Even cursory analysis of Gates’s statement yields layers of complexity that Gates may not have intended. The most simple of pronouncements can be rhetorically weighty. Precisely this issue is of most interest to us here: how rhetoric forms the very fabric of our communicative practices. Rhetoric is not just about the words we use and the contexts in which we use them, but concerns the fundamental shape of our social interactions, self-perceptions, and belief systems. While we may use the term “rhetoric”