Sin Permiso, Sin Perdón: Rhetorical Studies on Rhetorics of Race, Latinidad, Decoloniality, and Theory

• Main Author: Padilla, J Paul
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2024
• Subjects: Ethnic studies; Latin American Studies; Rhetoric; Rhetoric and Composition
• ISBN: 9798382346977

My dissertation addresses the problem of identifying and unlearning the endoxa—that is, the common opinion or “common sense” treated as true knowledge—of racism and coloniality certain rhetoric carries, shaping how race is understood and lived in the United States and within its cultures like Latinidad. This problem holds a simple truth about a complex reality faced by so many people of color like me and my son Ricardo: we need, but don’t often find, the space, autonomy, and theories to analyze a racialized world in ways that matter most to our communities now and over generations. Addressing this problem from this premise shifts the antiracism dialogue from the common paradigm of educating White ignorance through an inherent understanding of racism and a duty held by people of color, to a paradigm of unlearning, analysis, empowerment, and invention toward meaningful, practical forms of decoloniality centered on communities of color.In my dissertation, I argue that rhetorics of race serve as the primary means of transmitting and establishing the ideology, knowledge, and practices of racial hierarchy and inequity within languages, cultures, and customs of an epicenter of coloniality. I define epicenter of coloniality as a nation-state in the Americas created through its independence from its respective European imperialism that reflects the evolution of colonialism where racial hierarchy continues as primary system of colonial dominance and oppression despite dominant socio-political narratives of racial democracy through a nation-based cultural identity. As one epicenter of coloniality, the United States employs the dominant socio-political narrative of “the assimilated American,” which by law, politics, and society limited certain Europeans to be unhyphenated (White) Americans. Within variations of this narrative, race is framed as natural, biological, and indelible with ethnicity used to deny racial hierarchy and promote assimilation. Concerns of racial inequity are reframed as taboo within a spectrum, with silencing over anti-White racism on one end and claims of generational social progress on the other. Given the absence of critical analysis, race in the United States continues as intellectuals Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo theorized: the primary system of dominance and oppression established by colonialism and evolving through coloniality within the nation’s structures, institutions, and cultures.Rhetorics of race, complete with its endoxa, maintains racial hierarchy and inequity through the dominant ideology of White superiority within cultural, political, and national identities that informs intersectional discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, ability, religion, and nationality among others. For different racialized communities of color, critical analysis of race and racial inequity involves a foundational reconceptualization of the ideologies, knowledges, and practices established by rhetorics of race, beginning with internalized colonialism of agency, collective identity, memory, and futurity within individuals that defines the relational racial dynamic of White and Othered. For those communities who identify through Latinidad, addressing internalized colonialism may involve painful realizations about reconciliations of European, Indigenous, and African descendance that contradict dominant narratives of racial democracy through a unifying cultural identity of nationality and that nationality’s conception of mestizaje, which is often defined as the inter-racial mixing of European and Indigenous peoples, but not of people of African descent. These realizations become more challenging based on proximity to another epicenter of coloniality: those who identify with Latinidad but who were born, or live, primarily in the United States, where they understand, and live, race first through rhetorics, and endoxa, core to the U.S. relational racial dynamic. My research question for my dissertation is as follows: How can rhetorics of race in the United States and within U.S. Latinidad be criticized, analyzed, and theorized to provide different communities—those who live with racialized as people of color and as White—a structure to understand the evolution of coloniality through race, the problems of endoxa that sustain racial hierarchy within as vested identities of race within epicenters of coloniality, and the means of transforming internalized colonialism into decolonial re-existence on individual and collective levels?I address this question through a series of rhetorical theories for communities of color and allies that critically examines rhetorics of racism on identity, cultural memory, racial democracy, and internalized colonialism within the United States and Latinidad. I posit rhetorical theories of self-identification, rhetorical agency, collective memory, inter-cultural negotiations, fictive kinship, and advocacy to understand racial hierarchies in different epicenters of coloniality across generations and to move communities within the United States, U.S. Latinidad, and higher education toward decoloniality. To conduct my research and analysis, I employ a qualitative research methodology of rhetorical criticism that involves auto-ethnography, ethnography, and critical theory. My dissertation is written as a series of six open letters to my son Ricardo: a prologue and five chapter-length letters. I blend the traditional dissertation writing genre with the rhetorical “open letter” genre used by intellectuals James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Ta-Nehisi Coates toward advocacy for transformative social change through agency, rhetoric, and action for communities of color and allies. With this substantive approach to writing style, I seek to create a three-tiered audience toward a dynamic of antiracist dialogue that puts what matters to the communities most impacted by racism first. Thus, I conceive the primary audience of my son literally and metaphorically as a generation of communities struggling to find a space to study, learn, and address racism, the secondary audience being intellectuals of color and allies who seek to address these issues for their communities through community, professional, and academic work, and the tertiary audience being academics in Rhetoric and Composition Studies and higher education who can use Krista Ratcliffe’s theory of rhetorical eavesdropping toward cross-cultural learning.