Galen Faison
  

      Lost/Rhetoric

Of late I’ve been dwelling on The Tulsa Massacre of 1921—what Wikipedia refers to as “one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history.” From my ponderings emerges Lost/Rhetoric, a diagnostic tool I invented to identify confluences of place, time, and event where rhetoric has served mal-intention. Moreover, it sets out to explain how escalating degrees, combinations, and permutations of ontological erasure aimed at marginalized groups happen. The creation of this tool was necessary, a means to cope with what I hadn’t learned about—specifically, Viola Ford Fletcher (who fled the murderous mob in May 1921). She survived the Tulsa Race Massacre. For years, her story has been lost to history.

I’d spent a childhood at the feet of Black teachers who brimmed when regaling us kids about the 1950s and 60s—the lunch-counter contest of wills, and the Napoleonesque precision that bowed the Montgomery Bus Line. This history, I knew well. Indelibly, I am imprinted with the familiar scenes of the Civil Rights struggle—the choking haze of tear gas; the din of frantic, barking German shepherds; the whoosh of firehoses; and the resolute, full-throated chorus of protest mantras. In high school, my Black history classroom was a rectangular amphitheater. Mrs. Irby—militant, no-nonsense—would verge on becoming, to use the Jewish word, verklempt when wending us through the rough chop of the Middle Passage.

As a college undergrad, I opted for Western Civ, and classes extolling Akkadian cuneiform and the lex talionis of Hammurabi’s Code. There was the hoary glut of textbooks and monochrome documentaries. I felt I’d learned most of what I needed to know about people who looked like me. Black history month, its frigid and abrupt twenty-eight days, would make its orbital return, streaking across February.

As I crept deeper into adulthood, the term Tulsa Race Massacre became a sprite with diaphanous wings; it would flit every so often about my brainpan before returning to wherever recessed thoughts go to slumber. It took my becoming a doctoral student to face the magnitude of Tulsa in 1921—what Alfred Bronphy, in Reconstructing the Dreamland, insists was “the worst and most deadly American race riot of the twentieth century.”

What does Lost/Rhetoric tell us about the scrubbing of American history?

I seized my opportunity to learn more about Tulsa’s historical wound—an atrocity that somehow got stashed in a pocket universe. What I assumed would be an easy jaunt into an American “historical footnote” became the heart of my doctoral work. I would come to know how a vibrant African American community—christened Black Wall Street, by Booker T. Washington no less—succumbed to the pervasive ills of anti-Blackness.

I would learn about white Tulsans’ envy, their fear, which took the form of a jagged animus trained on Greenwood’s thriving residents who had the audacity to live well as a collective Black body. A single newspaper headline (“Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator”) quickened racist tropes: the bestial and depraved Negro; the fair white maiden; and white knights, her ultimate citizen-saviors.

I’d learn about state-sponsored paramilitary action.

I’d learn about the Greenwood death toll (that might have been as high as 300).

I’d learn about long-term historical suppression.

In ancient Greek tragedies a character’s parabolic rise and fall unfolded over the course of 24 hours. The tragedy of Tulsa defies Aristotle’s unities of time, place, and action. In only 18 hours, apoplectic violence reduced not only the famous Black Wall Street section of Greenwood but as well some 40-plus blocks of brick-and-wood homes, along with brick-and-mortar businesses, whose smoldering remains contributed to a smoke-hazed hellscape. This unrestrained destruction, incited by a provocative headline, was steeped in the rhetorical prejudices of its day.

This erasure—a violation of corporeal, material and psychological personhood—which has obscured the image of our collective, national consciousness, nevertheless offers insight into the Southern Gothic aesthetic. I wasn’t shaken by the prejudice that had warped the minds of that cabal of men, Tulsa’s vigilantes. It was not the wanton, racialized violence that shook me. Rather, it was the unnerving competence of everyday men—who slipped into their murderous selves, their most annihilatory natures.

These men took turns working the bellows, trying to breathe life into the gasping Confederacy. These men would not abide Greenwood, and the Black affluence that portended a shift away, however slight, from the white social norm.

So I formulated Lost/Rhetoric. It was (and is) necessary to detect, investigate, and taxonomize the root rhetorical causes that brought about the ontological erasure of Tulsa's Greenwood community. The forward slash, in Lost/Rhetoric, merges the operative terms Lost and Rhetoric; it does not substitute for the conjunction, yet conjoins the terms, the forces. The terminological nature of Lost is symbolic, representing the forfeiture of one’s being-in-the-world (as in, for instance, Heidegger’s Dasein). Lost constitutes the loss of: psyche, corporeal existence, as well as the material processes that sustain and enable well-being.  

My terminological addition of Rhetoric connects to language's power of influence; it also comprehends the reductive and destructive forms of certain human actions along with their corresponding consequences (such as were forewarned in Hammurabi’s Code) that didn’t seek to understand “the why” of these actions—whereas Lost/Rhetoric is designed for such a responsibility. Lost/Rhetoric traces ontological erasure back to anti-black mindsets (and anti-other mindsets), which spur rhetorical violence. Rhetorical violence manifests real-world violence. It’s the culminating end stage of the processes of silence.

