1. Gail Bederman highlights how this alternative narrative inverted Victorian values of “white men as the embodiment of civilization and manliness” and that for White men to embody these values means that they must necessarily condemn lynching (50).
  2. In Trust in Numbers, Theodore M. Porter calls quantification a “technology of distance,” in that it is a “highly structured and rule-bound” strategy of communication that many people (wrongly) assume “minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust” (ix).
  3. Morrison opens [her talk] with an exploration of statistical discourse as an impediment to allowing for the dignity of Black people in the United States.
  4. In Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein argue that many forms of quantitative rhetoric can often rely on an attempt to suppress emotion, but they contend that the most educational and memorable quantitative arguments explicitly activate emotion, leverage embodiment, and create novel presentations for “honouring context, architecting attention, and taking action to defy stereotypes and reimagine the world” (96).
  5. Drawing from Quintilian and Erasmus, Jeanne Fahnestock identifies two strands of amplification in rhetorical stylistics: to heighten and to be copious (“of having more to say”) (391).
  6. However, Jacqueline Jones Royster explains that someone like Wells, as a Black woman, had to carefully craft her ethos (Traces of a Stream, 65).
  7. Aja Y. Martinez writes that “[c]ounterstory functions as both methodology and method for minoritized people to intervene in research methods that would form ‘master narratives’ based on ignorance and assumptions about minoritized people” (21).
  8. Wells had a talent to take on an argumentative style that mimicked an authoritative or objective tone that also mixed with a rhetoric that relied on pathos in a forceful way, that “turn[ed] . . . the stomach” as Royster terms it (Traces of a Stream, 68).
  9. Similarly, Anita August comments on how Wells uses a rhetoric of objectivity but in a tradition of AVT [the African American Verbal Tradition].
  10. This storytelling was intertwined with an innate quantitative feature of making available to people the scale of violence of the state against Black women; for instance, according to Melissa Brown et al., nearly one-third of #SayHerName tweets between January 2016 and October 2016 contained the names of one or more Black women murdered by the state–with over 100 women mentioned, in total, in this period (1840).