New Course

I'm still playing with the syllabus for my new rhetoric course. I had a few assignments I liked, but I realized that I don't have time to do them all, so I changed the most time-consuming one, a rhetorical analysis of Douglass' slave narrative that required students to compare this very positive and optimistic version of his past with a speech that he gave at a 4th of July picnic. Needless to say, he did not speak all that positively about the freedoms that our country guarantees all citizens in this context! In fact, he would have scorched the eyebrows off of any white person who came too close. In fact, when that whole thing with Obama's former preacher broke, I thought about this very old tradition in African American rhetoric. Anyone who was familiar with it would not have been so shocked by Wright's words. And if one would only think about it, there are plenty of reasons he would speak that way. In some places, people of color are still persecuted, plenty of places. I'll still probably show them that speech and discuss this issue, but it would have been much more directly related to the assignment. Oh well! Can't do everything, right?