Radical Advocate

Book excerpt: "Born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi in 1862, Ida B. Wells emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a singularly dynamic national voice on behalf of racial, social, and gender equity. A journalist, teacher, and activist, she campaigned endlessly against racial violence and inequity and on behalf of women's rights and suffrage. In "Radical Advocate," Mary E. Triece pinpoints the persuasive strategies that typified Wells's efforts to shape broader cultural conversations concerning those causes. Triece highlights especially Wells's role as a radical embodied advocate, who Triece defines as one who occupies a marginalized social position; whose daily experiences, physical well-being, and mobility are shaped by social justice issues; and who must utilize non-traditional rhetorical strategies to push for deeply rooted social change. "Embodiment" suggests bodily visibility, and seeing the physical body as marked in ways that carry political and physical implications based on race, sex, gender, and class. In the context of the early 1900s, racial segregation and hysteria over race-mixing impacted bodies in every aspect of one's public and personal life, from where one lived and worked to whom and how one loved. To demonstrate the ways radical embodied advocacy occurs across various platforms, Triece examines Wells's speeches, pamphlets, and newspaper and magazine articles. For Wells, white violence was palpable and personal, experienced on her body and carried in her mind and heart. White men lynched Wells's friends, threatened her life, and forced her into exile after they destroyed the press for which she wrote and edited. From this perspective, Wells understood lynching as linked to white economic and political control. Furthermore, Triece presents Wells's radical embodied advocacy as one of the first forms of "intersectional journalism," a type of citizen journalism wherein the advocate raises up and centers the voices of those experiencing interlocking forms of oppression. Triece underscores the epistemic challenges faced by rhetors, such as Black women, who speak from marginalized social positions and who advance claims that do not align with culturally accepted frames for knowing and describing events, people, and places. She also bridges philosophy, rhetoric, and Black feminism to examine the epistemological and rhetorical demands facing social change advocates who shed light on injustice, and who simultaneously face deeply entrenched narratives that distort understandings of race and social injustice. Wells argued for deep-rooted change, and her rhetoric stands out because she framed white violence as systemic and intersectional. In the twenty-first century, "Radical Advocate" is even more relevant in the context of contemporary white violence and international movements for racial justice. A rhetorical analysis of Wells's speaking and journalism shows her to be one of the first to emphasize the systemic nature of racism while highlighting the unique ways Black women experienced racist and sexist oppression"--