disagree on what changes would be sufficient, and on much more as well, but that can be set aside for now.) Yet we cannot rely only on institutional change. As the discourse theorists point out, the norms, standards, and roles for civic participation are reconstructed daily in ordinary conversation and similarly situated forms of civic speech. Social inequality and socially enforced deficits in communicative freedom are always at issue. Empowering ordinary people requires not only understanding what they are doing when they speak, but also recognizing how they could be doing better and doing more. Whether committed to understanding existing discourse or to advancing the ideal of public deliberation, one has to move beyond celebrating social intelligence or public reason alone. Instead, one must see how they work against one another, how they can work together, and how they are brought together in moments of democratic eloquence. It is important to see the beauty in ordinary democracy. To do that honestly, one has to acknowledge how ugly it can be. There then are two additional steps that need to be taken. First, one must see and discard the aesthetic norms that lead to misrecognition in order to maintain some other


244 / Hariman system—typically, an aristocratic or other elite regime, certain academic cultures not excluded. Second, one must admit to what could be better on its own terms. Barbiegate provides many examples of speech that could have been better while still being within the range of ordinary citizens doing the mundane work of living together. Consider, for example, how much the Barbiegate speeches were disembodied and generic rather than rich evocations of personal experience in a shared locale.27 Think of how much of the controversy was not said, not clarified, and not resolved. Think of how little was changed, and of how little was done to transform listeners from individuals into a democratic public. Little attention was given to one another’s arguments, little recognition of the problems faced on each side, and not much was done to delineate a new policy or a new basis for trust. There was no concision, no wit, no moving reminder of our ideals, no powerful testimony to the harm that had been done, no well-organized deliberative argument, no evocation of a common life. The sacrifice of a child’s feelings, which perhaps could be justified in respect to the greater good of other children, was never acknowledged or explained. No individual was given his or her due, and the many who spoke as “I” did not become a “we.” Procedures were upheld, speeches were made, civil relationships were maintained, but people did not reason together, justice was not done, Word was not born. I have argued that ordinary democracy has a difficult task that justifies a commitment to eloquence. The task is that ordinary people must speak in a manner that can weave together strong norms of public accountability with the deep sociality of everyday life. The more that ordinary speakers and audiences share the skills and standards of good public speech, the more likely this task can be accomplished without having to turn power over to elites and nondemocratic institutions. Those promoting ordinary democracy rightly resist both the self-abstraction of the autonomous liberal self and the social amnesia of some theories of public deliberation.28 They also should reflect on their susceptibility to the charm of the banal, and recognize that as important as it is to allow all to speak, it is not enough to say whatever one says. Nor is it enough to find fault. We must recognize that a commitment to ordinary democracy has to include work on several levels. The schools have to be improved to educate all students in the fundamentals of citizenship. Currently, they do not. They do a good job at inadvertently making most


Amateur Hour / 245 students dislike an authoritarian institution, but that is not something to be proud of. Forums for public speech in material and virtual spaces need to be expanded and made more accessible. One could start by restoring public spaces within malls, which are beneficiaries of huge tax breaks and massive infrastructure investment by local governments. There also is need for attitudinal change of the sort I am recommending. As celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse says, we need to “kick it up a notch.” Better speech would be more fun, and this would help ordinary people care more about and expect more from civic institutions. It also would make it harder for some to disregard democratic principles. Ordinary citizens already lack money, status, organization, media, authority, time, and expertise. Much of the time, speech is all they’ve got. Used poorly, it proves to be another trap, leading to further alienation. It is worth noting how Kenneth Cmiel concludes Democratic Eloquence:The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America: The colloquial was connected to new forms of ritual interaction stressing friendliness over formality as a source of politeness. This is eminently democratic decorum, one that I love. Nothing is more ridiculous than those periodic efforts to undermine the egalitarian force of the colloquial by evoking more formal deportment. . . . But what is so comfortable in face-to-face behavior is problematic when extended to civic forms of public speech. . . . Far from trying to contribute to civic discussion, it has characteristically tried to evade it by placing undue emphasis on soothing conciliation. . . . The colloquial in public oratory has dulled critical faculties instead of exercising them.29 A democratic society requires democratic arts, and the art of public speaking in ordinary democracy has to be finely attuned to social leveling and still capable of raising everyone to become our better selves.30 There is no greater beauty than when ordinary people rise up and speak to create a democratic community acting on behalf of justice and the common welfare. Such speech is not possible unless one accepts that government should be in the hands of ordinary people who will spend most of their time stumbling through their own language from one mundane task to the next. That may be enough, but it does not thereby become good enough. If we are to continue to be a people, we should expect more of ourselves.


246 / Hariman NOTES 1. Technically, the Barbiegate forum was not a hearing, which should refer to a public deliberation focused on a specific decision that has yet to be made. The Boulder hearing was open to speeches on multiple topics and the board made no official decision. The term “hearing” still is apt, however: The forum existed primarily so that citizens could be heard; the citizens themselves focused primarily on one topic; the board chose to not act on the prior decision by the administration and in word and deed largely endorsed that decision; by attending only to speeches pertaining to that decision and by editing the transcript accordingly, this volume has represented the event as a hearing. 2. The Barbie Science Fair Project is available at http://www.barbiesciencefair. info/. This use of new media for self-promotion is something the Greeks would have admired. 3. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 4. On the importance of both sacrifice and public speech, see Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 5. Work in political theory includes exponents of participatory democracy, citizen competence, as well as reconsiderations of the role of emotion in political judgment. Several of these perspectives are discussed in George E. Marcus and Russell L. Hanson, eds., Reconsidering the Democratic Public (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), a volume that, like The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy, “signals a deep dissatisfaction with previous descriptions of the general public’s incapacity for democratic politics” (1) and recognizes that “the skills required of citizens are manifestly not those identified by researchers who stress the capacity for abstract thinking and ideological consistency” (15).The specific and vital contribution of The Prettier Doll: Rhetoric, Discourse, and Ordinary Democracy is that those skills include social and rhetorical competencies that can only be identified through close analysis of the transcripts and texts of civic participation in local settings. See also Stephen L. Elkin and Karol Edward Soltan, eds., Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 6. This is not the full story on polling. A good start on that is Susan Herbst, NumberedVoices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 7. Although democratic norms of transparency, accountability, representation, and equity may apply—and work somewhat differently—in the public media, elec-


Amateur Hour / 247 toral process, and federal institutions, they derive their legitimacy in part from their connection to the local setting. The democratic state depends not only on the myth that it is but a town meeting writ large but also on an economy of circulation between system and locale. First, the experiences of both individual persons and specific groups and communities are supposed to be able to be transmitted upward to the legislatures and the courts for distributive, retributive, or protective action by the state. Second, large-scale actions such as federal antidiscrimination statutes are supposed to be transferred down into the smallest locality and incorporated into law and manners. Likewise, the experience of working with those and all other laws is supposed to cycle back upward for administrative, judicial, and legislative adjustment of the laws. 8. Benjamin R. Barber, “Misreading Democracy,” in Demokratia: A Conversation on Democracies, Ancient and Modern, ed. Josiah Ober and Charles Hendrick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 373. 9. James Bohman, “Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom,” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 332ff. 10. I have argued elsewhere that careful attention to political experience requires that one take seriously the aesthetic dimension of all communicative action. If one is to learn to love ordinary democracy, and to understand democratic speech as a way of knowing the world and living with others, then there is need to consider which aesthetic standards are appropriate to and advantageous for its practice. There is need to acknowledge poor performance, although not to discredit democracy or to excuse the failure, but instead identify the institutional and attitudinal obstacles that prevent citizens from having richer interactions, stronger deliberation, and greater rhetorical power. Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 11. Allen, Talking to Strangers, provides a strong account of the importance of habits of ordinary social interaction in the experience of citizenship, as well as a case for more attentive and caring civic relationships that are realized in part through verbs of seeing (e.g., 9–12 and 167). 12. Michael Sandel, “The Unencumbered Self and the Procedural Republic,” Political Theory 12 (1984): 81–96. 13. Artful artlessness is not limited to the contemporary period or mainstream speech. Plain speech has long been a stylistic standard for truthfulness, while subaltern speakers have used their supposed lack of cultivation as a resource for selfassertion. Note how Frederick Douglass appeals to both assumptions at once in his lyceum lecture “The Races”: “I am as you know from the slave plantation—a bad School. I bring no pleasing arts to grace my speech and win applause. I come only to


248 / Hariman speak for the simple truth.” My point rests on a couple of distinctions that Douglass would have recognized: it is one thing to use these figures well and another to use them poorly, and it is one thing to use them intentionally and another to be trapped in them. 14. Erving Goffman identified many such maneuvers. See, for example, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper Colophon, 1974). 15. Bohman, “Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom,” 324. 16. I have seen high-quality citizen advocacy in settings with similar procedures and demographic profiles to the Boulder hearing. And, for all the justified criticism of televised presidential debates, it is clear that a fair amount can be said in two minutes if the speaker is well prepared. So it is that the talk shows don’t allow their “guests” even that much time. 17. Reported at The Barbie Science Fair Project, http://www.barbiesciencefair. info/. 18. Deliberation theorists are likely to contest this claim. For a recent forum within rhetorical studies on the promise and limits of deliberative theory, see the Special Issue on Deliberative Democracy, Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002). 19. Extended analysis of Simmons’s speech is provided by Samuel McCormick, “Earning One’s Inheritance: Rhetorical Criticism, Everyday Talk, and the Analysis of Public Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 109–31. 20. The gendered character of these examples may be coincidental, but it reflects a traditional solution to the problem of managing the relationship between public life and social life. That division of labor is not (and should not be) a stable option in modern democracies, however. Since social and public identities can no longer be managed via a gendered division of labor (and back-channel circuits of communication between men and women), the problem has to be dealt with by every speaker through artful speech. 21. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, trans. Henry Reeve, rev. Francis Bowen, ed. Phillips Bradley (NewYork:Vintage, 1990). For example: “When the inhabitant of a democratic country compares himself individually with all those about him, he feels with pride that he is the equal of any one of them; but when he comes to survey the totality of his fellows and to place himself in contrast with so huge a body, he is instantly overwhelmed by the sense of his own insignificance and weakness” (p. 10, book 1, chap. 2). 22. Ibid., 116 (book 2, chap. 7). Tocqueville’s analysis applies most directly to nineteenth-century civic organizations and political parties but more widely as well.


