Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. Asao B. Inoue
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concerning perceived “authenticity” and “honesty” (1992, p. 121). The examples of authentic and honest writing from the collection not only reveal a middle class set of tastes but a clear white racial set of experiences and perspectives. Faigley’s conclusions are ones about the ways that such reading practices by teachers are an exercise of Foucauldian power, power that is difficult to see thus more potent and pervasive (1992, p. 131). I would add to Faigley’s critique that it is race that functions in such daily classroom writing assessment practices, hiding behind power relationships set up by the judgment of student writing by teachers who use a dominant discourse. To put this another way, power is hidden more effectively because a set of white racial dispositions are already hidden in the assessment in various places, assumed as the standard.
Thus it is imperative that writing teachers consider explicitly and robustly the function of race in their classroom writing assessments, which often are a response to large-scale assessments, such as the ACT, SAT, AP, and EPT. The assessment community calls this relationship “washback” (Weigle, 2002, p. 54) when a test influences school and classroom curricula, but it might also be called “whitewashing.” If we think that these large-scale tests are racist, or could be, and we know they washback into our classrooms, or are supposed to, then it seems reasonable to assume that our classrooms are constituted by racist institutional structures, and race is a factor in our classrooms. In his chapter on the neoliberal narratives of whiteness that structures racism in the U.S., George Lipsitz offers a reading of the film Lean on Me (1989), but begins it with a fitting way to close this section:
My sister and mother both taught at Eastside at different times during the 1960s and 1970s and established reputations as the kind of demanding and dedicated instructor students remember long after their school years have been completed. Over the years, I have learned a great deal about what it means to try to offer a quality education in an inner-city school from them. My father, my mother, my sister, and many of their colleagues and friends have devoted much of their lives to that effort. I know how hard a job they have, how much patience and love it takes to try to neutralize the effects of poverty and racism even temporarily. I know as well that no amount of good intentions, no mastery of teaching techniques, and no degree of effort by individual educators can alter meaningfully the fundamentally unequal distribution of resources and opportunities in this society. (1998, p. 141)
If as teachers, we cannot alter such pervasive unequal distributions of resources and opportunities in our students’ lives, which affects who they are and what they bring to our writing classrooms, then I think our best strategy as antiracist educators is to change the way we understand and do writing assessment, while simultaneously building arguments and movements to change the larger structural racism in our society and schools. But this antiracist project begins in our classrooms because it is the only place we, as writing teachers, can begin.
Language’s Association with Race
Racial formations—material bodies that are racialized—are connected closely to language use and our attitudes toward language. Laura Greenfield (2011) makes this point in a number of ways. She argues that in U.S. society and schools, most people, including writing teachers, tend to ignore or overlook the “linguistic facts of life” that linguist Rosina Lippi-Green (1997) identifies and that reveal the structural racism in society and language preference. These facts of life are long-established linguistic agreements in the field:
•All spoken language changes over time.
•All spoken languages are equal in linguistic terms.
•Grammaticality and communicative effectiveness are distinct and interdependent issues.
•Written language and spoken language are historically, structurally, and functionally fundamentally different creatures.
•Variation is intrinsic to all spoken language at every level. (as quoted in Greenfield, 2011, p. 33; Lippi-Green, 1997, p. 10)
These agreements essentially say that all language varieties, from Hawaiian Creole English to Black English Vernacular to Spanglish are legitimate, rule-governed, and communicative. They are not degenerate versions of English or “bad English,” yet they are often seen in a lower position of power and prestige than the local variety of SEAE. It isn’t because SEAE is inherently better, more logical, more effective, or more efficient.6 It is because whiteness and white racial formations historically are closely associated with SEAEs and dominant discourses. Greenfield concludes, explicitly connecting SEAEs with the white body:
The language varieties deemed inferior in the United States (so much so that they are often dismissed not simply as inferior varieties but not varieties at all—just conglomerations of slang, street talk, or poor English) tend to be the languages whose origins can be traced to periods in American history when communities of racially oppressed people used these languages to enact agency. It is no coincidence that the languages spoken by racially oppressed people are considered to be inferior in every respect to the languages spoken predominantly by those who wield systemic power: namely, middle- and upper-class white people. (2011, p. 36)
Thus so-called proper English or dominant discourses are historically connected to the white body. This makes sense intuitively. We speak with and through our bodies. We write with and through our bodies. As teachers when we read and evaluate our students’ writing, we do so through and with our bodies, and we have in our minds a vision of our students as bodies, as much as we have their language in front of us. Who historically has had the privilege to speak and write the most in civic life and in the academy? Whose words have been validated as history, truth, knowledge, story, the most throughout history? White people. Additionally, the material conditions that our students come from and live in affect and shape their bodies, making them who they are, making us who we are as teachers. The material conditions of the classroom, of our students’ lives, as we’ll see in later chapters, greatly determine their languaging and the writing assessment ecology of the classroom. I argue that in most cases writing teachers tend to have very different local histories and material conditions than their students of color and multilingual students, often the common thread is race.
Allow a few crude examples to help me make the point that race is connected to the judging of English. In the seven years I helped run the first-year writing program at Fresno State, an historically Hispanic Serving Institution where white students are the numerical minority, there have been to my count seven teachers of color teaching in the program total. Every year, we bring in around ten to twelve new teachers, sometimes more. We usually have around 25-30 working teachers at any given time. This means that on average there has been one teacher of color teaching first year writing at any given time. The rest are, for the most part, white, middle class, and female. Given my experiences at three other state universities and a two-year college, these conditions seem to be the norm. A report by the Center for American Progress on “Increasing Teacher Diversity” in public schools in the U.S. cites equally alarming statistics from the National Center for Education Statistics. Racial minority students make up over 40% of students in all schools in the U.S., but only 14.6% of all teachers are Black or Latino/a, and in 40% of public schools there is no teacher of color, not one (Bireda & Chait, 2011, p. 1).
If the dominant discourse of the academy is taught almost exclusively by white, middle class teachers, then is it possible that such conditions will affect the discourse valued in writing assessments? Is it possible that those who achieve such positions, such credentials, might have achieved them because they can use and favor the dominant discourses? If so, it is no wonder that dominant discourses in schools are closely associated with the white body and whiteness, which makes them associated with race.
Some might argue that the picture Greenfield and I paint for why any local dominant discourse is valued is inaccurate. My paradigm seems to say that teachers think about race when they judge students’ writing. In one sense, yes. Greenfield and I are saying this. We cannot help it. Gender and race are the first things people identify (or try to) about a person when they meet them. We look, often implicitly and unconsciously, for markers that tell us something about the person so that we can interact with them appropriately. Why would teachers be any different? But at a more fundamental level, Greenfield argues that teachers are simply a part of systemic racism, a structural racism in schools and society