“Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”
—Aristotle, On Rhetoric
Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric is considered the standard. It means that if you are talking to an audience that you know has a limited vocabulary, then a vast vocabulary is not an “available means of persuasion.” In other words, if you want to be persuasive, know your audience to the best of your ability and speak or write accordingly.
As simple as this idea is, we do need to be careful when utilizing it. There is a difference between gauging an audience and projecting one. With the former, a speaker has done his or her due diligence, looking into the values, attitudes, preferences, and beliefs of an audience before determining how to convey a message. With the latter, no due diligence occurs. The audience is assumed, a priori, to have a particular disposition. Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric can thus be bastardized into a fallacious gauging of one’s audience.
Recently, California Governor Gavin Newsom, has been called out by the likes of Nicki Minaj and News Nation’s Batya Ungar-Sargon, for altering his speech to sound less intelligent and, therefore, more relatable when speaking to black people. Whether their assessments are accurate or not, though important, is not my concern right now.1 This essay constitutes the rhetorical concept of metabasis: discerning a more prominent issue from a seemingly prominent issue. The bigger issue is that the rhetoric Newsom is accused of performing is not an aberration among liberals, especially those of a white, middle-class background. It is a common performance known as “presenting lower competence.”
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In a 2019 analysis of political rhetoric, professors Cydney Hurston Dupree and Susan T. Fiske of Yale University and Princeton University, respectively, found that “liberals—but not conservatives—presented less competence to Black interaction partners than to White ones.” The study found that white liberals generally slow their speech and use a more narrowed vocabulary when speaking to black people.
This phenomenon, “presenting lower competence,” (PLC) is nothing new. I have experienced it throughout my life. Many who used it when interacting with me probably meant well, but many white liberals have devolved so deeply into an unthinking habit of infantilization that the phenomenon needs to be addressed immediately if they do not want to keep hemorrhaging black voters.
That said, I want to make clear that my concerns are more rhetorical than political. I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. Just a few years ago, after a lifetime of being a registered Democrat, I changed my affiliation to Independent. Why? Because I had finally reached my breaking point with paternalistic or prescriptive racism, condescension disguised as empathy and camaraderie, perpetuated by white liberals, predominately.
PLC and Prescriptive Racism
I believe PLC is a subcategory of prescriptive racism. Prescriptive racism/PLC is also why I left academia, a place where white people will gladly scold me for not being black correctly and scoff at my insistence that black people are not hopeless children who can only be saved by righteous progressives. The same white people who accused me, a black man, of being a white supremacist for saying that teaching standard English to black kids is a good thing, often behave as if they are supreme whenever interacting with black people.
As a rhetorician, I know how important gauging one’s audience is to effective communication, but that gauging cannot be predetermined. Too many white liberals assume that a speaker need not try to get to know a black audience because they assume blacks are to be addressed with less sophistication. This is not good rhetoric. It’s good old-fashioned stereotyping.
Credibility is important when it comes to persuasive speech. Aristotle called it “the controlling factor in persuasion.” 20th Century rhetorician Kenneth Burke simply called it “identification” and wrote, “You persuade a man only insofar as you speak his language.” This is a fine rhetorical consideration. The problem is when “his language” is assumed and not discovered. When we assume an audience’s rhetorical preferences based on prescribed identity, we are not seeing that audience for what it is, but for what we assume or even want it to be.
And that is where things truly get uncomfortable. PLC is not always done with malicious intent; some people were taught that this must be done when addressing minorities. But if PLC is deliberate, it suggests that a particular narrative is being sold, one in which certain people are cast in certain roles.
Sadly, the narrative put forth by white liberals is one in which minorities, especially black people, are cast in the role of downtrodden victims who need to be saved by righteous and morally superior white liberals. To be fair, black liberals do this, too, when the victim role is seen as politically advantageous. Thus, PLC in general suggests a negative invocation of an audience. Rhetoric is not only used to persuade an audience but to summon an identity.
PLC and prescriptive racism toward minorities is so rampant that I and others created Free Black Thought to combat it. We were sick of the fact that mainstream media depicted black people as a mentally and emotionally stunted monolith who cannot even be trusted to procure their own driver’s licenses. Thus, we provide a platform for black voices that do not fit the victim narrative perpetuated by progressives.
So, as far as I am concerned, Newsom is not the real issue; this is bigger than one person. It is a phenomenon that has been around for a while. It is not enough for white liberals to say minorities are their equals. They need to talk to minorities as if they are equals as well.
Though Newsom was talking directly to a black person, the viewing audience was not predominately black and, apparently, his words were addressed to a more general American audience.