Michael Calvin McGee’s landmark essay, “’The Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” laid the groundwork for understanding idiographic—and idiomatic—language as socially and politically charged, let alone ideologically inscribed. Since Obama’s inauguration in 2008, along with talk soon thereafter of America as a post-racial society, one wonders of the actual verity of putting race behind us when it is at the fore of so many of our (ethical) discussions. That Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters are both on trial for ethics violations certainly does not present a singular example of corruption in politics. It is laughable that anyone—especially in a…“post-racial” society—could equate blackness with corruption, whiteness with purity. Post, however, does mean beyond. The question remains what such talk of “posts” will do to the ideographic nature of our conversations about race in the twenty-first century and beyond, as well as what “playing the race” card today actually indicates amongst different people. We might consider as a counter-question here what further discourse might have been around the Gulf oil spill had the BP chief executive officer been…“corrupt.”
This clip from The Daily Show touches on some interesting considerations.
Photo Credits: www.mediate.com
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