Amateur Hour / 249 23. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone:The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001). 24. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 33. 25. Allen, Talking with Strangers, 121. 26. Bohman, “Deliberative Democracy and Effective Social Freedom,” 337. Bohman can’t be used to represent all deliberation theorists on all issues, but he is a leading scholar of public deliberation, and his capability thesis brings deliberative theory close to my argument. Bohman’s focus on capability is undertaken with a clear sense of purpose: “Capability analyses of political equality show that these problems could spell the end of democracy itself ” (346). Reading Bohman and others such as Amartya Sen also should make it clear that discussing the social and rhetorical deficits of ordinary people can be done not to demean them but rather to sustain actually existing democracies and to advance realization of the democratic ideal. 27. To see how classical oratory could be attuned to the spirit of place—that is, to the social and cultural codes structuring audience comprehension—see Ann Vasaly, Representations: Images of the World in Ciceronian Oratory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 28. This middle ground provides a basis for additional scholarly alliances. See, for example, Benedetto Fontana, Gary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer, Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). 29. Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence:The Fight over Popular Speech in NineteenthCentury America (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 259. Cmiel uses a typology of colloquial, plain, and expert discourses, but applies this criticism to both colloquial and plain speech as he argues that overvaluing those forms has harmed democratic participation and handed power and legitimacy to technocracy. 30. Similar standards, among others, should apply to scholarly essays, and I probably have failed on both counts. Not for want of help, however, and so Angela Ray, Keith Topper, and Karen Tracy should be recognized for their good editorial suggestions.



Appendix A

TRANSCRIPTS OF BVSD SPEECHES Included are transcripts of the fourteen speeches of the citizen presenters and the board members. As a set, the speeches run a little more than an hour in length. Included are: (1) David Thielen’s initial speech during the public commentary time at the board meeting on February 13, 2001, (2) Thielen’s follow-up comments at the February 27, 2001 board meeting and the comments from representatives of six groups who also spoke about the science fair during the public participation phase of the meeting, and (3) remarks during the “board communications” phase of the meeting from each of six board members present at the February 27 meeting. Readers may view videotapes of the speeches by going to http://comm.colorado.edu/rdod. Transcripts were created from a videotape of the public broadcast and reflect how people spoke: repetitions and restarts, uhs and ums, and other hearable sounds are included along with people’s words. These oral features of talk were available to meeting listeners; they affected participants’ and viewers’ senses of what speakers meant, and provided additional information for building persuasive interpretations. These transcripts are more detailed than most rhetoricians use, and less detailed than what many discourse analysts use. In seeking to balance the goal of making the speeches acces-


252 / Appendix A sible and easy to read, with the goal of providing transcripts sufficiently detailed for different analytic purposes, we opted for this intermediate level of transcription detail. Some chapters have retranscribed sections of speeches in more detail where doing so tied to an analytic point authors were developing. It is important to note that citizen and board commentaries were fitted into the regular structure of BVSD board meetings. That is, the agenda did not include the science fair as a decision issue, nor was this occasion a public hearing about the science fair.

CONTENTS February 13, 2001 BVSD Meeting President Stan Garnett explains rules for public participation in the meeting and David Thielen comes to the podium to claim the first speaking slot. A. Chair’s opening comment and David Thielen’s (Father of Mesa Student) initial speech

Transcript Lines 1–111

February 27, 2001 BVSD Meeting Superintendent Garcia begins the meeting by presenting awards and then gives a district statement about the science fair. The public broadcast station incurred technical difficulties during Garcia’s speech so his comments were not audible to the viewing public. Difficulties were corrected by the end of his comments. Then vice president, Bill de la Cruz, explained public participation and citizens began lining up in groups of four to five to speak. Only comments from the citizens speaking to the science fair controversy are transcribed. At the conclusion of public participation, vice president de la Cruz invited board members to begin “board communications,” the phase of the meeting where board members speak about any topic that is not on the agenda.


Transcripts of BVSD Speeches / 253 Speaker ID, Name, and Affiliation

Transcript Line Numbers

B: Barry Satlow, ACLU Chair C: David Thielen, Father of Mesa Student D: Judd Golden, ACLU Rep E: Clare Schoolmaster, Mesa Teacher Rep F: Jordana Ash, Mesa PTO President G: Alvertis Simmons, Million Man March Rep H: Rita Davis, Mesa Parent

Lines 112–94 Lines 195–333 Lines 334–73 Lines 374–440 Lines 441–70 Lines 471–542 Lines 543–66

I: Janusz Okolowicz, Board Member J: Julie Phillips, Board Member K: Teresa Steele, Board Member L: Jean Bonelli, Board Member M: Angelika Schroeder, Board Member N: Bill de la Cruz, Board VP

Lines 567–725 Lines 726–71 Lines 772–842 Lines 843–91 Lines 892–1015 Lines 1016–225

A: CHAIR’S OPENING COMMENTS AND DAVID THIELEN (February 13, 2001) Chair 1 . . . any: issue you want to um we only have a couple 2 of ground rules. The first and the most important 3 is er that you have to um start and complete 4 your: comments within two minutes, um Sa:ndy 5 how’re we doin on our- on our timer tech6 technology. (pause) Good. I noticed at the last 7 one that er the egg timer was just not quite as 8 precise as we needed. (laughter from audience) 9 Some people would get about forty-five seconds 10 and other people get four or five minutes ’cause 11 of the way those things work so (more laughter). 12 Ah thanks: er an we appreciate that um so I am 13 gonna try duh- e- I- I don’ wanna be er- er- a 14 tyrant up here but please try to keep your


254 / Appendix A 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

comments to two minutes. Er we do have a lot of speakers tonight and I am required by board policy to finish all the speakers er within an hour. Which I think we can do, if everybody um abides by the rules. So er let me call you up here five at a time and um now we’ll get started. First of all David Thielen, then John Ketling, Esme Patterson, Kate Morley, and Lauren Heger. (pause) Come on up.

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David Theilen Five minutes- and I didn’t- I planned for five minutes, and I’m sorry. So I’m going to have toI guess rush through this. [Pres: Well, I’ll be gentle, but uh i- it’s been two minutes for quite a while so do the best you can to uh stick to that.] Um, my daughter did a science fair experiment like many others. Her science fair experiment was she took two Barbies, one black and one white, asked fifteen adults which one was prettier, switched the dresses, asked an additional fifteen adults which was prettier. The Barbie with the purple dress was the prettier dress among the adults. She then did the same thing with two sets of fifteen kids at her elementary school. In the first classroom, all fifteen chose the white Barbie. In the second classroom, nine of the fifteen chose the white Barbie. Um and i- it’s not a terribly surprising result, and in my view not a terrib- not necessarily a racist one either. Um, the experiment was not derogatory, it was not racially discriminary- discriminatory- it’s right there- did not create racial an- animosity. And its conclusion was incredibly innocuous. What I’m gonna cover is the reaction of the school which


Transcripts of BVSD Speeches / 255 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

was the antithesis of science. It’s censorship. It’s sweeping racial inj- issues under the rug. It’s a violation of your own strategic plan. And it opens the district up to extremely serious legal liability. What the school board does with this is extremely important. The kids know what has happened and as a very strong lesson has been imparted to them. The teacher-administrator network knows what has happened, and they know can do- can and will do this in the future if they can. And imagine the devastation to a child, eight years old, in third grade, who thought they’d done an outstanding job on science fair and was then told it was so terrible it had to be removed. Science is setting a hypothesis, testing it, and publishing the results regardless of what those results are. If certain subjects are off limits, if certain results are censored, it is not science. It cannot be science. What happened was ex- identical to what happened to Galileo when he was excommunicated from the Catholic church for proving that Jupiter’s moons revolved around Jupiter not the Earth. The experiment was clearly removed because of the result. And one administrator in the district actually offered to consider allowing it to go back up there if the results and conclusion were reworded. This met the science fair guidelines. There’s nothing in the guidelines that says no research can be done on race. There’s nothing in the guidelines that says results must be politically correct. We bemoan the lack of children going into science, especially women and minorities [Pres: Is that the timer? OK. Um take about another thirty seconds Mr. Thielen.] I’m sorry this was so wrong in so many ways. It was censorship plain and


256 / Appendix A 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

simple. Was this appropriate for elementary school? Elementary kids as young as kindergartners in Selma, Alabama marched out against white police officers with German shepherds and fire hoses. And yet we cannot ask our children of the same age to address or be willing to be exposed to racial issues here after those kinds of things went on. This was sweeping it under the rug not cause the children were uncomfortable with it but because the adults in an all white staffed elementary school. This violates six out of the thirty bullets in your strategic plan beliefs behind it. That’s twenty percent of them. And this has opened up the school district to serious legal liability where you have clearly violated her rights to free speech, this is what I was told by an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, and[Pres: OK-thank-] you clearly violated her civil rights because she was um this was done because of race and [Pres: w- we get your drift Mr. Thielen. Thanks very much.] Um I am sorry that to the board issues this serious are not worth a couple more minutes. [Pres: Well a number of us have spent quite a bit of time on the phone with you Mr. Thielen but at any rate, why don’t you take the poster board with you? John Kettering]

February 27, 2001 BVSD Meeting Part I: Public Commentary B: Barry Satlow, ACLU 112 Good evening. My name is Barry Satlow. I’m chair 113 of the Boulder County ACLU. And, um, I know some 114 of you, but I haven’t had an opportunity to be 115 here and speak before you before. Uh, the ACLU’s 116 very concerned about the- the prohibition of this 117 project, of the display of this science fair



project. Um, basically you had a little girl who went out and and did a science— a social science project and then was told she couldn’t display it. And, um, we haven’t heard anything about um imminent fear of disruption or fear of imminent disruption of education or um of rioting or a history of that sort of thing in the school. Of racist incidents at Mesa Elementary, or anything of that that sort. As we understand it this was pulled entirely because it was thought it would make minority children uncomfortable. And for all we know, because it might make majority parents and children feel uncomfortable that it was getting shown at all. Um uh it- it’s ironic that this experiment was suppressed- I’m sorry, I have a letter for all of you, and I am referring slightly to it, and I should have passed it out. I know some of them were faxed to you, but I apologize, let me, um, pass them out, make sure you’ve got good copies. Uh it’s ironic that this experiment was suppressed by the school in the name of protection of the rights of th- members of minority groups. Because freedom of speech has historically been a bulwark for minority groups and viewpoints against the tyranny of the majority. It’s been a bulwark for those speaking truth to power and seeking to persuade the majority of its error. Um when we defend the rights, and the ACLU fre- sometimes does, frequently does, defend the rights of Nazis, or Communists, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, or any other unpopular group, we defend and secure rights that the rest of us use the next day or the next year or ten years later. Rights that that we defended years before were used in the- in the Civil Rights Movement. And um the First Amendment is


