In this article, I explore the rhetorical deployment of White tears, tears that are circulated within narratives of interracial conflict as evidence for the rightness of White supremacist norms. More specifically, White tears are those that are framed as deictic indicators of a White victim versus a Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) threat. These presumed relations of cause and effect are made possible within an emotional context that assumes a baseline White rationality as the norm; distress signals the threat of non-White aggression. Analysis of several prominent cases of crying demonstrates how tears can be marshaled as evidence for the legitimacy of White bodies at the expense of those of color. Although considering the rhetorical force of affect and emotion is important for critical rhetorical analyses, such work needs to contend with how scripts for emotional engagement are already inclined toward or against certain bodies. It then becomes possible to develop alternative, subversive framings.

This essay argues that critical rhetorical work on race needs to account for how racist ideas are maintained and enacted via expectations about which kinesiologies are appropriate for which bodies. In the music video "This Is America," artist Childish Gambino performs the contradictory expectations for Black male embodiment as both hyper-violent and hyper-talented by juxtaposing African and African American dance forms with gun violence. Analysis of this juxtaposition demonstrates how the expectation that the Black body must always remain in motion while in the public sphere creates an atmosphere of ontological exhaustion. These understandings of "appropriate" kinesiologies might be less prominent in discourse but no less influential on understandings of race. As the rhetorical analyst's own body does not exist outside these societal biases, critical rhetorical analyses that seek to address racial divides should explicitly account for kinesthetic assumptions embedded in performance and viewership.

This article explores bodily movement practices as a foundational component of rhetorical awareness. Through ethnographic study of dance pedagogy, the author demonstrates how genre uptake is enabled by bodily experience; learned ways of moving produce inclinations toward certain rhetorical pathways over others.Enabling students to uptake new genres means teaching them to be aware of the intersection of bodily and intellectual resources.

If bodies and discourse are always interpenetrated and mutually influencing, rhetoricians need ways to consider how it is possible to evoke embodied effects with rhetorical force via discursive tools. This article discusses how the use of somatic metaphors, metaphors crafted to revive remembered embodied experience in the mover’s consciousness, allows access to the ideological, political, and affective ties formed in the original embodied performance. Repeated exposure to this metaphoric resurrection of the past creates a kairotic awareness where remembered embodiments are viewed as potential rhetorical resources.