Victor Villanueva's "The Rhetorics of the New Racism"
Rebekah Shultz Colby

Victor Villanueva, a professor of English at Washington State University, has won two national book awards for Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color, written nearly 40 articles, and delivered over 35 keynote and featured addresses. He has also edited Cross-talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, an anthology which thoroughly covers the history and background of Composition Studies. A Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican high school dropout, Villanueva entered community college after the military and eventually went on to receive his PhD in English from the University of Washington. At Washington State University, he has worked as an Equal Opportunity Program Director, Director of Composition, and English Department Chair. He is a former chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communications. Villanueva's research concerns the interconnectedness among rhetoric, ideology, racism, and literacy practices.

In "The Rhetorics of the New Racism," Victor Villanueva argued that in The Clash of World Civilizations: Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntingtons theory that, in the near future, culture and not ideology will define the great clashes between world civilizations primarily Western civilization against all other world civilizations effectively sweeps away race and racism as a factor in international (and national) conflict by collapsing race into culture. In other words, race effectively becomes an invisible and empty signifier, subsumed as it is under culture, creating a new racism.

Unfortunately, this new racism is all too prevalent in liberal conversations as well, even within universities, where race and racism all too often become subsumed within multiculturalism. Framing the discussion of race within the tropes of culture and multiculturalism shapes our thinking and helps liberals forget that racism is still very much a part of society and, unfortunately, still a part of academic culture. As Villanueva argued, discussing racism openly has now become more taboo than religion and politics. For instance, within academic contexts, it is acceptable to discuss different cultures and multiculturalism, but discussing race, or more importantly, openly discussing racism, especially the still all too ubiquitous forms of institutional racism, becomes much more difficult, even to the point of becoming completely silenced.

Making racism impossible to be spoken about becomes its own oppression and ultimately its own form of racism. Making it impossible to openly discuss racism, allows white liberals (including myself) the luxury to believe the fallacy that racism is not still a part of America, that we are not complicit within a racist system, and that by being complicit and turning a blind eye, that we are not racists either. By believing that we are color blind, we are blind to the oppression and racism around us, which is still entrenched within our institutions, and it makes those who are still racially oppressed invisible in a similar way as Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man.

In a way, it could be argued that Villanueva sees this type of color blindness in his College English symposium about the movie Crash. In his article, 3D Stereotypes: Crash, Villanueva argues that by railing against stereotypes but then portraying those same stereotypes within most of its characters, the movie actually maintains the same stereotypes it protests. For instance, Villanueva writes that one of the black characters played by the hip-hop artist Ludacris, protests the stereotypes of black people but then performs these stereotypes in the film black men are always seen as a threatthe threat becomes real; there should never be black-on-black crime, then he jacks Camerons SUV; Mumbling hip-hop rappers, spoken by the hip-hop rapper (349). So, in the film, these protests against stereotypes can soothe liberals into believing that they do not actually believe in these stereotypes, while the characters actions reassure them on a sub-spoken level, possibly even a subconscious level, that they are still there. Vocally, then, liberals can protest and deny these stereotypes while silently still believing in them on a deeper level. Also, by creating this silence for stereotypes, it denies stereotypes the right to actually be discussed, deconstructed, and demystified. Furthermore, the ways that institutional racism can construct and reify these stereotypes also goes further unnoticed and undiscussed.

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