258 / Appendix A 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189

based on the idea that that different viewpoints can contend, that if falsehood is stated, that truth will come up and will defeat it. And, we have to believe that, that’s what it’s, that’s what it’s based on, that’s what this country is founded on. Um it’s especially ironic that the experiment that was performed by this little third grade girl mimicked without her knowing it the pioneering work by great psychologist and social scientist Kenneth Bancroft Clark. And, his research on the self-image of black children played a pivotal role in the 1954 case of Brown versus Board of Education which ended legal segregation of public schools and began the dismantling. Just began it, but the dismantling of separate but equal public education in the United States. And, uh C. B. N. Woodward points out in the Strange Career of Jim Crow that we were for awhile on the same path as South Africa, and this really put us on a different path. And I’m glad to see South Africa ((small laugh)) has gone on a different path in the last few years, but, um. And, Dr. Clark did similar studies, he did them mostly with black children, but uh with black and white dolls. And um we’ve consistently fought racial discrimination in public schools. We accept the goals of the of the nondiscrimination policy. We accept what I take to be the policy itself, which is actually very short, but not the regulations to enforce them. And, we warned, and Mr. Golden will speak later, he was, he’s been here before, we warned whenwhen these were revised, that they would, that they would- ((bell rings)) that’s the two minutes I take it? Oh, I’m sorry, OK. Uh, uh I’ll let I’ll let Judd take over, I’m sorry. Uh it’s in


Transcripts of BVSD Speeches / 259 190 191 192 193 194

the letter, and thank you, and we hope you will change your regulations. We hope you will make clear that even under these regulations as they are this kind of thing will not happen again. And, that you will-

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C: David Thielen, Father of Mesa Student Um, just to confirm, my wife gave me her two minutes also, which gives me [Vice Pres:Yes] four minutes. OK. Um, my daughter did a wondrous thing. Because of her science experiment a lot of people are now talking with their children about race. [Vice Pres: Mr. Thielen could you speak more directly into the mike? Thanks ] OK, I’m sorry. I’m proud of her, I respect her, and I thank her. First of all, I’d like to take this opportunity to say thank you to a number of people. First, thanks to the community for their support. The magnitude of that support, which has been absolutely incredible, has renewed our faith in humanity and has made this a positive experience for our daughter. I want to thank the faculty and staff of Mesa Elementary, which has remained a nurturing and supportive environment for our daughter even in the midst of this controversy. Being wrong on this issue does not make them bad people. The faculty and staff at Mesa are and remain dedicated, caring educators. I want to give thanks to James Madison and our other founding fathers. The system works. And, thanks to the media for covering this event in a reasonable and even-handed manner. Their coverage was comprehensive and balanced. Thanks to the ACLU for putting in a great deal of time answering our questions and explaining why this action is most likely illegal. And finally, a


260 / Appendix A 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259

huge thanks to MEAC. There’s just- there’s not enough time and words to describe all the- all of the ways I would like to thank ’em for all the things they’ve done. I first want to speak to two issues that have recently been raised. First, some have said this experiment was not science. It is. Several psychology professors have said it would be acceptable as a freshman research project in college. My major at CU was physics and mathematics. It followed the protocols. It had a hypothesis. It had data gathering. It reached conclusions of a reasonable base in that data gathering. The conclusions were just uncomfortable to people. Second, people have claimed that this could upset children.Yes, it could. Field day upsets those that are not athletic. Multiplication competitions have students failing them in tears. To prepare our children for the world schools must and they do, prepare our children to handle things that upset them. If they did not, our children would be totally unprepared for life. What would we like to see happen? During the past two weeks, a great deal has transpired. And our feelings on what needs to happen has changed some. We are not asking for an apology. We are not asking for anything to be done with our daughter’s science experiment. In fact, we actually do honestly want to thank the school system for what they did. Ifif they had left the experiment, two or three children would have been made slightly uneasy. Ten or twenty parents and teachers would have bee- felt uneasy. And remained silent. And that would have been it. Instead, this has led to a lot of people realizing they need to talk with their children about race. A lot of people



realizing we do avoid racial issues especially the ones that are here and now. A lot of people deciding to do something positive to address this difficult issue. So out of something very wrong, something very very good happened. And for that, we thank Mesa Elementary. We thank the superintendent and the central administration. So what do we want? I’m sorry, this thing with my glasses, when it’s close it’s disconcerting. First, we feel that solutions to the issues brought up by this situation need to be decided by the school board, not the central administration. These are political questions that need to be decided by the elected representatives of our community. Second, the school board should take a strong stand that they enthusiastically support our children’s constitutional right to free speech. How can we teach our children to treasure the constitution if at the same time the district is losing a battle in court due to those abrogation of those same rights. Children understand hypocrisy all too well. Third, rumor has it and Dr. Garcia seemed to confirm it, that the district is considering disallowing social and behavioral science experiments and requi- will require detailed description of all experiments. This is wrong. True- is that my two or four minute? I have about another minute. Could I please speak to this? [VP: OK just go ahead and be timely] OK thank you. True discoveries come from unfettered scientific inquiry. The present system is good, and the board should take a strong stand to leave it as it is. Please do not pervert the very idea of what science is. We continue our request to the school board to state th- uh experiments of


262 / Appendix A 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331

this nature should be encouraged and removedshould be encouraged and not removed. Fourth, race remains a huge issue in this country and clearly one that is very difficult to talk about. However, we cannot limit discussion about race merely to the sterile controlled environment of a set lesson in a classroom. We must discuss it whenever it arises in any context. The world is not neat and ordered. It is messy and chaotic and only in the context of the real world can we address all aspects of the racial issues we ourselves face today. We as a society always talk about how important it is to encourage our young people to be free thinkers and how to question everything. But this situation is an example of when it comes to backing our words with convictions, we falter. I’m going to skip through the rest of this and hit to the- the biggie. Um we can only do this by discussing racial issues that exist here and now, and I think that is the crux of this disagreement. Not just history. Not just the Holocaust and the civil rights struggle that happened in the past and were done by other people who were bad. But, what is happening here and now, not just in prepanned- planned lesson plans but as it comes up everywhere because the preplanned lesson plans are not sufficient. This is the hard fight we have to make. Studies have shown that children start disc- making distinctions about race at age three. And if we make this subject taboo, it means they make their decisions on their own without our guidance. We talk to our children about drugs. We talk to them about sex. We should also be talking to them about race. Our society has been stuck on the issue of race for the last thirty years, since


Transcripts of BVSD Speeches / 263 332 333

1970. And perhaps our children can show us a way out of that. Thank you very much.

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D: Judd Golden, ACLU Good evening members of the board. Um, I’m also going to talk about where the ACLU is coming from on this issue and follow up on what uh Barry Satlow said. As um the board will recall and Dick Bump will recall, we spent a lot of time when last summer, the board considered the amendments to their nondiscrimination policy. We opposed that policy, we negotiated with um Mr. Bump, with Pam Duran, and we did come up with some suggestions that were incorporated. But, what we said, and I will repeat those words, what we said to the board is that this does not mean that we approve of these regulations if they are used as a basis to punish protected First Amendment speech or expression alone. We hope that imfimportant First Amendment and free expression rights of district students and employees will not be limited by unreasonable interpretations of these regulations. We will need to see how these regulations are enforced and interpreted to see how it will work in the real world. Well, this inci- incident points out that hypersensitive people will misinterpret these regulations because they are unnecessarily overbroad. What we would like to do is to work again with district staff and attorneys to come up with a way to again revise these regulations so this kind of incident will not occur. The courts have recently spoken very clearly in other jurisdictions saying that regulations like this cannot withstand First Amendment scrutiny. We want to be sure that this district incorporates the kinds of changes that


264 / Appendix A 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373

will make sure that we don’t have to resort to the kinds of things that people did in State College, Pennsylvania, which was litigation to try to make sure that their rights of free expression would be respected. So, we’re ready to work with you, we are available, so uh we just are ready to um make things work right this time. Thank you very much.

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E: Clare Schoolmaster, Mesa Teacher I am a teacher at ele- Mesa Elementary, and I am speaking on behalf of the staff. The staff at Mesa Elementary wants to clarify the information concerning the decision to not display the Barbie doll science fair project. Our decision to pull this project came after efforts to work out alternatives for the dis- project’s display were turned down abruptly by the parents. We are disappointed common ground and modifications were not reached with the family in order to display the project. This could have modeled a more positive way to handle disagreement and perhaps would have been an excellent lesson in tolerance and compromise between people in conflict. Our major concern was the form in which this project would have been displayed. Letting the project stand on its own would not have allowed for a needed discussion to tackle and address the complex and difficult subject of racism. The project would have served to even broaden racism if young students took results at face value or insensitive, ignorant remarks were overheard in passing. We do not fear the topic of prejudice or intolerance. We ensure these issues are incorporated in the curriculum and are brought to human scale through literature, discussions of



current events, and in our dealings with the daily conflicts that we have in our classroom and on the playground. We also wonder if we had displayed the project in earnest hopes that no child would be hurt by its impact that outrage would have occurred, questioning our professional judgment and our insensitivity to the minority children. Perhaps the media would have had a heyday with that decision too. This project brings with it much controversy. It carries the issues of sensitivity to race and the freedom of speech. As professionals we made the decision in the best interest for all our students, staying true to teaching practices that are best for students’ developmental readiness, their capacity for understanding, and their ability to transfer their learning to usefulness in their lives. The project would be a learning opportunity for the upper grades. It could serve as a springboard to healthy and honest conversations on racism. But only if it is presented in a risk-free atmosphere where discussion and the sharing of ideas are common and encouraged practices. Parents at Mesa can bring concerns and issues to teachers, the principal, or to our SCDM, which is a SIT committee, a school improvement committee which sets our goals for our building. We hope that the discussions arising from this project will bring new insights on how to best address these issues surrounding res- racism with children. We will learn from the science fair event and take the implications seriously and to heart. We must say, however, that there is clearly more than one viewpoint, on whether the project should have been displayed, and we feel our decision was appropriate given the ages of our students, the


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arena of a grade school science fair, and the district’s nondiscrimination policy. The project did not belong in the science fair forum, but the issues it brings up do belong in the classroom and the homes of our students. Thank you.

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F: Jordana Ash, Mesa PTO President Hello, I’m Jordana Ash, the president of the uh Mesa Parent/Teacher Organization, PTO. And, I don’t have prepared notes here tonight, but I just wanted to thank the school board, thank Dr. Garcia, and thank the particularly the staff at Mesa, but first to thank the members here for taking this issue seriously, for listening to our staff, and our teachers, to try to come to some uh understanding of the implications and the seriousness of this topic. Um in particular here tonight I’d like to thank Dr. Garcia for coming to our school and looking at our curriculum, looking at the ways in which our teachers day in and day out are addressing these issues and certainly not um ru- hiding from them or sweeping them under the rug as has been implied. As some of you may know, Mesa has um received an incredible amount of um harassing and really disturbing phone calls and e-mails from the community, the nation, and actually even internationally. And that has done some serious damage to the morale of this incredible school, this award winning school, these award-winning teachers. So, I’d just like to take this time to tell you that we support our staff, we love our teachers. And think that they do an incredible job each and every day, making these difficult decisions about how to teach our children to look


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at the world around them and learn from it. Thank you.

