“You know it when you see it:” the rhetorical hierarchy of race and gender in rhinelander v. rhinelander

Kenneth Burke places order and hierarchy at the heart of his rhetorical theory. The impulse to order creates categories of terms used by cultures to construct social orders based on race, gender, class and economic status. These lead to a “paradox of purity” wherein individuals are evaluated substantively from that category despite their individual motivations. In 1925, a woman of mixed blood was accused of defrauding her husband by “passing” as white. Her white lawyers were required to maintain the racist social structure while simultaneously freeing their client from the strictures of that structure. The paradox of purity was resolved through a transformation of terms until an ultimate order was recreated that retained the hierarchy, yet placed another collective category, gender, at the pinnacle.