Abject racism, a commonality in the early-twentieth century, doesn’t fully explain the malevolent violence that cut a smoldering swath across north Tulsa. I needed to interrogate the supremacist mind. My doctoral research roved around in Hegel’s post-Enlightenment cogitations on “the Negro” as the “animal man in all his savagery and lawlessness.” I noted Thomas Jefferson’s disdain for “the hideous blot” of institutional slavery (a pang of conscience that somehow failed to encroach on his ownership of 600 Black bodies). Sitting prominently within the pages of Lectures on the Philosophy of World History and Notes on the State of Virginia were commonplaces that inferiorized Black in the constructs and matrices of race.

In these and other comparable works we were reduced to our sensorial faculties. Racialized as barbaric, we were without achievements in the arts or sciences. We’d been deemed incapable of engaging in the grand intellectual forays that could be a part of one's lived experience. And then there was the raft of hierarchies and classification systems—propounded by Kant, Hume and other venerated thinkers—which racialized the Great Chain of Being or suggested the Curse of Ham or impressed upon readers (as well as those who didn’t read) ideas of Blackness as “anything but. . . .”

I had to get back to the supremacist mindset specifically of Tulsa. My task was not to be a Herculean undertaking. A quick archive search led me to a transcribed speech (which was reported on in the Tulsa World, on July 12, 1914, seven years before the Massacre). A fiery, tempestuous post-Reconstructionist sermon, delivered by the Reverend James E. McConnell, is worthy of special note. His address was a diatribe against Black people, whom he feared were increasingly being perceived as approaching "social equality with white people." The headline blared: "Blunder Has Been Made; Said Slavery Was Wrong, But Negro Shouldn't Have All His Present Privileges."

From his pulpit, McConnell had characterized us as illiterate, morally degenerate, diseased from immoral life, having no conception of purity or chastity, impure and filthy, intemperate, shiftless, indolent, and given to petty stealing. After centuries, here was McConnell channeling Hegel’s pejorative characterization, thinking out loud about Tulsa’s Black body, except that matters had worsened with time. I felt the need to further contextualize this white racial framing.

I tapped into Kenneth Burke, whose theory of piety—which was meant to explain the nature of dogma, a system of beliefs concerning “what goes with what”—was of aid to me in making sense of our realities. Burke also focused on how individuals consciously and unconsciously filter language, symbols and vocabulary through what he calls terministic screens. So he was explicating the mechanics and nature of the white supremacist machine.

I delved into Merleau-Ponty’s le corps propre (“the lived body," "one's own body”), which proposes that consciousness is situated in the body as a pre-reflective experience. The body understands the world, in an embodied practical way, before conscious thought. I also worked through Barthes, Foucault, Mbembe, and Fanon. I began to see correspondences among these thinkers with respect to how the Black body was being mythologized, subjugated under institutional sovereignty, and colonized.

All these developments in my doctoral work suggest that mindsets as manifested through language, rhetoric, aren’t neutral. Certainly, le corps propre, for instance, can be tainted in order to pre-reflectively embody anti-Blackness. Piety can be oriented as anti-Black piety, determining the attitudes through which one relates Blackness to humanness, equality, and affluence. In this iteration of the pious mind Blackness is inferior and therefore does not properly "go together" with these indicators of human worth. But then, if inferiority is to be the baseline of Blackness, how does one explain Greenwood, perhaps especially that portion of it that included the then-storied Black Wall Street?

How does white racial framing reconcile inherent beliefs of Black inferiority, when Black Wall Street—despite the palpable threat of the Ku Klux Klan, despite the ghost of the Black Codes, despite the functions of Jim Crow—stood as an unapologetic citadel? The enclave’s assemblage of straight angles and vertices, its built environment, its material truth, all but verified human ingenuity and stood as a monument to intelligent, resourceful enterprise.

Greenwood itself was a proving ground, a proof-of-concept certifying Black humanity and heralding the advance of Black equality, in example showcasing the heights of Black prosperity. How does the white supremacist mind maintain harmony between deeply rooted beliefs in Black inferiority and overwhelming evidence that contradicts those beliefs?

The short answer is it could not.

In 1921, in that American moment, white fear and jealousy won out. Tulsans, under the spell of anti-Black belief systems, suffering cognitive dissonance, were violently reactive at the sight of thriving, self-governed Black folk. Remedies were sought for this affliction.

I had the occasion to interview Hannibal B. Johnson who’s a Harvard-trained attorney, author, and leading historian of Greenwood and specifically the Tulsa Race Massacre. Johnson concurred with my thinking about white supremacy and cognitive dissonance, and the “cure” for such toxicity of the mind. He extended a caveat along with a clarification. First of all, Greenwood’s existence poisoned white Tulsans’ orientation to Black affluence, which was due, he said, to “the natural context of race in America at the time.” One of the remedies for this poisoned orientation was violence. “Take away what the Black folks have,” Johnson continued, “and thus harmonize what is in disharmony.” The rationale for violence was clear and motivating.