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G: Alvertis Simmons, Million Man March Good afternoon- good evening. Um it’s a long drive up to Boulder. I almost didn’t get here, couldn’t find my way.Y’all had no signs to tell us where to go. What’s up with that? Let me uh uh begin by saying my name is Alvertis Simmons, I’m the executive director of the local organizing committee of the Million Man March in Denver. Uh many of you all have heard of us, and those who haven’t will be hearing of us because we are um taking this issue very serious. I’ve got several phone calls from African American parents in the Denver community and um I don’t know if Boulder knows about us, but um we are very hurt by what has happened here in Boulder. Um the question becomes, how can a- and we’re not angry with that little girl, that young lady, we’re not angry with her at all. Because som- she had to learn that from somebody or from somewhere. We want to say to the school board we stand behind you. Our African American community stands behind you. Do not shuffle. Do not go backwards. Keep your faith. We believe you are right on this issue. This is not about First Amendment, this is not a First Amendment issue. I’ll be the first one to stand up as a black man and say we stand by the First Amendment. But would you allow your school newspaper to say that blacks uh are less attractive than whites? Would you? No, you wouldn’t. So, why would you allow us a project to come into your school system, a project that says, you got two dolls, one black, one white.


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You got thirty kids. Twenty-four of them. It’s my understanding, said that the white doll is much prettier than the black doll. What do you all think the civil rights movement was all about? It was about self-esteem for black folks and for minorities. We believe in ourselves. We know that we feel good about ourselves as a people.You all have uh- have an opportunity as a school board, to say that if we’re going to deal with diversity, if we’re gonna say that we’re all equal, then you gotta treat us as equals.You can’t treat us as less than equal and say one thing here at Boulder, and then we sitting back looking at you all and the students are following you al- you all’s example. That is why we are angry in Denver. We’re saying that we gonna monitor what’s going on up here in Boulder. I just brought one person with me, but we will come back. And we will do what we have to do. We’re not afraid of the ACLU. ACLU, that wi- that threat you made, we not afraid of that. We know that we can stand by, as a group of people, we will stand together and say racism has to stop no matter what color it is, no matter who it’s by, but we cannot sit back and allow you to teach our kids this kind of intolerance. And, again, we’re not angry with that young girl. But I’ll tell you, where did she learn that behavior from? And, Boulder, lastly, as I c- as I close, you know you all have a history of hating black folks.You don’t even have a black in this room, other than myself and and my organization. So what does that tell us? But this issue is very important, so as I close I want to say, please school board do not change your position. Do not be afraid of the ACLU, stand firm. We’re watching. The community


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is watching. The minority community is watching. I believe you all are doing the right thing and please we- you have our support. So, I wanted to say that, and I’ll stand back and listen to other comments. Thank you.

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H: Rita Davis: Mesa Parent Hi. I’m Rita Davis, I’m a Mesa Elementary School parent, and I wanted to come in tonight and say thank you to Dr. Garcia. I think that your report and your outline of the situation was very clear and accurate. I wish that the Daily Camera had been a little more accurate with their reports. Um I also wish that the staff at school was able to address some of the questions and the media attention at the time of the incident. I think that the staff felt that they couldn’t say anything um to some of the newspaper people that might have set things straight from the beginning. Um, I also don’t think that this is a freedom of speech issue. I think that um the project was given the opportunity to be discussed and that was deny- that was um rejected. Rather than having it in the science fair, I would rather have seen it as a parent in the classroom, or at a school assembly, which we have every week. And we have some wonderful things that the kids all do at the assemblies. So, I would like to just say that I agree with the school board, and um I thank you for standing behind our teachers who I think made a good decision.

February 27, 2001 BVDS Meeting (Board Members’ Comments) I: Janusz Okolowicz 567 Well, I’m very pleased that people are agreeing 568 with school board, but we’ve never discussed this


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issue, so I don’t know what you are agreeing with. All right, now, I would like to make few comments, I hope my first and last ones about the Barbiegate. It is spreading around claiming more victims on all sides by the minute. How to stop it? There are two sides to it. And, what- please take my remarks the way they are said. I am not trying to blame anybody. I am not trying to deny anybody anything. I am in the fullest support, I take no second place to anybody in supporting our policy, antidiscrimination policy. I was behind it in ’95 when we passed it. I just want to look at two sides of the story. One is the child. The other side are the adults. First, the child. The third-grader, Ms. Thielen, designed and executed the science fair project about how do we perceive Barbie dolls, based upon their color or on their dress. She received different information from adults who perhaps were lying, or perhaps were interested in lavender dress, and she had different results coming from students. The freedom of inquiry is as essential to science as the freedom of speech is essential to a free society. And, I was born in society which was not free. I lived in Nazi Germany. I lived in Communist- I was put in a concentration camp. I know discrimination or prejudice. Believe me, when I was doing my science Projects in school, I was limited to what I could study, and I knew that there were things I cannot touch. So obviously we were not free. Scientific theorists are born as heresies and die as superstitions How? Because the observable facts are the cornerstones of any theory. Becau- it stands as long as the facts support it. The science fair parameters are and should, and I agree here with



Dr. Garcia that we should look at our policies. There are some Supreme Court cases, I’m sure some of my colleagues will bring, which describe what we can do, how we can limit legitimate pedagogical concerns, how to quote one of their opinions, how we can prohibit the use of vulgar and offensive terms in public interest. We need to look at this. But this was not the case. The project should be discussed by teachers before the re- the results will always surprise us. Even if we set parameters, children, free children will always surprise us with something which we did not expect, and I don’t want to speculate where it comes from, they have ideas. Then, we should and could discuss it, and I do have full confidence in teachers at Mesa that they could have discussed this with the students after the fact. I trust our teachers that they will do it in a sensitive way, maximizing the learning, because we can learn a great deal out of this project. However, we looked at those data, we can discuss it and we can get what we want which is congruent with our nondiscrimination policy. I assure you of this. Science projects and their discussions improve the understanding of scientific approach. And by the end of high school, we expect that most of our students who participated will understand complexity of the scientific approach. But, not first time around. In the third grade, however, Ms. Thielen asked the question, performed observations, wrote about it, did all she could. Therefore, from her point of view, she deserves what she was promised, i. e., the science fair certificate, and I’m happy she received it, and the display of he- of her project. Well, I think right now, denying this


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display is pretty ridiculous because during last board meeting, her project was presented here in living color on television, and whole county of Boulder wa- was able to observe this project. So, denying display of this project right now really does not make any sense for whatever reasons. After seeing this project after last board meeting, I, and I am speaking for myself, none of my colleagues are involved, personally apologize to her and her parents for the turmoil we put them through. Because we made promises we did not keep. And one should keep promises to little girls.You know schools are about little girls. Not about our administration, school board, blunt desks, thrones on which we are sitting. They are about little girls. If we look at little girl, what do we do to her? Now, it doesn’t mean that we adults are not at fault. It’s saying that in Boulder Valley, sensitivity is the only commandment, that is a commandment, thou shall be sensitive to replace all the other commandments. But sensitivity does- doesn’t have a standard, it is in the eye of beholder. Therefore, all kinds of fine, upstanding people, and we hear all of them around, feel incensed feel- try to show that they are also sensitive to something else. And, we have the real orgy of sensitivity. Why? Why is it taking us so long? Why are we quoting our policies to prove the obvious wrong to little child? Because in her mind this is wrong. Whatever we however we’re interpreted this is wrong. And, why- why are we forgetting this little child at the beginning and getting-and having all kinds of more and more difficult things? As I said before, our anti-discrimination policy is wholeheartedly supported by, I am on



the third board in a row, I don’t know one board member who does not support it whole heartedly. We want to get rid of racism. We are trying to do everything against all kinds of discriminations. The problem is, and this is before Dr. Garcia, that’s why I am making those comments because this was indeed- we were discussing regulations to the policy. Policy is fine, and we should not touch it. We were discussing regulations last spring. We were rewriting regulations. And, after extensive work, regulations are generally very good with two exceptions. First, I did not think that the Board of Education should vote on regulations. I think we should delegate regulations to superintendent and administrators to write. And to check it that they are all legal. So I did not believe that we should vote on it. And when we voted on it, I think to show how sensitive we are again, I did not vote for those regulations. For two reasons. And looking at my notes from last year, my two concerns were that we were limiting freedom of speech. And I was concerned with protecting even obnoxious speech of our employees. I was concerned that teacher who is doing thorough job in the classroom may have to present all kinds of points of view, some of them obnoxious. Academic integrity will require to present different points of view before you discuss them with students. I was afraid that our regulations are limiting this freedom. And also I mentioned that I was afraid they will be limiting science fair projects. Well, we did. At the time, everybody says, oh no, no, no, you are always worrying about something. This is never going to happen in our fine and upstanding district, everybody will—


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will take care that we do not abridge anybody’s freedom of speech. Therefore, the only thing we have to do is to delegate it, to rewrite the regulations, not the policy which is fine, and not all regulations, just the one part when there is a really serious problem with how we allow our employees and our students to exercise their freedom of speech. And where can we restrict it? Because out of their restrictions to freedom of speech, I mentioned some. But the study of Barbie dolls, how we perceive them, does not rise to the level of yelling fire in a crowded movie theater.

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J: Julie Phillips Um this Sunday I had the opportunity to um speak about Amendment 23 to the Universalist-Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. And afterwards um I spoke with a woman named Kari Muldi who talked to me a little bit about um the St. Paul schools and how they handled choice and diversity there. And, I was really intrigued by what I heard, and so I just wanted to share it with all of you. Uh, their entire school district in St. Paul is basically choice, um. When parents start kindergarten, they pick whatever school they want to go to, and they apply to it, but they have a very interesting policy that governs this which is that every school in their district which is a school of choice, which is all of them, has to reflect the diversity in their district. And in St. Paul, I think that’s um fifty-one percent, this is sort of a- fifty-one percent minority and forty-nine percent white, which is sort of a joke because it would be um it’s not a minority when there’s fifty-one percent. But, basically what it means is that every single school in the district


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has to refect- reflect the demographics. And, if we apply that to Boulder, what they do is um for example, they have a gifted and talented high school. And they have to maintain that every kid has to take a test and they have to be gifted and talented. But, they cannot have more students of one race or another to throw off the demographic balance. So um let’s say they have a cap of five hundred, they have to, you know, they have to have two hundred and fifty-five um students of color or else they can’t have as many students as- as they’re allotted. And I thought that was a really interesting way to have it. It’s absolutely fair. And if more students of color apply than the fifty-one percent would allow then they have a lottery. And similarly if more white students apply than their number of fair slots, they have a lottery for them. It’s absolutely fair, and every school in their district reflects the demographics of their school district. I thought that was a really interesting way to handle choice and to handle the issue of diversity. And so I just wanted to share that with everybody.

