商品簡介
Designed by a communications scholar for students, scholars, and educated general readers interested in race or public discourse, this book looks at how Americans can talk about race and citizenship by examining the speeches of Barack Obama. The author argues that Obama's public addresses, both during the 2008 campaign and in his first term as president, offer a model of rhetoric that acknowledges the realities of American racial history without separating listeners by race. The book's core argument is that Obama's speeches often depend on a basic idea: double consciousness, a term invented by W.E.B. Du Bois to describe the way black Americans must always be aware of how they are are seen by others, is something everyone has experienced at some level. Obama uses African American experience as a metaphor for American experience, and recasts double consciousness from a racial burden to a difficult gift: always remembering that being Americans—citizens of a democracy--requires us to see from more than one point of view. The author compares the strategy and rhetoric of these speeches to Du Bois' ideas of double consciousness, and discusses the ways Obama's rhetoric therefore emphasizes citizenship as a responsibility as well as a privilege. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
