Resisting whiteness' rhetorical silence

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Abstract
This essay explores the rhetorical dimensions of whiteness in public political discourse from an ideological perspective. It analyzes a debate between Carolyn Moseley Braun and Jesse Helms over a patent extension for the United Daughters of the Confederacy insignia containing a Confederate flag. In this essay I argue that rhetoricians must do the critical and self‐reflexive ideological work necessary to make whiteness visible and overturn its silences for the purpose of resisting racism. To do this, scholars must locate interactions that implicate unspoken issues of race, discursive spaces where the power of whiteness is invoked but its explicit terminology is not, and investigate how these racialized constructions intersect with gender and class.

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