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K: Teresa Steele First I find it um difficult at times because the past seven weeks in our district have been rough that we are focusing so much on a science fair project. Um I would like to offer my condolences to Timo Sandoval and his family and his friends. He was accidentally shot um Thursday night in a target shooting um area in Lyons, Colorado. He’s was a Centaurus High School student, also a student who uh played a lot of sports with my high school kids and um my kids’ father also was


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one of his volunteer coaches for many, many years. So, I want to offer condolences and um it’s just a difficult time for the kids in the family right now that are struggling with these issues. Which brings me to all this attention on a science fair project when we have a lot of kids hurting out there. We have a lot of kids with special needs that aren’t being addressed, and yet we have national media attention because our administrators and teachers looked at a policy of nondiscrimination that at first I did question. I did think the science fair project should have been displayed and have since changed my mind. Um they did the right thing, and they need our support. And I just want them to know that they- they do have that. It’s not that I have an issue with a child doing a science fair project, and I you know, but I do think we have to look at making sure nothing we do in our schools where we have an absolute responsibility to have a safe environment for every one of our students that that has to continue to stand. Um as far as what we do district wide or what individually I just wanted to say every year um I work with the reading to end racism, reading to kids in schools, talking about this difficult issue. WeI start it with a story about a person being mistreated because of their race or because of their religious beliefs and it goes into a discussion on what is happening in their classroom. And I’ve done this in Lafayette in the schools there where we do have more diversity than other parts of the district. And so, I do believe that it’s everywhere our kids see it every day, but discussions happen every day. And we have to continue to support those discussions


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in an appropriate manner. Um last I’d like to make a request of this board in looking at the different needs of our students. And, if i- if we’re going to support all of our students, if we’re gonna end discrimination, we have to look at the achievement gap. And we keep talking about it so I’m making a formal request that we have a work session immediately before budgets get put forth to say where are our priorities? What are we gonna do for our kids in need that are struggling learners? Um I received from Columbine Elementary today some graphs. And in 1991, they had fourteen percent English second language learners- students and thirty-four percent free and reduced lunch. They now have fifty-nine percent ESL students and sixty-three percent on free and reduced lunch. We’re losing ground without giving them more resources. So, I think we need an honest discussion quickly on what the plan is and look at all the options, short-term, long-term, what can we do knowing wer- we will eventually get more money with Amendment 23. And t- to take responsibility for what we have said that we care about these kids now let’s put the money where it’d do the most good. Thanks.

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L: Jean Bonelli Um I’d like to go next because I very much agree with what Teresa said about um focusing on the achievement gap. And that—that’s what we really need to be doing and I too would like to urge us to have a work session uh right away to talk about resources that will be applied toward um reducing that achievement gap. If we want to uh really deal with issues of nondiscrimination and equity for all, we need to be working with the


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achievement gap, issues in our district. I also think that we’ve heard a lot about um the teachable moment and uh Mesa teachers were criticized in the media for not using the teachable moment, but I’m sorry I think that’s exactly what they were trying to do. Because they understood immediately that this was a teachable moment and if they could get the adults together to talk about it as well as the kids. And come to some resolution about how a subject like this could be presented in a community, rather than just throwing it out there without uh having any real discussion about it. That perhaps they could keep some children from being deeply hurt. They were very concerned about the credibility of the teachable moment. And for that they were vilified. And I’m very sorry that happened to our Mesa teachers. Because I think that they were trying to honor all children in- in what they tried to do. And so what did we adults do? Instead of listening to what the teachers were saying about kids could be hurt here, let’s get together and talk about how we can talk about things like this without kids being hurt. We adults tal- turned it into a philosophical discussion about free speech and nondiscrimination and our policies, and we missed the point that the Mesa teachers knew right away. It was about children. And it was about a community of children and how do we talk about these things appropriately and not have some people’s self-esteem and image of themselves tremendously hurt. That’s what they were concerned about. And for that, they just got crucified. And for that I’m really sorry, that that happened. I think the community that


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teachers in that school were trying to do the right thing. And I applaud you for that. I’m sorry for the way it turned out. I hope we will continue the discussions.

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M: Angelika Schroeder Um, regarding the uh Barbiegate, I would like to at this point move forward. I agree with the superintendent that we should evaluate our science fair policy. I am very surprised that the science fair policy is not designed as a support for our science curriculum. It’s what I always thought it was, that it was directly related to the science curriculum that we delivered to our children. And if I understand it correctly and I think I was a part of approving it, it relates to the natural sciences. However, having done a dissertation in the social sciences, I will not say that it’s not science. But I will say that it is different, it is more complex. One of the most difficult issues about social science research is how to control for different variables. And one of the greatest criticisms of social science research is that there are variables that affect the results that haven’t been included in the discussion or that haven’t been measured. So it’s very complicated stuff. And I don’t um see that it could possibly be effectively directed at an elementary level. If it is, it ought to be done by the social science teachers. And it ought to be under um a lot of guidance. Analogous to that particular issue, whether- whether research is carried on in the natural sciences or in the social sciences, at the university level no student, no professor, no researcher is free to design and- and carry out a research project


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which uses human subjects without first submitting it to a review by a committee that evaluates that research subject to a set of protocols that are necessary. I cannot tell you what those protocols are cause I’ve forgotten that pleasant experience. In any case, there are some rules that must be followed. And it’s very important when you’re doing research with human subjects that that research be carried out in an appropriate manner. I believe we’re at real risk if we let our students engage in research using su- human subjects, using questionnaires, without some understanding what those parameters should be. So, I’m not suggesting that we eliminate that, but I suggest we study tha- um, what those protocols are and ensure that we can also ensure them for our students. They’re designed to be a safety- safety net. Um in terms of our discrimination policy, I would um appreciate an update from counsel not today but at some point. What- what the um whether our rules do meet what we believed they did, that they were constitutional, that they did not infringe on free speech etcetera. I’d like to just have a very brief update in light of what has occurred in this particular incidence. I’ve heard from some of the folks at Mesa, some of the teachers at Mesa, that perhaps we could improve the guidelines and help write them in such a way that they provide better guidance. And I’ve thought about that. At this point, every teacher at least six, every administrator, who looked at our policy came to the same conclusion. And that leads me to believe that maybe our guidelines are just fine. But I’d like another pass at that to see if we can, if there’s some way we can clarify



it for them. They all came to the same conclusion. I guess there was a comfort level that was lost, and if we could improve that it might be helpful. Two other areas about which I have um comments or concerns. There have been some concerns under the open enrollment process from some parents at schools where, focus schools where demand was insufficient for another round or another group of students. And I um would like us next year to explain to open enrollment families that when you have a choice system and an open enrollment system, it’s a demand system. It’s very similar to going to college and signing up for courses. And it can happen that if there are en- not enough students signing up for a class, the class is canceled. And we ha- sort of had that come into play this time around. And I’d like t- for us to be very thoughtful about how we can explain that to parents because I think there’s a feeling that central administration is making an effort to eliminate certain programs. The elimin- if there are eliminations of programs, it’s because there’s not enough kids signing up for them. And we need to be able communicate that in an effective manner to folks. If it’s a demand driven system, we run into that problem. I have been disappointed when courses haven’t been offered because not a kid- not enough people were interested in- in them. I was. But that is going to be a consequence of the system that we’re providing. My last concern relates to a number of calls I’ve had just in the last couple of days regarding the uh class schedule, I believe just at the high schools, in which students have had to mi- I’m sorry, classes have been canceled in order to allow for CSAP


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test administration. So some students are not there so that the teachers can administer the tests. The concerns, I- I think people are understanding the situation. They’re up- parents are upset about it but I’ve- I think I’ve been able to direct them to the legislature because they’re the ones that set this up. This wasn’t something that we wanted to design. I’m guessing that because all our high schools are of a different size, they all have different schedules. My concern at this point is I’d like to know how parents were informed about the alternative schedule because they’re- I’ve had some unhappy calls. And it might be that next year we can improve that particular process. I’m not really talking about babysitters, but there’s sort of something analogous to keeping track of your high schooler. And there’s some frustrated parents out there. So if I cou- if I could have an understanding of how we were able to disseminate that information. We might talk about an alternative. Thanks.

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N: Bill de la Cruz: Board Vice President Thanks, Angelika. Um I would like to make a few comments on the last couple of weeks. Um I agree with my colleagues about looking at the science fair protocol and- and also going through the regulations. I think based on the regulations that we have and the way they’re worded that what was done was proper and in the best interest. I think it could have been a little more sensitive to all of the people involved. However, that’s not something I’m going to dwell on because it’s really time to move forward um from this point. And I would not want to blanketly eliminate



social science projects from the elementary level because I think that is an opportunity to really begin that discussion and that it it is indeed appropriate for elementary school children. I started that discussion with my children when they were about two years old. Because they are a minority population and it’s important for them to understand um not to fear, but to understand the issues that come from being different and looking different. So, I’m gonna talk a few minutes more about the piece that intrigued me the most which was the reaction from the racial perspective and how quickly in this community everybody was calling everybody a racist. And um and just going from that perspective and to me a racist is somebody who from a series of events and interactions shows that they indeed have no tolerance and no respect for other people. And if I believed that the people in this room or the people in that school were racist, I wouldn’t sit here and try to change things from this seat. And, and it wouldn’t, an- and I know many people who wouldn’t do that in this community. And so I don’t believe that the people involved in this whole incident, staff, teachers, administrators, school board members, and and we were called racist from as far away as South Africa ((small laugh)). And that was pretty amazing. Minnesota, Wisconsin, uh New York, Berkeley. And it was from all over the country. And our school district was called racist um based on uh this incident. And the issue of racism is- is really um intriguing in that it’s a challenge to talk about. And it is uncomfortable, and it is not ever risk-free because when you talk about racism, you have to talk from your heart and you have to talk about


