viz.

Welcome to the visual rhetoric blog. Here we investigate the arguments made by visual culture in all their varied iterations. While nowhere in her post did Szwarc directly mention racial discrimination, she led with the image that MK reproduced on Viz. Rhetorically, she is directly associating segregation (an organized, long-standing, sometimes violent form of discrimination that has its roots in social, religious, and scientific discrimination and...oh, I don't know... SLAVERY) with the Mississippi House Bill. Are there commonalities? Sure - it's state-sponsored discrimination. But they are not the SAME and I do agree with the argument that such an analogy is ultimately irresponsible. If one carefully revisits the conversation surrounding this post, one would note that there is an acknowledgment of discrimination and that a point of discomfort lies in the careless/thoughtless appropriation of another (or an Other) form of discrimination. I would go further and say that NOT addressing her visual argument in the text of the post only aggravates this issue.

Secondly, what I am uncomfortable with in your posts is not your opinion, but rather the manner in which you attempt to shut down conversation. This is the second post in which you attempt to do so; this time you insist that the blogger is "making this into far more than anything she wrote or even implied" (patently false, since Junkfood Science consciously chose the image to accompany their blog post) and then calling the analysis a "pseudo-argument." While I think an engagement with the visual argument at hand is appropriate, an attack on the blogger is not. This is not usually the best strategy for building a conversation. Blogs such as Szwarc's and Viz. rely on the idea that investigating the strategies and implications of arguments - not just what is said but how it is said, how the argument works - is a culturally relevant tool and an important scholarly exercise. Let's focus on building that conversation instead of shutting it down.