Salt of the Earth: Rhetoric, Preservation, and White Supremacy

Salt of the Earth is an autoethnography and cultural rhetorics case study that examines white supremacy in the author’s hometown of Grand Saline, Texas, a community long marred by its racist culture. James Chase Sanchez investigates the rhetoric of white supremacy by exploring three unique rhetorical processes-identity construction, storytelling, and silencing-as they relate to an umbrella act: the rhetoric of preservation. Overall, this text argues that (1) we need to better understand the productions of white supremacy as a complex rhetorical act, and (2) in order to create a more well-rounded view of cultural rhetorics as a subfield, we need more analyses of the way cultures of the oppressor survive and thrive.