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injustice. And you have to talk about oppression. And you have to talk about your own stereotypes. Um if anyone read the Daily Camera today um there was an elderly woman who actually lives two blocks from my house who saw two Hispanic males leaving a house and putting a bag into their car. She said they looked agitated, they looked out of place. And so what did she do? She called the police. Eight police came, pulled their guns out, took the guys out of their cars, handcuffed them face down in the lawn, wouldn’t listen to what the young man was saying. One was a twenty-five year old Honduran who’s studying English at the university. Another was a nineteen year old El Salvador native who lived in Longmont. And after it all came out it turns out he was walking out of a room that he rents in that house after having lunch. And what was in his bag was a coat he was giving to the Salvation Army. Well in most of these cases in this community people would deny it and defend it an- or not even talk about it. But this woman said she felt horrible for what happened. And in retrospect would have done things differently. And she told the police she was profiling the two men and didn’t see how they could live in an expensive area. But the thing that really struck me was that she said it was an unfortunate mistake. I feel very, very badly about it, and I recognize that I had a prejudice that I didn’t even know that I had. And to say that in the newspaper and to put her name to it as well is pretty bold. And she knows she made a mistake, and she also knows that it came from a stereotype that she holds. And I would submit that all of us hold stereotypes, all of us have racist attitudes, all of us can discriminate,



because that’s the culture we come from. And in my se- case, being Mexican and Indian and Spanish. My people were both the oppressed and the oppressor in our history. And I think we all need to recognize that that people who came to this country came to escape religious persecution, and they came here and it started all over again. And to bring this a little closer to home, when I look at the way that we teach racism in, not only in our schools but in our community, a lot of what we focus on is culture. The foods, the dress, the way we talk, um isn’t that romantic, the way the Indians go out and sweat and- and- and dance and let’s all go out and bang our drums and do that. And it’s almost disrespectful in that it teaches um a romanticism of a culture rather than really understanding what racism is about. We don’t talk about the fact that the Trail of Tears that went from Georgia to Oklahoma killed ten thousand Cherokee Indians and dislocated them from their home. That’s racism, that’s oppression, that’s injustice. And when my kids come home and they say oh we studied about uh the Asian culture this week, they talk about um the foods and the dress, they don’t talk about the Asian and the Chinese who came here and were discriminated against and forced to work on the railroads and- and those things. And it’s interesting because we can talk abou- we still talk about the Holocaust because it was over there and it was those people who did it. And yet we have all of these examples of discrimination and racism in our own country. But I think to look at those means we have to take some ownership of them. Not from guilt. And not from saying well gee I’m not responsible, but to


286 / Appendix A 1136 1137 1138 1139 1140 1141 1142 1143 1144 1145 1146 1147 1148 1149 1150 1151 1152 1153 1154 1155 1156 1157 1158 1159 1160 1161 1162 1163 1164 1165 1166 1167 1168 1169 1170 1171

really look at how it perpetuates the whole notion. And so what I would submit is that instead of just talking about the cultural value that different people have, to really look at the injustices because I have to tell you from my perspective it’s really uncomfortable when my kid asks me how come that guy’s following us around the store. Or a clerk looks at me and says I don’t think you can afford that, let me show you this one. These are all things that happened in Boulder in the last ten years. Or a bank person tells me well I can’t cash that check because I don’t trust that you’re going to give the money to the person it belongs to. And you can’t imagine the kind of emotion that comes from that, maybe you can now and after the last two weeks, seeing the emotion that’s come from our community and outside of our community. And I just think that it’s important to remember that to talk about racism doesn’t mean you’re a racist. And that really inhibits our ability to talk about it. And we need to get beyond that and really look at our own behaviors, our own attitudes and what we’re modeling to our kids. And this issue of being sensitive is important. But I don’t think that we can always look for a nice controlled environment to talk about these issues. And we need to find a way as individuals, as teachers, as human beings to have that moment even outside of that structure. And I truly believe in my heart that this school board and this school district is totally committed to dealing with these issues. And because we take a step back doesn’t mean we’ve uh we’ve- we’ve finished and we can’t keep moving forward. And I keep hearing that well you guys aren’t going to



do this, you’re not going to do that, you should get rid of those people. And it’s just amazing like I say how far we go to denigrate and disrespect each other when things happen. So, I’m committed to continue working forward on this, and there were some members of the community that offered as a proposal a symposium on racial issues. And I think that as a board we should support that and as a district support that and I would ask that we get MEAC involved in that in terms of framing that discussion so that it has some real substance to it. And we move beyond talking about a culture and really look at um the oppression and the injustices because I think that’s really where we need to go to create an understanding and- and as evident by this elderly woman, it happens all the time. And we need to just be aware of that and be aware of our own stereotypes and our own um ways that we operate. And- and be able to move forward. This is really a positive thing that happened, and I think we need to take it as that and- and- and see it as a gift because it really is. And we can all benefit from it and move forward. So that’s my piece on that whole arena. And as far as the achievingthe achievement gap um I’m really supportive of that to look forward to talking about that. And last week we were at a press conference with the governor and the attorney general. It was mostly a, a- what do I call it- a dog and pony show but it was, it was um bipartisan we had both um Representative Dean and Senator Mansanaka there. And they’re putting together a resolution to take uh to the legislature that would basically state that they’re gonna put closing the achievement gap as one of their highlights of education


288 / Appendix A 1208 1209 1210 1211 1212 1213 1214 1215 1216 1217 1218 1219 1220 1221 1222 1223 1224 1225

reform. And they’re pretty sure it’ll pass. Of course, it’s a resolution, it has no teeth. It just says, yes we think this is a really good idea. So, so that’s- that’ll be the next steps that we’ll see. But I think the positive there again is that the discussion is all the way up at that level, and people are talking about it and are understanding that there really is an achievement gap and that we need to address it. And it, I mean and it’s even being talked about in these same issues about class systems and- and racial issues and expectations of different students. So- so the discussion’s gonna be happening at that level. And I will keep you posted at- from that perspective and this committee that I’m on, how that pursues. And, but I think it’s in line a lot with what we’re doing. So, uh that’s it. So thank you.


Appendix B

NEWSPAPER AND SCHOOL DISTRICT DOCUMENTS List of materials authors were given in addition to the BVSD meeting tapes and transcripts. 1. An editorial by regular columnist. Clint Talbott, “A Science Fair’s Teachable Moment,” Daily Camera, February 20, 2001, http://www. bouldernews.com/new/talbott/201clin.html, accessed March 4, 2001. Available October 2006 at http://www.thedailycamera.com/news/ talbott/20lclin.html. 2. An editorial by a feature writer with three children in the district. Maria Cote, “Racism Isn’t Child’s Play,” Daily Camera, February 25, 2001, http:// www.bouldernews.com/opinion/guest/25eguest.html, accessed March 4, 2001. 3. A news article. Amy Bounds, “ACLU May Sue BVSD,” Daily Camera, February 28, 2001, http://www.bouldernews.com/news/local/281shbd.html. 4. An unsigned newspaper position piece. “Teachable Moments,” Daily Camera, March 1, 2001, http://www.bouldernews.com/opinion/ editorials/01eedit.html, accessed March 4, 2001.


290 / Appendix B 5. A news article. Amy Bounds, “BVSD to Review Science Fair Rules,” Daily Camera, March 4, 2001, http://www.bouldernews.com/news/local/ 04aguid2.html, accessed March 4, 2001. 6. Editorial by five doctoral students in psychology. Jen Overbeck, Chris Wolsko, Melody Sadler, Geoff Urland, and Megan Lineberger, “Prejudice Study is Genuine Science,” Daily Camera, March 4, 2001, http://www. bouldernews.com/opinion/guest/04egw.html, accessed March 4, 2001. 7. Article by parents. Dave Thielen and Shirley Thielen, “Parents Speak on ‘Barbie’ Project,” Daily Camera, March 11, 2001, http://cfapps. bouldernews.com/opinion/printpage/index.ctm, accessed March 4, 2001. 8. Letter to the editor. C. Ricci, “Coverage of Science Fair Project Flap Unfair,” Daily Camera, February 23, 2001, http://www.bouldernews.com/ opinion/lettesr/23elett.html, accessed March 4, 2001. 9. Letter to the editor. Susan B. Levy, “Mesa Staff Handled Science Fair Well,” Daily Camera, February 25, 2001, http://www.bouldernews.com/ opinion/letters/25elett.html, accessed March 4, 2001. 10. Letter to the editor. Brook Atkinson, “Girl’s Project to be Commended,” Daily Camera, February 26, 2001, http://www.bouldernews. com/opinion/letters/26elett.html, accessed March 4, 2001. 11. Letter to the editor. 75 Mesa Parents, “Mesa Does Not Shy from Tough Issues,” Daily Camera, February 28, 2001, http://www.bouldernews.com/ opinion/letters/28elett.html, accessed March 4, 2001. 12. Correction. Daily Camera, March 1, 2001, http://www.bouldernews. com/opinion/letters/01elett.html, accessed March 4, 2001. 13. Letter to the editor. Jason Philip, “Camera Misportrays Science Fair Flap,” Daily Camera, March 2, 2001, http://www.bouldernews.com/ opinion/letters/02elett.html, accessed March 4, 2001.


Newspaper and School District Documents / 291 14. Letter to the editor. Rich Glover, “‘Never Right Time’ to Discuss Issues,” Daily Camera, March 2, 2001, http://www.bouldernews.com/ opinion/letters/02elett.html, accessed March 4, 2001. 15. Letter to the editor. Malakai Pettigrew, Andrew Pettigrew, Richard Garcia, and Karen Ashmore, “A Reality Whether It’s Acknowledged or Not,” Daily Camera, March 3, 2001, http://www.bouldernews.com/opinion/ letters/03elett.html, accessed March 4, 2001. 16. News article. Monte Whaley, “School Reviews Yanking of Girl’s Racism Project,” Denver Post, February 20, 2001, A1. 17. Editorial. Bill Johnson, “Barbie Experiment Wasn’t Racism; It Exposed Racism,” Rocky Mountain News, February 20, 2001, 6A. 18. News article. Owen S. Good, “Science Fair Project Booted: Dad Demands Apology over Racial Preference Venture by Daughter, 8,” Rocky Mountain News, February 21, 2001, 26A. 19. News article. Monte Whaley, “Anti-Bias Policy Linked to Pulled Science Project,” Denver Post, February 22, 2001, B-01. 20. News article. Owen S. Good, “Doll Project Insensitive: Principal Says White Barbie’s Victory Raises Racism Issue,” Rocky Mountain News, February 23, 29A. 21. Boulder Valley School District Nondiscrimination Policy (File AC-R), http://www.bvsd.k12.co.us/sb/policies/AC-R.htm, accessed March 4, 2001.



Contributors

Mark Aakhus is associate professor of communication at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He publishes in the areas of discourse, argumentation, technology, and communication. He is coeditor, with James Katz, of Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, and Public Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2002). He is currently working in the area of the augmentation of interaction and reasoning on a project called “Designing for Reflection.” Bruce E. Gronbeck is A. Craig Baird Distinguished Professor of Public Address, Department of Communication Studies, at the University of Iowa. He is Director of the Center on Media Studies and Political Culture, and has written books, book chapters, and articles on rhetoric, media, and politics. He is currently at work on Visual Rhetorics in 20th-Century American Politics. Robert Hariman is professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. His publications on civic performance include Political Style: The Artistry of Power (1995) and an edited volume, Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice (2003). Current work includes a series of journal articles with John Louis Lucaites on the role of iconic photographs in the formation of public culture.


