The main point of Villanueva's essay, "On the Rhetoric and Precedents of Racism" is to show that rhetoric is not a purely objective thing, there are many causes for subjectivity in rhetoric, and racism is an issue that, even if we are not aware of it, causes much subjectivity in rhetoric. Some of the subjectivity pointed out is regard to credibility, or more accurately what our ideas of credibility are as have been built from the past. We tend to give more credibility to philosophers who follow western thinking, as demonstrated with the analogy of a Mexican philosopher vs. a French philosopher.
Part of this is that Western philosophers tend to be more well known. The beginning of Villanueva's essay discusses non-European influenced rhetoric in Peru and Mexico. The article demonstrates that the Aztecs and Incas were capable of intelligent rhetoric that is not totally unlike our own rhetorical strategies, but until reading the article last week, I hadn't known that at all. On the flipside, even those who have never taken a philosophy or rhetoric class have probably heard of names like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The way our culture's research and education is currently focused, western rhetoric and philosophy definitely has an advantage over non-western.
Even Google seems to share a bias towards western rhetoric. The other part of our homework was to search for non-Greek, non-traditionally western rhetoricians. This proved to be a bit tricky. Let me demonstrate this: When I type "Ancient Greek Rhetoricians" into Google, the search results give me much about Greek rhetoric and specific Greek rhetoricians, and the first search result is a Wikipedia page with a list of 3 possible subcategories to ancient Greek rhetoric and 55 ancient Greek rhetoricians, including names we have seen in our readings such as Protagoras and Gorgias.
Now what happens when I change my Google search to "Ancient Chinese rhetoricians"? The first search result is the exact same Wikipedia page as the previous search. Never mind that I specified "Greek" nowhere in the search terms, the word rhetoric is so tangled with Greece that Google figured that must've been what I meant. The next search results, rather than offering specific Chinese rhetoricians, instead offer suggested articles under the helpful heading of "Non-Greek Rhetorics." After that, there were only a few links that could be useful. It took several attempts at narrowing my search down before I began to find truly useful info.
If you're thinking that this simply means Chinese rhetoric is just not at thing, this is simply not so. I have found a fair amount of articles and dissertations analyzing specific aspects of Chinese rhetoric, though with the exception of Confucius, very few names are mentioned. Still, this doesn't excuse the relative lack of research I found, on Chinese rhetoric, vs. the amount found on Greek rhetoric.
When we live in a digital age where the potential for so much information is at our fingertips, we sometimes forget that the information we are shown through technology is as subject to social and cultural biases as anything else, and our worldview can become limited through this ignorance. Creating equality in research and digital technology search results, including in issues discussed in Villanueva's essay regarding the relationship of race and ethos, is just one more bridge that will hopefully be crossed at some point in the future.
Finally, here are the articles I found on Chinese rhetoric and rhetoricians:
-Reading the Heavenly Mandate: Dong Zhongshu's Rhetoric of the Way (Dao)
- Cultural Factors and Rhetorical Patterns in Classical Chinese Argumentation
Also, this next link is a super long dissertation that I admittedly haven't looked into much yet, but it seems too interesting to not mention:
- A Comparison of Greek and Chinese Rhetoric and Their Influence on Later Rhetoric
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