Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. Asao B. Inoue
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the largest turnout in 2006, estimated at 400,000 (Gorman, 2006). In fact, it is reported that in L.A., the protesters chanted, “Si, se puede” (“Yes, it can be done”) (Glaister & MacAskill, 2006), which was the motto of the United Farm Workers organization, headed in part by César Chavez.9 While the writer of the 2-essay doesn’t mention any of these details, one could read them underneath the text. The references to “not even going to work,” “hours lost” from work, and the sense that many “did not care” that they lost some money but wanted social and economic change seems to be sentiments felt or experienced by those in the student’s community.
These changes are not simply about labor, but about Latino/a labor in California, about immigration policies, and racially defined immigrants and their material struggles with participating in social justice projects, like a boycott. They are about the experience of Latino/a immigrants engaging in a boycott that is meant to affect advertising and consumer consumption. These references are only off topic if you don’t find such Latino/a cultural references valid in a discussion about the marketing of consumer products. If a reader’s primary relation to such advertisements is that of a buyer, and not the laborer or retail worker working in the department store stocking and selling the soap or cereal, then this paragraph may seem off topic. But what if a reader imagined that her primary relation to the production and distribution of such advertisements was as a laborer who made such items available to customers? Then, I think, this paragraph, with its reference to the Great American Boycott, is far from off topic and racialized as Latino/a in a California context. It calls upon the common relations of Latinos/as in California to Capitalist consumption.
Yes, I read a lot into the essay, maybe too much, but that is the point. White discourses and dispositions tend to lean on abstraction, and avoid such racially politicized readings of texts. I don’t think the writers of the prompt or the guide intended for such an assessment to be valid of this essay because it racializes it. Does this mean that the essay should get more than a rating of 2? I think so. In the above ways, it addresses material concerns in a pretty unique way, in a way that matters to many in California, in a way that stretches the prompt to be more applicable than simply about an abstract idea like celebrities in ads, in a way that may very well matter to the student writer.
I cannot argue definitively that the guide or any judge would consciously see the markers of this text as racialized stigmata, but it doesn’t matter. What the guide does promote is a particular ideal text, one that values only abstract ideas, with no sensitivity to the way particular racial formations might respond differently, respond from their own social conditions. This ideal text, I argue, is informed by a dominant white discourse, seen in the rubric and the way it asks readers to judge from it. The assessment that the guide promotes seems to ignore the possibility that what is “off topic” is culturally and socially constructed by a dominant, white discourse, and that any response will be constructed by one’s material relations to the ideas around advertising and consumer economies in a racially divided California. Judging essays in the way the guide asks teachers to do produces the uneven and racist consequences that we see in Fresno State’s remediation rates and its Early Start and Bridge programs. One cannot know who this writer is, but that’s not the point. The point is what gets read and stigmatized in the text while not explicitly about race ends up having racist consequences.
Racial Habitus
Up to this point, my use of the term race has been imprecise. At the same time, race as an abstraction or as a social dimension in which people are grouped or group themselves is tricky to define too finely. It encapsulates an historically organizing set of structures that structure social interactions and society, to draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase for habitus (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72). The term habitus gives us a way to think about race as socially constructed in at least three ways:
•discursively or linguistically, that is, through discourse and language practices;
•materially and bodily, or through people’s material conditions and the bodily and material markers that our environments leave on us; and
•performatively, or through the ways we perform, behave, and act, which includes what we consume in conspicuous ways.
Bourdieu defines habitus as “not only a structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices, but also a structured structure: the principles of division into logical classes which organizes the perception of the social world itself the product of internalization of the division into social classes” (1984, p. 170). That is, race as habitus structures and is structured into our lives, bodies, languages, actions, behaviors, expectations for writing, reading practices that judge writing, etc. Quoting Pierre Bourdieu, E. San Juan uses this definition of habitus:
Bourdieu means “the conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence that produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.” (2002, p. 52)
For Bourdieu, habitus is multiple, historically situated structures composed of and conditioned by practices, material conditions, and discourses, that iterate into new structures (i.e., structuring structures), all the while these structures are durable and transposable, even when history and conditions alter them superficially. Racial habitus, then, is one way one might think of race as a set of structuring structures, some marked on the body, some in language practices, some in the ways we interact or work, write, and read, some in the way we behave or dress, some in the processes and differential opportunities we have to live where we do (or get to live where we can), or where we hang out, work, go to school, etc. Thus, racial habitus places an emphasis on the continual (re)construction of race as structures, as sets of dispositions that are discursive, material, and performative in nature. We speak, embody (are marked materially), and perform our racial designations and identities, whether those designations are self-designated or designated by others. Another way to say this is that racial habitus explains the way race is made up of discursive, material, and performative structuring structures.
To complicate further the concept of race as a social dimension, race has two ways of being experienced and referenced in the world that make it slippery and ambiguous in any given situation beyond the historically changing nature of it.10 It is a dimension that can organize one’s own subjectivity in the world, the way one acts, speaks, relates to others, and behaves. This is its subjective dimension. Everyone experiences race subjectively, or from a particular subject position and set of experiences, which intersect with other dimensions of experience (e.g., class, gender, sexuality, disability, etc.). One might consciously or unconsciously reproduce particular racial structures in language, dress, behavior, appearance, etc. that structure one’s own sense of one’s racial subjectivity. In this sense, race is consciously a set of discursive, material, and performance choices.
Race is also commonly seen or understood by others through physical, linguistic, social, and cultural markers, structuring structures themselves that have uneven and various meanings to others. This second dimension is race’s projective dimension, or one of others’ perceptions and expectations placed upon the person or persons in question. It is the dimension of race that people or institutions use in order to know people and organize them either privately or institutionally. Even though we may not publically act on or voice assumptions about racial formations or individuals in our midst, we all have such assumptions. It’s hard not to given the way our minds work to help us make sense of things, people, and experiences, particularly the unknown. In this sense, race is projected onto individuals and groups for a variety of purposes, often institutional.
Allow me to offer an example that illustrates how racial projection affects assessments (sets of judgments and decisions about people), despite a contradictory racial subjectivity. Growing up in Las Vegas, I was at least five or six shades darker than I am today. I was short, skinny, with jet black hair and brown eyes. In that context, among the working class whites at school and in our neighborhood, I was a “beaner,” a “dirty Mexican,” a “trouble-maker.” In that context, where local Mexican-American communities were