294 / Contributors Kathleen Haspel is assistant professor in the Department of English, Communication, and Philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey. Her work looks at the discursive practices of participants in public, mediated, and institutional discourses, particularly those of laypersons and ordinary citizens. Alexa Hepburn is senior lecturer in social psychology in the Social Sciences Department at Loughborough University. She has had a long-standing interest in children’s rights, and has published on constructions of authority, control, and bullying in school situations. Her research has also developed a critical perspective on more traditional forms of psychology, reflected in her recently published book An Introduction to Critical Social Psychology (Sage, 2003). Her most recent work has focused on emotion in interaction, and in particular crying and its reception. Darrin Hicks is associate professor in the Department of Human Communication Studies, as well as on the faculty of the Conflict Resolution Institute and the Center for Civic Ethics at the University of Denver. He writes on argumentation theory, public deliberation, and community collaboration. James P. McDaniel was assistant professor of communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was working to bring several of Kenneth Burke’s unpublished manuscripts to print. In 2004 the Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award, given by the National Communication Association to a promising young scholar working in rhetoric and public address, was awarded to McDaniel posthumously. Jonathan Potter has written on topics including constructionism, discourse analysis, cognitivism, psychology and institutions, child protection, quantification rhetoric, riots, literature, eating, reflexivity, relativism, racism, science, method, and reality. He is one of the founders of the approach known as discursive psychology and is currently professor of discourse analysis at Loughborough University. Herbert W. Simons is still teaching communication after all these years. He began at Temple University in 1960 and has been there ever since—with


Contributors / 295 periodic interruptions for lectures abroad and visits to beautiful places like Boulder, Colorado. Recipient of the National Communication Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award, he has published widely. Karen Tracy is professor of communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is author of Everyday Talk: Building and Reflecting Identities and Colloquium: Dilemmas of Academic Discourse and is a past editor of the journal Research on Language and Social Interaction. Currently she is at work on a book that examines ordinary democracy’s dilemmas in school board deliberation.



Index

achievement gap, 78 ACLU speakers, 49, 74, 76, 82, 97, 112, 228. See also Golden, Judd; Satlow, Barry Afrocentrism, 60 agora, 25, 26, 27, 30 Allen, Danielle S., 242, 246n4, 247n11, 249n25 Allen, Richard, 129 Alsina, Cristina, 25, 40n6 Althusser, Louis, 225 Amendments: First, 77, 106, 112, 147; First/Fourteenth, 12 antidiscrimination policies, 103 apologia, 89, 90, 92, 225 Arendt, Hannah, 33, 40n1, 42n25 Aristotle, 29, 30, 42n33, 80, 227 Army-McCarthy hearings, 70, 98 Arneson, Patricia, 135n9 Arnett, Ronald, 135n9 Aronowitz, Stanley, 42n31 artlessness, 226, 227, 247n13

Åsberg, Christer, 100n22 Ash, Jordana, 51, 73, 74, 82, 83, 84, 86, 89, 101n35, 116, 117, 125, 230, 237 Ashmore, Karen, 80, 102n53 Atkinson, J. Maxwell, 172n12, 173n15 Barber, Benjamin R., 6, 7, 168, 223, 247n8 Barbie doll experiment, 3, 104 Barbiegate: explanation of term 5, 11–12; usage, 270, 279 Beiner, Ronald, 24, 40n5 Bellah, Robert N., 66n2 Benjamin, Walter, 22, 32, 33, 38, 40n1, 42n24 Benoit, Chantal, 172n11 Bentham, Jeremy, 46 Billig, Michael, 48, 50, 59, 67n9, 68n32, 161, 174n33, 178, 193 black nationalism, 54 Black Panthers, 60 black power, 54


298 / Index board members, 60. See also Bonelli, Jean; de la Cruz, Bill; Garnett, Stan; Okolowicz, Janus; Phillips, Julie; Schroeder, Angelika; Steele, Teresa Bohman, James, 171n4, 232, 243, 248n15, 249n26 Bonelli, Jean, 51, 73, 83, 85, 86, 89, 90, 91, 101n34, 133, 237, 277–79 Boulder Valley School District (BVSD): board meeting description 9–11, 74– 75, 79, 81, 143–45, 248n16; nondiscrimination policy, 3, 11–12, 21n24, 52, 76, 77, 83, 86, 100n26, 103–6, 113, 122, 291; science fair policy 11, 21n22, 77, 235, 246n2. See also BVSD Board speakers and control of proceedings Boulder Valley School District Board speakers and control of proceedings. See BVSD Board speakers and control of proceedings Bowen, Francis, 248n21 Boulder-Denver contrast, 152, 154–56 Bounds, Amy, 67n11, 102n54 Bradley, Phillips, 248n21 Brault, Pascale-Anne, 41n2 Brummett, Barry, 175n41 Bryan, Frank M., 7, 19n7 Burger, Thomas, 102n57 Burke, Kenneth, 38, 42n35, 63, 67n6, 68n42, 71, 79, 81, 85, 99n3, 99n6, 100n30, 101n33, 167, 175n42 Butler, Judith P., 35, 42n27 Buttny, Richard, 197 BVSD Board speakers and control of proceedings, 49, 73, 75, 77, 83, 85–87, 231–36, 352–53

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 68n33, 99n1 Carey, Mathew, 129 catharsis, 80 cautiousness, 173n21 censorship, 107, 130–33, 174n32 character, 31 Cicero, 57 circulation: of ideas, 116–19; matrices, 121–25 civic judgment, 24, 211–12 civility, as a code, 106, 135n9; tensions with freedom of speech, 106 civil rights movement, 54 Clark, Kenneth B., study of raced dolls, 52, 77, 124 Clark, Richard, 228 Clinton, Bill, 56, 70 Cloward, Richard A., 102n58 Cmiel, Kenneth, 245, 249n29 code-switching, 241 collective sentiment, inviting, 157–66 Collins, George, 42n33 Columbine (CO) Elementary School, 90, 103 Combs, James E., 99n6 communication: as dialogue, 108–9; epidemiological model, 108, 122; in liberal governance, 105; instrumentalist model, 107 Condor, Susan, 67n9 Conley, John 14 contagion: importationist theory, 127; miasmist theory, 128–30; social, 108– 9, 121–30 context, 137n39 Conquergood, Dwight, 97, 102n56 Copjec, Joan, 26, 41n11 Cote, Maria, 58, 96


Index / 299 court cases: Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 135n3; Harris v. Forklift Systems, 135n13; Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, 140n76, Saxe v. State College Area School District, 135n11; Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 135n12 courtship, 38 Craig, Robert, 144, 214 cultural capital, 34 cynicism, 22, 27, 28, 29, 220, 224 Daily Camera: 4, 19n4, 23, 51, 58, 63, 67n11, 68n25, 73, 79, 88, 96, 100n26, 101n34, 102n54, 289–91 Davies, Philip John, 25, 40n6 Davis, Rita, 73, 74, 78, 83, 85, 89, 119– 20, 125, 269 Dean, Rep. Douglas, 231 deictic reference: pronouns, 147–52; place terms 152–57, 158 demagogy, 228 demos, 29 de la Cruz, Bill, 47, 62, 63, 73, 83, 86, 87, 90, 91, 133, 231, 232, 282–88 Delgado, Richard, 135n8 Delli Carpini, Michael X., 6 democracy, 143: types of: 6–7, 19n7, 136n14. See also ordinary democracy Derrida, Jacques, 30, 31, 38, 40, 41n20, 42n33 design theory, 214–16 Dewey, John, 6, 20n9, 29, 30, 31, 37, 41n18, 41n21, 142, 168 dialectic(al), 36, 70, 92 dialogue, 36, 65, 119–21, 132 dianoia, 72, 93 Dieter, Otto Alvin Loeb, 100n24

dilemmas: as a kind of analysis, 47, 48, 64, 207–10; in court doctrines, 107– 9; ideological 178–79; of democracy, 176–99; rhetorical, 51 discourse: big-D/little-d, 14–15, 16, 18 discourse analysis, 39, 206–9, 229, 233; action-implicative 214–15; difference with rhetoric 12–15 discourse strategies. See strategies, discourse discursive psychology, 177 dissoi logoi, 35, 50, 53 Dobbins, James, 128 Douglass, Frederick, 247–8n13 doxa, 36 dramatization, 71 Drew, Paul, 173n24 drug abuse announcements, 164–65 Dryzek, John S., 19n7 D’Souza, Dinesh, 68n23 Duncan, Hugh Daziel, 99n6 e pluribus unum, 38 Eagleton, Terry, 2249n24 Eberly, Rosa A., 169, 175n45 Edelman, Murray, 22, 27, 40n2, 71, 74, 94, 95, 99n4, 100n15, 102n49 Edwards, Derek, 13, 67n9, 178, 179, 197 Eliasoph, Nina 171n4, Elkaïm-Sartre, Arlette, 41n15 Elkin, Stephen L., 246n5 eloquence, 169–70 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 38, 42n34 emotion, displays of, 122, 196–98 Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychology, 123 Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action, 54 Esteva, Gustavo, 23, 40n3, 40n4


300 / Index ethnorhetoric, 213 ethos/ethoi, 72, 79, 93 father. See Thielen, David Feteke, John, 87, 101n38 flow, 81 Fontana, Benedetto, 249n28 footing, 137n21 forms, marked/unmarked 142–43, 171n5 Foucault, Michel, 14, 34, 211–12, 225 frames, 75, 86, 88, 89, 102n50, 248n14: sociopolitical, 76, 77; educational, 76, 77, 78; procedural, 76, 77 Fraser, Nancy, 42n22 freedom of speech, 174n32: tensions with civility, 106 Frye, Northrop, 93, 101n46 fusion, 28 Galileo, 82, 194–95 Gandy, Oscar, 174n39 Gane, Mike, 67n9 Garcia, George (BVSD Superintendent), 73 Garcia, Richard, 80, 102n53 Garfinkel, Harold, 183 Garnett, Stan, 98, 179–92, 253–54, 256 Gastil, John, 171n4 Gee, James 14 Glenn, Phillip, 136n13 Goankar, Dilip, 124 Goffman, Erving, 137n22, 248n14 Golden, Judd, 73, 74, 75, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89, 101n34, 263–64 Goldman, Alvin, 122, 123 Goodwin, Charles, 187 Gorgias, 228

Goshorn, Kent 174n39 gossip, 117 governmentality, 135n7, 243 Greene, Ronald Walter, 135n7, 140n76 Gregg, Benjamin, 25, 36, 40n7, 42n28 Groden, Michael, 101n38 Gronbeck, Bruce E., 25, 39, 40n6, 41n14, 99n2, 100n22, 101n48, 208–9, 210– 12, 213–14, 220, 236, 239 Grootendorst, Rob, 217n14 guilt, 79, 80 Grossberg, Larry, 101n38 Habermas, Jürgen, 29, 30, 34, 37, 40, 42n30, 97, 102n57, 211–12, 225, 242 Hacker, Andrew, 68n23 Halloran, Michael, 60, 61, 64, 68n33, 70, 75, 99n1 Halualani, Rona Tamiko, 170 Hanson, Russell L., 246n5 Hardt, Hanno, 99n10 Hariman, Robert, 38, 42n36, 247n10 Harris, Randy, 68n13 Hart, Roderick, 41n17 Haspel, Kathleen, 172n12, 207–9, 210, 232 hate speech 135n8 Hauser, Gerard, 41n12, 172n11 Hendrick, Charles, 2247n8 Hepburn, Alexa, 207–9, 179, 197, 234 Herbst, Susan, 246n6 Heritage, John, 158–59, 172n12, 173n16, 173n18, 173n21 Herrick, James A., 42n26 Hess, Frederick 9, 20n21 Hicks, Darrin, 135n7, 136n13, 138n39, 140n76, 208, 210–11, 231, 237 Hoare, Quintin, 41n15


