Dangerous eloquence: Hate speech tactics in the discourse of Asa/Forrest Carter from 1954--1974.

Abstract

This study takes as its subject the political life and writings of Asa Earl Carter and the literary writings he produced under the name Forrest Carter during the period of 1954 through 1974. As part of this study, I offer a biography of Carter, provide excerpts from his full body of work, and analyze---using the hate speech tactics identified in "The Rhetoric of a Closed Society" by Waldo W. Braden---the degree to which Carter conforms and deviates from the accepted practices of rhetoricians in the "closed society" in which he operated. By identifying the milieu in which Carter operated, the organizations to which he belonged and for which he wrote pieces, the successes and failures which Carter experienced as a member of that milieu and those organizations, I illustrate the typical strategies and specific tactics deployed by one---sometimes successful and sometimes not---member of the White supremacist discourse community to enact hate speech in opposition to the Civil Rights movement. I illustrate further that this is true even in his later literary work and despite his identification with a pro-minority stance by demonstrating the great consistency between the works he produced during his candidacy for Governor of Alabama in 1969--71 and his first two novels, and by demonstrating his continued engagement in extremist White supremacist organizations during the period in which he wrote those novels. By locating patterns of White Supremacist, hate speech structures, I demonstrate that White supremacist, hate speech utterances manifest in unexpected ways within discourse types that are not generally recognized as being typical of the White supremacist milieu or of hate speech as previously defined.