The #Rhetoric of Waleed Aly's "Send Forgiveness Viral": Is Rogerian argumentation an appropriate response to racism?

• Author: Paquet, Lili

Introduction

In 2016, Waleed Aly argued that Australians should forgive racism. Aly's argument responded to Sonia Kruger, an Australian media personality from the Channel 9 breakfast show, The Today Show, who made a controversial call to ban Muslims entering the country. Her argument caused widespread outrage and condemnation, and she became targeted on social media sites for her views. Waleed Aly is a Muslim Australian academic and award-winning media personality, well known for his "Something We Should Talk About" segment on the Channel 10 panel show, The Project. His response to Kruger's comments (co-written with producer Tom Whitty, July 2016) used an unexpected Rogerian approach of empathy and understanding, and also was framed in the Rogerian argumentation structure as outlined by Young, Becker, and Pike (1970). This leads me to ask, can Rogerian argumentation strategies be utilized to combat racism? This article concludes that Aly's use of Rogerian argumentation is flawed because it places the onus of combatting racism onto victims. Furthermore, Rogerian argumentation models have underlying problems with power relations.

In what follows, I evaluate Waleed Aly's argument for "construction" in his #SendForgivenessViral segment against criteria of Rogerian argumentation and empathic response. While scholarly writing by Lassner (1990) and Ede (1984) is dated, they provide pertinent and influential ideas to consider. Following this section, I introduce more recent scholarship to evaluate #SendForgivenessViral, including arguments on race, rhetoric, and Twitter revolutions by Brock (2012), D'Cruz (2017), Gerbaudo (2012), Margolin (2017), and Roose (2016). I compare the argument to #illridewithyou, another Australian Twitter movement that combatted racism. To conclude, I draw other sources from contemporary social media responses to Aly's segment to evaluate his communication strategies, use of Twitter as a medium for argumentation, and lack of practical guidelines. To qualify, this article does not aim to discount Aly's views entirely. As a public intellectual, Waleed Aly has made many astute and convincing arguments. This particular argument was intriguing because of the way Aly framed it using Rogerian strategies. The use of Rogerian argumentation is also the problematic epicenter of his argument.

Rogerian strategies

There are differences between Rogerian therapy, structure, and argumentative strategies that should be addressed before applying them to Aly's #Send Forgiveness Viral. Rogerian argumentation is based on a client-centered therapeutic method developed by Carl Rogers. As outlined in his influential book, Client-Centered Therapy (1951), Rogers based his therapeutic method in empathic understanding of his patient, which allowed him to resolve conflict (Caspary 1991, 9). Even a cursory understanding of client-centered therapy methods should recognize the communicative aspect that recommends it.

Based on this empathic therapy method, Young, Becker, and Pike (1970) developed a mode of rhetorical argumentation that could be used instead of the classical oration structures outlined by Aristotle that confirm and refute arguments. While after thousands of years the classical method of argumentation is still valid, it can appear as too adversarial for certain arguments, and so this group of academics put forth Rogerian argumentation to respond to the changing context of academic communication (Brent 1991, 453). Young, Becker, and Pike summed up the goals of Rogerian argumentation in three parts:

The writer who uses a Rogerian strategy attempts to do three things:

1. to convey to the reader that he is understood,

2. to delineate the area within which he believes the reader's position to be valid, and

3. to induce him to believe that he and the writer share similar moral qualities. (1970, 275)

The strategy is, therefore, based more in communication, as adopted from the therapeutic method, and not in the adversarial nature of classical argumentation.

According to their proposed Rogerian arrangement (283), the argument begins by outlining how the opposing point-of-view is valid in certain contexts, and then moves to confirming the writer/speaker's opinion. This structure is in opposition to classical models, which begin by confirming one's own argument before refuting the opposing argument. Lunsford writes that classical (or Aristotelian) and Rogerian argumentation strategies begin at different points in an argument. She suggests that Aristotelian argumentative strategies also have an understanding of the opposing argument but--instead of beginning there like Rogerian arguments--build upon this foundation of understanding, which is a pre-argument (1979, 148). Conversely, I am inclined to agree with Guo and Kroll who argue that the critical difference is that Aristotelian strategies only attempt to understand an opponent's position to piece together a rebuttal (2014, 484). Rogerian arguments have no strict rebuttal of opposing arguments, but instead large parts of the proposed arrangement are taken up by the speaker/writer demonstrating an understanding of opposing viewpoints and gaining the trust of an unreceptive audience through empathy.