Index / 301 Hobbes, Thomas, 72, 84, 97, 99n8, 99n9 Hochschild, Jennifer, 8 holocaust, 91 Holt, Elizabeth, 173n24 hortatory style, 71, 96 human condition, 33 Humphreys, Margaret, 125 ideological contamination 106 ideology, communicational, 109, 124–25 Irvine, Judith, 109 Iyengar, Shanto, 99n5, 102n50 Jackson, Jesse, 160, 162–63, 174n34 Jackson, Sally, 217n14 Jacobs, Scott, 213, 216n6, 217n14 Jamieson, Kathleen Hall, 68n33, 99n1 Jefferson, Gail, 177, 181 Johannesson, Kurt, 100n22 Jones, Abaslom, 129 judgment, professional 140n76 justificatory game, 109–12, 132 kairos, 35 kategoria, 89, 90, 92 Kettering, John, 234 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 53, 74, 160, 163, 174n35 Kingwell, Mark, 135n9 Kraut, Alan, 125 Kreiswirth, Martin, 101n38 Kritês, 29 Lagasse, Emeril, 245 Lakoff, George, 143, 171n5 language pragmatics, 213 language and social interaction, 212–13, 216n5

laughter, 180–83 Lawrence, Charles, 126, 134 Lawrence, Frederick, 102n57 Lee, Spike, 74 Levinson, Stephen, 152 Lewis, John E., 163 liberalism, 45, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 64, 66n3, 66n4, 67n7, 105, 108 Lippmann, Walter, 2, 30, 37, 41n19 local access television, 40 localist politics, 36 Locke, Abigal, 197 Locke, John, 46 logoi, 50, 53, 79 Lynch, Lisa, 129 macroscopy, 22, 240, 241 Madison, James, 168 Madsen, Richard, 66n2 Malcolm X, 60, 74 Mandelbaum, Jenny, 173n15, 173n21, 175n46 Mansanaka, Sen., 231 March, James, 6 Marcus, George E., 246n5 Marcuse, Herbert, 27, 41n13 Marsden, Paul, 123, 125 Matoesian, Gregrory, 137n22, 137n35 Matsuda, Mari J., 135n8 Marx, Gary T., 99n10 McClosky, Herbert, 174n32 McCormick, Samuel, 74,100n19, 248n19 McDaniel, James, 211–14, 220, 236, 239 Medhurst, Martin J.,102n48 meetings: chairing, 178–92; their discourse 171n4 Meiklejohn, Alexander, 124


302 / Index Mercer, Neil, 179 Mesa Elementary School, 4–5, 46, 52, 80, 104, 218. See also Ash, Jordana; BVSD Board speakers and control of proceedings; Davis, Rita; Schoolmaster, Clare Meyrowitz, Joshua, 37, 42n29 micropractices. See strategies, discourse microscopy, 22, 240, 241 Middleton, David, 67n9 Mill, John Stuart, 46, 66n3, 124 Million Man March speaker. See Simmons, Alvertis Montague, Ashley, 174n39 Moore Jr., Barrington, 41n13 Moyers, Bill, 66n4 Moynihan Report, 55 Multi-Ethnic Action Committee (MEAC), 68n24 mystery, 38 mystification, 38 mythos/mythoi, 72, 93 Naas, Michael B., 41n20 narratio, 84 Nederman, Gary J., 249n28 newspaper. See Daily Camera 9/11 Commission, 70 Nixon, Richard, 68n45 O’Barr, William 14 Ober, Josiah, 247n8 officialization, 71 ordinary democracy, 5–7, 12, 34, 36, 37, 38–39, 40, 64, 65, 205–7, 211– 16, 218, 219, 223, 228, 233, 238, 241, 242, 243, 244; as a marked form 143, 222, 224, 225, 230, 236, 241, 247n10; its challenges 144–46, 219

Okolowicz, Janus, 52, 53, 61, 73, 83, 85, 87, 89, 269–74 O’Neill, Tip, 28 Osborn, Michael, 170, 175n48, 175n49 overhearing, challenges of, 116–19 parallelism, 162–66 pathos, 80 Pearce, W. Barnett, 100n23 performative action, 39, 98 performative pragmatics, 38 performativity, 35, 97 Peters, John Durham, 40n8, 40n9, 121 Pettigrew, Andrea, 80, 102n53 Pettigrew, Malaika, 80, 102n53 phantasmagoria, 27, 30, 38 Phillips, Julie, 73, 78, 83, 85, 89, 274–75 Pino, Alvaro, 87, 101n38 Piven, Frances Fox, 102n58 Plato, 121, 228 plurality of voices, 72, 84, 92, 95, 97 Poe, Edgar Allen, 32, 33, 38, 42n23 polis, 93, 94 political arousal, 23 political correctness, 55 political gallery, 94–96 political performance, 22, 70, 92, 93, 224, 232 political spectacle, 28 Polletta, Francesca, 20n15 pollution, 79, 80 polyvocality, 241 Pomerantz, Anita 172n12, 175n46 positionality, 81 poststructuralism, 25 Potter, Jonathan, 13, 67n12, 181, 207– 10, 234 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 124


Index / 303 practical discipline, 214–15 Prakash, Madhu Suri, 23, 40n3, 40n4 prejudice, 192–94 psychological actions 187–92 public opinion, 24 public proceeding, 60, 64, 70, 79, 81, 84, 88, 93–99 public sphere, 31, 42n22, 42n30 Publizitat, 97 Puchta, Claudia, 181 Putnam, Robert D., 171n4, 249n23 quiescence, 23 race: politics of, 125–30; talk about, 47, 52, 54, 56, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64, 76, 77, 82, 83, 86. 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 146– 47, 150–52, 164–66, 167, 168 racism, 113–14,118–19, 121, 126–29, 192–94, 195–98 Radley, Alan, 67n9 Rafael, Vincent, 117 Ray, Angela, 249n30 redemption, 79 Reeve, Henry, 248n21 Remer, Gary, 249n28 representative anecdote, 71, 80, 81, 91 repressive tolerance, 28 res publica, 225 rhetoric: difference with discourse analysis, 12–15 rhetorical analysis, 45, 65, 206–14 rhetorical effectivity, 104 rhetorical strategies, 173n21. See also strategies, discourse Robbins, Bruce, 41n22, 42n31 Robinson, John A., 157 Roffe, Mick, 183–84 romance, 92–93, 101n46

rules: and practices, 183–84; and resistance 184–87 Ryfe, David, 6, 19n7, 145 Sacks, Harvey, 148, 172n15, 181 sacrifice, 79, 80 Sandel, Michael, 247n12 Sandman, Charles, 68n35 Sandoval, Timo, 90 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 28, 41n15, 41n16 Satlow, Barry, 73, 74, 75, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89, 101n34, 114, 124, 127, 256–59 Sauer, Beverly, 167, 168, 175n42 Schegloff, Emanuel, 117, 181 Schell, Heather, 140n65 Schmitt, Carl, 72 school governance, U.S., 8–9, 20n21 Schoolmaster, Clare, 58, 59, 73, 76, 78, 83, 84, 86, 89, 101n35, 104–33, 237, 264–66 Schroeder, Angelika, 73, 76, 78, 83, 85, 86, 124, 227, 279–82 Schudson, Michael, 142 self-abstraction, 26, 39, 236 Sen, Amartya, 249n26 Sennett, Richard, 168 Simmel, George, 118 Simmons, Alvertis, 51, 73, 76, 83, 85, 87, 89, 97, 109, 115, 118, 124, 129, 130, 142–71, 236–37, 248n19, 267–69 Simons, Herbert W., 13, 45, 207–9 Skillings, Judith, 128 Sloane, Thomas, 67n8 Sloterdijk, Peter, 246n3 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 50, 67n13 social cohesion, 230 social drama, 70, 72, 75, 79, 92 social realism, 32 societas, 225


304 / Index Socrates, 65. 229 Socratic dialogue, 60, 133 Soltan, Karol Edward, 246n5 spectatorship, 29 specularity, 94 speculum, 29 Splichal, Slavko, 99n10 stasis, 100n24 Steele, Teresa, 51, 73, 78, 83, 85, 89, 90, 133, 237, 275–77 strategies, discourse: categorical descriptions, 119, contrast, 119, 157–60; idiomatic expressions, 173n24; lists 160, 162; parallel structure 162–66; repetition 162–66 “structures of feeling,” 82, 87–88, 92 Sullivan, William M., 66n2 Swidler, Ann, 66n2

Topper, Keith, 249n30 Tracy, Karen, 144, 171n4, 172n9, 175n46, 207–9, 210, 232, 249n30 Trail of Tears, 91 transcription, 173n6, 177, 198, 199n3, 251–52

Talbott, Clint, 4, 67n11, 101n34, 120 Tannen, Deborah 160, 174n29 “teachable moment,” 52, 63, 83, 85, 96, 101n34 Thielen, David, 3, 47, 52, 56, 57, 59, 64, 67n11, 73, 76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 98, 100n32, 101n34, 101n35, 114, 120, 124, 127, 131–32, 142–71, 185–98, 234, 235, 234–36, 237, 259–63 Thompson, Greg, 67n11, 104, 110 Thompson, John, 99n7 Tipton, Stephen M., 66n2 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 38, 42n32, 236, 237, 238, 242, 248n21, 248n22 Tomes, Nancy 140n65 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 99n10

Wald, Priscilla, 127, 140n65 Warner, Michael, 118 Watergate, 39, 70 West, Cornell, 167, 174n40 we-they terms. See deictic reference Whaley, Monte, 102n54 Wideman, John Edgar, 129 Wiggins, Charles, 68n35 Williams, Raymond, 87, 88, 101n36, 101n38, 101n39 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 183 Wolff, Robert Paul, 41n13, 66n3 Wood, Julia, 100n23

unity/division, managing, 147–57 University of Colorado Stereotyping and Prejudice Lab, 96 utopia, 37 videotapes of the speeches, 251 Vietnam war, House and Senate hearings, 98 van Dijk, Teun, 159 Vasaly, Ann, 249n27 vernacular, 33, 35, 41n12

Young, Iris Marion, 6–7 Zohn, Harry, 40n1


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