I’ve been asking this question for most of the semester now, and I’m trying desperately to ask any other question but I can’t think of one as important: how do we shape and use responsible rhetoric in argumentation and law to prevent the inevitable situation we’ve found ourselves in, of an Orwellian “nobody-read-my-politics-of-English-essay” nature?

In both pieces, the authors make explicit reference to how political bodies use rhetoric that masks the reality of what they’re doing with nicety and tact to make it more acceptable. As Crenshaw points out, w/re/to the stills of the King tape, this actually changes the reality of a situation as we perceive it—rhetoric is not then bound to an argumentative structure, but a narrative one. This realization is immensely important—with doublespeak levels of word invention, the reality of a situation changes and our ability to assess and talk about it diminishes.

A natural response to this that I can think of is to then shape rhetoric in a way that can be better used by the disenfranchised, but this has been tried (see the Occupy piece from weeks prior) and met with little success. Is there, then, some ability of a “neutral” rhetoric? But, even if this were invented, would it actually solve the problem if the language we use to tell these stories isn’t used emphatically enough—or with enough empathy? The nature of the world is that it is based on agreed subjective perception—how do we shape this perception to be empathetic?