none 10.5325/philrhet.56.1.0076 The Pennsylvania State University Press The Pennsylvania State University Press 3287 146866992 46318 2023040714044316500 10.5325 2026-06-08T10:34:47Z 2023-04-07T10:04:56Z 0 Philosophy & Rhetoric 0031-8213 1527-2079 04 2023 07 04 2023 56 1 Amir Jaima Department of Philosophy Texas A&M University ABSTRACT Africana scholars often address their texts to a reader who is implicitly white. This tendency, which this article characterizes as the “discursive orientation toward whiteness,” has the pernicious effect of limiting the range and rigor of scholars’ research questions and proposal. This analysis examines the other discursive “face,” following J. Saunders Redding’s observation from almost eighty years ago, which remains unnervingly insightful: “Negro [sic] writers have been obliged to have two faces . . . to satisfy two different (and opposed when not entirely opposite) audiences, the [B]lack and the white.” Scholars have described this second face in the text in a number of ways—variously as a temperament, a rhythm, or an “aesthetic.” Through an analysis of a few exemplary texts, the current study will describe a few of the most salient characteristics, ultimately in the service of equipping the “Black” scholar with a few effective, liberatory rhetorical strategies. 04 2023 07 04 2023 76 91 10.5325/philrhet.56.1.0076 https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/p-n-r/article/56/1/76/351356/To-Make-a-Scholar-Black-A-Constructive-Analysis-of https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/p-n-r/article-pdf/56/1/76/1851059/philrhet_56_1_76.pdf https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/p-n-r/article-pdf/56/1/76/1851059/philrhet_56_1_76.pdf https://muse.jhu.edu/article/888612 My Bondage and My Freedom Reprint 2014 The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader 97 1996 Black Skin, White Masks 1967 Aspects of the Novel 1927 Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method 1980 A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies 233 2002 Public Culture 30 1 19 2017 “Black Aesthetics, Black Value.” Harvard Educational Review, Education and Black Struggle: Notes from the Colonized World 3 1974 “The Vocation of the Black Scholar and the Struggles of the Black Community.” To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance 2010 Journal of Intercultural Studies 40 2 210 2019 10.1080/07256868.2019.1577233 “On the Discursive Orientation toward Whiteness.” Journal of Black Studies 52 1 77 2021 10.1177/0021934720958158 “Don’t Talk to White People: On the Epistemological and Rhetorical Limitations of Conversations with White People for Anti-Racist Purposes: An Essay.” Notes on the State of Virginia 1801 Is God a White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology 1997 Surfaces 1 1991 “Kant and the Negro.” Kant: Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Other Writings 2011 Philosophical Quarterly (1950–) 57 229 573 2007 “Kant’s Second Thoughts on Race.” Differend: Phrases in Dispute 1989 Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance 11 2007 Southern Journal of Philosophy 47 S1 161 2009 10.1111/j.2041-6962.2009.tb00147.x “Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls.” Philosophical Review 83 4 435 1974 10.2307/2183914 “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Forum 24 63 1992 “African, African American, Africana Philosophy.” Being Apart: Theoretical and Existential Resistance in Africana Literature 2015 To Make a Poet Black 1988 Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays 2009 Walker, David. 1830. “Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, . . . (Boston, 1830).” Edited by PaulRoyster. Zea E-Books in American Studies Book 15. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeaamericanstudies/15. Philosophy and Literature 37 2 542 2013 10.1353/phl.2013.0028 “Should We Take Kant Literally?: On Alleged Racism in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.” Not Only the Master’s Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice 107 2006 Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 35 1–2 1 2014 “Form of Spatial and Textual Alienation: The Lived Experience of Philosophy as Occlusion.”