Blerd Knows Best: Black Family Rhetoric in Service of Anti-Racist Pedagogy

Rhetoric Society Quarterly May 2022

Blerd Knows Best: Black Family Rhetoric in Service of Anti-Racist Pedagogy

Shelagh Wilson Patterson Montclair State University

Abstract

In this essay, Patterson continues the tradition of turning to analysis of family as a way to challenge asymmetrical power relations within academic discourse. Through an analysis of publications and performances from three members of the author’s family—Phillip Patterson’s The Serenity of Knowing, Michael Patterson’s Humanist Solutions to American Problems: An Apolitical Approach to Governing, and Morgan Deane’s “A Light in the Night: Reopening & Operating Nightlife Venues in the Time of Covid-19”—Patterson animates Tracie Morris’s theory of grace as an African proverb performance rooted in Black family rhetoric to make visible rhetorical traditions and strategies used to create literacies for working across difference and surviving and thriving despite racist hegemonic structures of oppression. Additionally, Patterson extends their family rhetorical practices as useful techniques for decolonizing curriculum in form and content.

Journal: Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Published: 2022-05-27
DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2022.2077629
Open Access: Closed
Topics: race and writing

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