One must consider whether an "argumentation strategy" can be based upon an empathic therapeutic method. In her study of Rogerian argumentation using her Women's Studies class (discussed in more detail below), Lassner discovered, "If writers of Rogerian argument are out to win, they are clearly very different from the therapist who submerges her own needs and adapts to the client's ego by changing her style of discourse in response to the client's needs" (1990, 222-223). In their instrumental chapter, Young, Becker, and Pike (1970) state the goal of the argumentation strategy is:

[A]n eminently practical one: to induce changes in an opponent's mind in order to make mutually advantageous cooperation possible ... Essentially, the writer induces his opponent to listen to his position, to understand it, and to see the truth in it, by demonstrating that he has done the same with the opponent's position. (283) This highlights the dual goals of Rogerian rhetoric: to practically (but implicitly) change an opponent's mind, while (explicitly) showing that one has understood the opponent's position. The implicit goal is the most important but is hidden under the surface goal of empathic understanding. There are inherent problems with this approach, as highlighted by calling the audience "opponents" (Ede 1984, 45). While this term is understandable in an argumentative context, it contradicts the idea of empathy.

Empathic argumentation

While empathic understanding may work for certain problems, in Aly's case its effectiveness is questionable. This difficulty is based in how one understands "empathy" and then utilizes it in argumentative settings. Rogers defines empathy as "to sense the client's private world as if it were your own, but without ever losing the 'as if quality" (1957, 99). This definition appears to disconnect the therapist more distinctly than some others, through its inclusion of the qualifiers "as if." The implication is that therapists using this method must occupy a neutral position, where they understand the patient but do not lose themselves in the pathos of the patient's ideas. It also implies a connection between the two actors; a combined effort. As Cheung summarizes Rogers's methods, "For empathic communication to occur, both persons must strive together" (2014, 319). The therapeutic setting is, therefore, very different to the argumentative rhetorical setting, where the communicator is not having a face-to-face dialogue with their audience but is instead presenting a complete argument.

Even Rogers's use of empathic understanding in psychotherapy has been questioned. As Margolin (2017) argues, Rogers's therapeutic method ignores the power relations that exist beyond the client-patient relationship, such as social identity power structures based on sex and ethnicity, and concludes, "the notion of a clienttherapist relationship without coercive effects is utopian" (12). The problems of power relations in an empathic argumentation strategy are pertinent to Aly's "Send Forgiveness Viral," as discussed further in this article.

Lassner articulates some of the problems with the Rogerian approach to combatting discrimination, in her aforementioned study on her Women's Studies class. The results were overwhelmingly negative. One student is quoted as telling Lassner, "Rogerian argument feels like a model of mock democracy--too sweet, pretending to accept the minority view but writing in a way that makes women ignore how they feel. If they ignore how they feel no one else has to pay attention to them" (1990, 227). Indeed, through its description of "mock democracy" this feedback implies that the issue with Rogerian argumentation is its split goals; an implicit goal of persuasion, but an explicit goal of understanding and empathy. The true meaning is hidden behind neutral and unemotional language that aims to placate. This could be perceived as "mock democracy" because it plays into the power dynamics of the communicator (as marginalized) and the audience (as dominant). To put it simply, a disenfranchised communicator who uses Rogerian argumentation has their perspective submerged under a guise of "empathy." This does not meet Herrick's ideas of ethical rhetoric, which assists advocacy and distributes power, rather than remaining neutral and dispassionate. More importantly to this case study, Herrick writes that the distribution of power is achieved by the act of speaking (2005, 19), and speaking is a form of power that has been denied to certain people on the basis of ethnicity, sex, and other factors.

For this exact reason, students who took part in Lassner's study found that they were unable to be empathic toward those who opposed their arguments. For...