This essay examines moments of Black women’s rhetorical impatience, or performances used to manage time within adverse conditions, to expand conceptions of kairos and self-care. It shows how disruption is a vehicle of discipline designed to promote Black women’s respect and wellness, revealing discursive postures that must inform discussions of identity, risk, and power in relation to rhetorical criticism and education.

Although models for recovering and theorizing black women’s discourse have focused on examples of communicative eloquence, competence, verbal prowess, and depictions of strategy, these frameworks do not completely account for the racialized threats of violence black women sometimes incur as consequences for their participation in public dialogues. To understand how risk and penalty are activated against black women intellectuals on television and social media, this essay analyzes the controversy and subsequent social media backlash Wake Forest University professor and former MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry experienced in late 2013 after off-hand remarks about former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s African American grandchild. When read as the consequence of feminist literacy practices and signifying enacted within a hostile surveillance culture, Harris-Perry’s experience reveals an adverse rhetorical condition that penalizes and silences contemporary black women speakers and intellectuals.

The canonization of vocal African-American women scholars and activists is a trend that can obscure memory of their sophisticated persuasive techniques and political campaigns. Such has been the case with Geneva Smitherman, the noted sociolinguist and scholar activist. This essay analyzes the persuasive choices in a corpus of her earliest essays as a rhetorical campaign to situate her innovative use of antagonism and analysis within a tradition of African-American women scholars and activists who have used essay-writing as a means of sociopolitical action and to model a conceptual framework for understanding the complexity of their efforts.