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Affecting white accountability: what Mr. Rogers can tell us about the (racial) futures of communication

Walking out of the documentary, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, with a friend one Sunday morning, we reflected on a shared national childhood of being raised, in part, by Fred McFeely Rogers. Mr. Rogers, as the documentary pointed out, was dismissed by many as a simpleton, whose puppets communicated saccharine and naïve understandings of the world and its politics. However, the documentary went on to deconstruct this belief, in part by showcasing Mr. Rogers’ warmth, thoughtfulness, and sophistication in crafting radical antifascist, antiwar, and antiracist messages. In his 50 years on the air, Mr. Rogers addressed issues from segregation to 9/11 and Vietnam to divorces. When read as part of the larger culture of PBS,Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood illustrated the revolutionary potential of the station, with its low-budget programming and radical ideas. When the film ended and the house lights came up, a theater full of teary-eyed people walked out together, reminiscing about Mr. Rogers. We need not romanticize that moment of connection to theorize its significance. Mr. Rogers, though far from perfect, was a unifying figure who persuaded and performed gently, through trenchant analyses of structural oppression. In a moment when Generation X and Millennials are reaching adulthood only to find that the promises of the American Dream are largely unavailable to them, nostalgic returns to familiar figures and television shows have provided emotional balm for those in dire straits. In this moment, Mr. Rogers’ tone offers a profound affective contrast to the divisive politics of Donald Trump, as well as a vehicle through which Generation X and Millennials imagine a compassionate and progressive world. Using Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood as a starting point, this essay contemplates the pedagogical, scholarly, and racial futures of the field of communication, particularly rhetorical studies, in a tumultuous world. Rhetoric, in a world that has been post-fact for longer than we care to admit, must reimagine its historical purpose as a discipline that devotes much of its energy to studying argument construction via logos. As the affective turns in sociology, psychology, cultural studies, gender studies, and ethnic studies, among others demonstrate, arguments are rarely made primarily a posteriori in the service of persuasion but rather post facto in the service of deeply held feelings and beliefs. These feelings and beliefs are frequently tied up with our conceptions of intimacy, belonging, and citizenship in ways that can make us unreceptive to even the most well-established facts about the world. Nonetheless, rhetoric scholars continue to insist on embracing rationality and