Rationales for rhetoric-based violence are not unique to any one American moment. A bedrock trope, in action comic books, for instance, is the villain arc (it’s often depicted as some pivotal event that turns the good to evildoer, thereby deepening, entrenching the evildoer’s villainous persona). One Dalton Eatherly, a white Tennessean, arguably illustrates this villain arc. He recently lost his job at a construction company due to a road rage incident in which he hurled racial slurs at a Black woman. His notoriety hamstrung attempts to get his contracting business off the ground. So he turned to livestreaming.

Eatherly has rebranded himself as Chud the Builder: a sort of neo-urban cowboy replete with cowboy hat, boots, a fall of shoulder-length hair, and a prodigious mustache curled at the ends. Some people have tried to dismiss Eatherly, this modern-day live-streaming, figuratively mustache-twirling villain, whose online presence others have taken to be socially toxic, and whose “dastardly acts” do not typify caricatured villainy. (In other words, he’s viewed by some as basically innocent, despite his online racist aggressions.) To be sure, Eatherly is an angry man. Diminished by the consequences of his own racism, he became vindictive. And worse, Eatherly was violent. 

Chud the Builder—armed with pepper-spray, a firearm and his cell phone—traversed Tennessee’s urban hubs, instigating racial conflicts and livestreaming in order to monetize these conflicts of his own making. In wielding hate speech, beneath the thin guise of free speech, he’s antagonized, cajoled, berated, and denigrated Black people wherever and whenever he’s encountered them.

Semantically, he billed himself as a “free speech absolutist.” In his race-baiting, “Nigger” was his choice lure. By his specious reasoning, words are benign. Hence Black people, when accosted with the “n-word,” shouldn’t “chimp out” as a reaction. He’s worked diligently to turn his livestreams of racist rage-baiting into a thriving cottage industry.

Most alarmingly, Chud the Builder, loudhailer for the guild of chuds (a mocking stereotype of cartoonish, slow-witted, conservative podcasters), was gaining traction in popular media venues. Cyberspace’s dark underbelly was going mainstream. Less a prophesy, more an inevitable consequence of his appetite for vengeance, Chud the Builder infamously posted on X: “Series finale is a dead chimp on the pavement and you monkeys rioting when I walk free.”

No chimps or monkeys, but, in Black parlance, “he found the right one.”

Outside the Montgomery County Courthouse, Joshua Fox, a Black military vet, bit on Chud’s race bait. A scuffle ensued. Eatherly, who shot Fox, is now charged with attempted murder and is facing a lengthy prison term. His grand design to cash in on abject racism was not lucrative after all. Eatherly can’t make bail. As he sits, the world moves on.

What does Lost/Rhetoric tell us about our American moments?

What does it tell us about Viola Fletcher who lost her future to an insidious headline in Tulsa?

What does it tell us about Dalton Eatherly who lost his future by making insidious headlines?

Before her recent death (in November 2025) Viola Fletcher—once a nameless, faceless, voiceless victim of the Tulsa Race Massacre—became the name, the face and voice for all the Massacre’s victims and survivors, when she testified, at 107, in Congress. As the tenets of good storytelling require, Fletcher’s words, weighted by ineffable loss, were laden with visceral details: the acrid smoke, the tumultuous screams, the crush of fear.

The greater utility of Lost/Rhetoric, of this tool, is our understanding of rhetoric’s power to erase. Tools are subject to how one intends to use them. Perhaps that use includes restoring a lost voice.

What does Lost/Rhetoric, finally, tell us about our present American moment? What we are witnessing has been seen before. To modify and secularize Ecclesiastes 1:9, what is being done today has been done before. As far back as Gorgias, we have known that language is incantatory. We imbibe syntax and meaning. We rely on language—turn the mirror thus and so—in order that angle of incidence reflects our thinking, or refracts it, bending belief so to light our way of seeing the world. Therefore Lost/Rhetoric has a historical function.

This disquisition is a trident: a confluence of history, rhetoric and erasure. It interrogates, presently, under the sun, how rhetoric scrubs important histories like Viola “Mother” Fletcher’s. In many ways, this essay is centrally about Viola Ford Fletcher, a survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

This essay has also been about Dalton Eatherly, a man who walked Tennessean streets bludgeoning passers-by with dehumanizing speech. Fletcher and Eatherly, these two human beings, who aren’t connected in any tangible space-time, or within any obvious geodemographic, are, nevertheless, actors in the same world—as we all are.

In May 1921, Viola Ford Fletcher fled a murderous mob into a chaotic night.

In May 2026, Dalton Eatherly, a self-avowed free speech absolutist, shot a Black man.

Lost/Rhetoric is formidable in the way that it cannot be spatio-temporally contained. 

To understand Tulsa, and other violent American social and political phenomena that continue to explicate American revanchism, Lost/Rhetoric has become essential, to be sure crucial to our collective future. When words turn pathological, inducing pyromania, Lost/Rhetoric may reveal the tell-tale accelerant that incinerated the future, a future Fletcher foresaw for herself. Eatherly, foreseeing a future in which he would become an anti-hero to bigots, doused himself in Lost/Rhetoric and set himself aflame.