Black communication style

The use of metis and nommo by unrepresented (and often marginalized) audiences provides them a means to engage the communicative situation, for example “through strategic attempts to negotiate meaning, identity, and power” (Parker, 2003, p. 278). Metis and nommo as rhetorical devices can be used as resistance to discourses that mark raced individuals as outsiders. The use and manipulation of words through metis/nommo by the individual contributes to an empowering process. Parker suggests that empowerment is a means “by which oppressed persons gain some control over their lives by taking part with others in the development of activities and structures that allow people increased involvement in matters that affect them directly” (262). The choice of words or the double-meanings applied to words can afford an opportunity for individuals to gain control of the communicative situation. This double-meaning, or code-switching, is used as a rhetorical device that marks individuals as insiders or outsiders to a discursive event.

As an example of individuals marked as insiders or outsiders to a discursive event, Cintron (1997) introduces us to an area of Chicago, where the community and the people seek to reclaim rhetorical control of their lives, even if only by “officialdom and paperwork” (51). The subliminal messages are profound in this text of power and control. As an ethnographer, Cintron, just like others in that discipline (Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw, 1995; Agar, 1996; Motzafi-Haller, 1997; Hakken, 1999; MacNealy, 1999) seeks to make sense of the tools of his trade. Cintron finds those tools loaded with assumptions of dominance and control “organized by our assumptions concerning people and society,”(12) and he seeks to complicate the configuration. Along the way he notes that the “public sphere... [becomes] a site in which the struggle to be heard is matched by the struggle to silence others” (27). This silencing is evinced in generalizing a group of people, effectively dismissing “a plethora of contentious voices and a whole range of distinctive characteristics” (28). In this instance rhetoric not only neutralizes other voices, it simply dismisses them as unconscious voices unable to “leave a record of themselves” (33). The stance of civilized culture to map, grid, and control the untamed wilderness extends to humans and animals who were unable to or chose not to do the controlling themselves. Thus, “other concepts remained voiceless to a formalizing system that was deaf to everything except itself” (37). But Cintron does not give us a picture of a people who are willing to submissively accept the controlling forces of their lives. Instead, we are invited to share their discourse and discover a people who are members of the unconscious community, who survive and fight for existence within a seemingly conscious society that wishes to silence and ignore them.

Cintron suggests that while the people of Angel’s Town may be on the fringes of the conscious social order, their rhetorical tropes suggest otherwise. He states that “[a]ll of these wordplays contai[n]… a kind of biting resistance to Anglo ways and authority” (93). His discussion of the graffiti used by Angel’s Town gangs reveals that the word and symbolic tropes that are used to define relationships are content-driven. The use of symbols, colors, or terminology is not arbitrary—the gangs appropriate the mainstream artifacts and conform them to newer meanings. In this manner the gangs are able to take the language used and ply their trade on top, layering thoughts and meanings into a complex, “secret, esoteric, subterranean world” (167). The language use is not necessarily grammatically correct, but the graffiti makes its point by using the standard writing conventions of “left to right and... standard spelling” (169). It is the pun on words and the visual representations of love and dislike in the graffiti that provide the content of meaning. The attempts by the local city government to remove this subterranean language use from gangs is seen in the enactment of park rules “ban[ning] gang activity at all of its family recreation areas” (190). Whereas the city has attempted to disown and not acknowledge a different way of communicating, the interpretation can also be seen as a means to project that gangs and their families are not viewed as viable or valued members of the community. These “discourses of measurement” (199) evince the mutating uses of language. The appropriation and misappropriation of meanings and words are seen as part of the need to claim a territory or control a space and directly impacts on its content-meaning, just as the use of rhetorical devices do.