Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. Asao B. Inoue
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college writing programs demand that their students produce some dominant discourse, then judge them on their abilities to approximate it, according to Greenfield, is racist, since all dominant discourses are associated closely with white middle- and upper-class racial formations in the U.S.
But wait, some may argue further that even if this is true, even if structural racism does form the context of any writing course, it doesn’t change the fact that there is a dominant discourse that is the lingua franca of schools, the workplace, and civic society. If you can approximate it, you have more power in those circles. You, in effect, negate the structural racism that may hold you back, keep power and privilege from your grasp. And so, in good writing classrooms, goes the argument, one can honor and respect the languages that all students bring to the classroom, then teach and promote a local SEAE so that those students have a chance at future success. This pedagogy is posed as antiracist, or at least one whose goal is social justice. This kind of argument and pedagogy, says Greenfield, is based on two false assumptions. The first is that these other language varieties, say BEV, are somehow less communicative and cannot do the job needed in the academy or civic life (Greenfield, 2011, p. 49). A simple example will show the flaw in the pedagogy’s logic. Hip hop and rap are mainstream musical genres now, have been for years. Most of the lyrics are based on BEV, yet the music is listen to by people from a wide range of socioeconomic strata and by all racial formations in the U.S. and worldwide. If BEV isn’t as effective in communicating in civic life, how is it that it is so popular, so mainstream? How is it that it connects to so many different kinds of people? How is it that it can tell such compelling stories? Is it that we don’t mind Black people entertaining us (a white mainstream audience), but we don’t want their language tainting the so-called important areas of our life, academics, knowledge making, civic life, law, politics, etc.? Are we just slumming in Harlem when we celebrate the relatively few Black entertainers and sports figures, the few who make it economically, the exceptions, so that we can ignore the multitudes who do not?
The second false assumption that Greenfield says supports the above pedagogical decisions is that “[p]eople believe falsely that by changing the way people of color speak … others’ racist preconceptions will disappear and the communicative act will be successful” (2011, p. 49). So teach Blacks or Latinos/as to speak and write a dominant discourse and they will have more power and opportunity. They’ll be more communicatively successful. The logic here says that today people aren’t racist toward people, but they may be toward the languages people use. Consider again the hip hop example. If we really did believe that changing the language of people of color would gain them power and opportunity, make them more communicative, then again I ask why are Hip Hop and rap so popular? It’s mainly performed by Blacks in the U.S., although it has become a global genre. Could it be so popular if it wasn’t effectively communicating ideas and narratives?
We are talking about the exceptions really. The rule is that African-Americans who speak and write BEV are not usually successful in school or civic life. But is it because they are not able to communicate effectively and clearly? According to Greenfield, the answer is no. Referencing several studies that prove the fact, she argues that people really are racist toward people because of the way racialized white bodies historically have been and are closely wedded to local SEAEs. She says:
Black people are not discriminated against because some speak a variety of Ebonics—rather, I argue, Ebonics is stigmatized because it is spoken primarily by Black people. It is its association with a particular people and history that has compelled people to stigmatize it. Our attitudes toward language, it appears, are often steeped in our assumptions about the bodies of the speakers. We assume an essential connection—language as inherently tied to the body. In other words, language varieties—like people—are subject to racialization. (2011, p. 50)
What does it mean that Ebonics or Spanglish or some other variety of English is stigmatized already in writing classrooms? The word’s root is “stigma,” which the OED defines as “ a mark made upon the skin by burning with a hot iron (rarely, by cutting or pricking), as a token of infamy or subjection” (Stigmata, 2015). Thus something stigmatized is something already judged, something already in subjection, something lesser. No matter what antiracist motives a teacher may have, including my own motives, we all work within conditions and systems that have branded some languages as less communicative, less articulate, less than the dominant discourse. No matter who we are, we always struggle against antiracist systems in the academy.
We shouldn’t pretend, however, that any local dominant discourse, BEV, Spanglish, or any variety of multilingual English is monolithic or self-contained, therefore these stigmas are also not categorical. What I mean is that everyone speaks and writes a brand of English that has its nuances, its deviations. For instance, not every African-American student will speak BEV, and not everyone who uses it will use BEV in the same ways that others will use it. V. N. Volosinov (1986) makes this point clear about language generally, arguing that there is no langue, only parole, only language that is in a constant state of flux and change. Vershawn A. Young’s (2004; 2007; 2011) arguments for “code-meshing” agrees and helps us see the nuance, helps us see why it’s difficult to speak of BEV or a dominant white discourse alone. In fact, none of us speak or write solely some brand of English alone. We use variations of English that we encounter around us. Young (2007) argues that we all have hybrid Englishes. We speak in codes that are meshed with other codes, and we should account for this in the classroom. Additionally, because the dominant discourse is a white racial discourse, associated with white bodies historically, Young explains that “[w]hen we ask Black students to give up one set of codes in favor of another, their BEV for something we call more standard, we’re not asking them to make choices about language, we’re asking them to choose different ways to perform their racial identities through language” (2007, p. 142). However, just because we can see the hybridity of any brand of English, it doesn’t mean the stigmas go away. The question is: how do we not let the stigmas determine how we assess writing in our classrooms?
The bottom line is we cannot separate race, our feelings about the concept or particular racial formations, which includes historical associations with particular racialized bodies in time and space, from languages, especially varieties of English in the U.S. This makes language, like the dominant discourse, racialized as white (I’ll say more about this later in this chapter). More important, as judges of English in college writing classrooms, we cannot avoid this racializing of language when we judge writing, nor can we avoid the influence of race in how we read and value the words and ideas of others. Lisa Delpit offers a poetic way to understand language and its connection to the body, which I read with racial undertones: “[o]ur home language is as viscerally tied to our beings as existence itself—as the sweet sounds of love accompany our first milk” (2002, p. xvii). Freire has another way of pointing out the power of language in our lives, the power it has in making our lives and ourselves. He says, “reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world” (1987, p. 23). When we read the words that come from the bodies of our students, we read those bodies as well, and by reading those bodies we also read the words they present to us, some may bare stigmata, some may not.
The Function of Race in the EPT Writing
Assessment
I’ve just made the argument that race generally speaking is important to English as a language that we teach and assess in writing classrooms. But how is race implicated in writing assessments? How does race function or what does it produce in writing assessments?
One way to consider the function of race in writing assessment is to consider the consequences of writing assessments. Breland et al. (2004) found differences in mean scores on the SAT essay among Asian-American, African-American, Hispanic, and white racial formations, with African-Americans rated lowest (more than a full point on an 8 point scale) and Hispanic students rated slightly higher (p. 5), yet when looking for differences in mean SAT essay scores of “English first” (native speakers) or “English not first” (multilingual) students, they found no statistically significant differences (p. 6) —the mean scores were virtually identical in these two groups. I don’t know how Breland and his colleagues determined native speaking proficiency, but my guess is that it may fall roughly along racial lines. These findings have been replicated by others (Gerald &