Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. Asao B. Inoue
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didn’t matter that my name is as Japanese as you can get, very obviously non-Anglo, but that marker itself was read as a marker of the racial other that was most at odds with working class whites in my neighborhood and school. Unlike ethnicity, race is usually a broad brush stroke, not a fine penciled line. All my actions, all that I did, walking past a fence or a neighbor’s trailer, knocking on a door to see if a friend could play, or trying to get a soda from a vending machine at the trailer park’s office, all were seen as suspicious activities, ones that suggested I was surely up to no good.
I’m not making up this feeling of being suspect everywhere, every day, by everyone. The stigma was real, so real that a group of white trailer park tenants and the manager (also white) got together, wrote a letter to my family, listing all the activities my twin brother and I had done in the last year. One more misstep and we were evicted, kicked out. Interestingly, there were a list of activities and wrong-doings attributed to my brother and me during the previous summer, a summer we had spent with our grandmother in Oregon. We were not even in the state, yet all bad things were attributed to us, the Mexicans in the trailer park. To my white, working class neighbors, it seemed obvious and clear that all wrong-doing in the trailer park were markers that my brother and I had been there. Our skin tone, eyes and hair were judged to be Mexican, which told them about our natures as boys.
I have always been proud to be Japanese-American, to be Asian-American, despite the racial and ethnic ambiguity that has often followed me. This is why I’ve placed extra effort and labor in my racial subjectivity, even back then, even as a pre-teen and teenager. It didn’t matter what I said, or what I claimed to be. My performance, my physical and material appearance, even my discourse, which was quiet around adults, especially men (having almost no contact with men until deep into high school), was assessed as Mexican, as trouble-maker, as racial other. No matter what I did or said, it was seen as suspicious or bad. And because I was raised by a single-parent, my mom, who didn’t have a college education, worked several low-paying jobs just to keep the lights on, our clothes were not the newest or nicest. They were clean and cared for, but there were several years in which we had to make do with last year’s school clothes, last year’s shoes. These economic constraints only reinforced the other material markers that constructed me as Mexican in the eyes of the whites around me.
I believe writing teachers, as good-hearted and conscientious as most are, use racial projection in the same ways that I experienced as a boy. Perhaps they do not make the same exact assessments when working with students of color, but we do racially project our notions and expectations onto others we meet, others we read, others we evaluate and grade in the writing classroom. If we didn’t, it would be difficult to teach, to interact with any group of students, to understand the language offered us in writing by our students. We have to have assumptions, otherwise nothing makes sense. Now, I realize that some may find my conclusion about racial projection difficult to accept. They might say that they don’t have to see race or assume and project some set of racial attributes in order to get along and work with others who appear different from them. Fair enough. Yet, I too find the typical alternative conclusion, that we can escape such racial projections in our interactions with our writing students when reading their writing, including multilingual writing, equally unacceptable and unrealistic. This practice of ignoring racial habitus in our lives, in reading and writing practices, and in our dispositions for judging, is essentially an attempt to negate much of what makes all of us who we are and how we communicate. It means that a teacher who tries not to see race is forced to assume a non-racial set of dispositions, which amounts to a white racial habitus (discussed below). But I understand that likely those who do not accept my conclusion likely have not experienced constant racial projections that contradict their own racial subjectivity. And this is likely because they fit into a white racial habitus that often doesn’t have such contradictions in school.
Thus these two dimensions of race, subjective and projective, may not match up in any given particular person, but they operate simultaneously. Our writing assessments should struggle with these two ways of experiencing race, race as subjectivity and race as projection by others. Although tangled and flawed, race as discursive, material, and performative are good ways to organize inquiries into what happens in writing assessments, since our life experiences, whether we acknowledge them or not as racialized, are often organized by racial subjectivity and projection to some degree, just as gendered habitus organize our experiences. Racial habitus offers language that calls attention to the dynamic, (re)productive structuring structures of discourse, materiality, and performance that are central to judging student writing. The term helps us talk about race as sets of structures—as parts in and of systems—structures that are not categorical, nor static.
To think of race as racial habitus has been approached by Edwardo Bonilla-Silva (2003) in his sociological work on racism and whiteness, only he focuses on a white habitus that produces particular language about race. In his study, Bonilla-Silva examines the ways that students from various U.S. universities use certain discursive “frames” (e.g., abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism) to articulate their racial ideology and cloak it in linguistic “styles” (e.g., “I’m not prejudiced, but …” (p. 57), “I’m not Black, so I don’t know” (p. 58), “anything but race” (p. 62), “they are the racist ones …” (p. 63)).11 This color-blind racist discourse used primarily by white students attempts to ignore, erase, or minimize the structuring structures in language that construct racial difference and racism. He explains that “social and spatial segregation” in different communities creates a “‘white habitus,’ a racialized, uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters” (2003, p. 104). Thus whites have structuring structures that construct local white racial formations, just as Hmong and Mexican-Americans do in Fresno.
Arguing that writing teachers and writing assessment theorists need to “interrogate and refashion our racial politics of assessment,” Nicholas Behm and Keith Miller (2012, p. 125) provide a detailed account of Bonilla-Silva’s (2006) study of color-blind racism, and explain his concept of a white habitus in which whites are socialized. Behm and Miller explain that a white habitus is a set of “historically and culturally constructed dispositions, feelings, and discourses, which ‘conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters’” (2012, p. 129, emphasis in original). But habitus may be more complex than this. Sometimes it is unconscious, so it may be more accurate to say that we participate in already existing racial habitus, participating in structures that are to some degree outside or beyond individuals, making habitus structuring structures we make our own, nuancing them in the ways that Young (2007) discusses code-meshing. Furthermore, when I speak of white racial habitus below, it is not necessarily linked to a racialized body, a white body, as it appears to be in Bonilla-Silva’s study. Instead, the structuring structures of a local white racial habitus make white students, or ideal students, in writing assessment ecologies of the classroom. A white racial habitus exists beyond or outside of bodies, in discourse, in methods of judging, in dispositions toward texts, etc.
And so using a term like racial habitus can keep us from thinking of these structuring structures as simply dwelling in individuals, as inherent characteristics of individuals – since I’m rarely taking about individuals when I discuss issues of race and racism in classroom writing assessments. Instead, racial habitus foregrounds the macro-level phenomena, foregrounds the structures and social structuring, foregrounds the patterns among many people who associate or find themselves geographically and historically in the same places and circumstances, without forgetting that these patterns exist in individuals who augment them.
White Racial Habitus
Important to seeing racial habitus as a determining aspect of any classroom writing assessment project is seeing a white racial habitus as fundamental to all classroom writing assessment, whether we promote it, critique it, or actively promote something else. Many have discussed how to define whiteness as a construct that affects writing pedagogy (Frankenberg, 1993; hooks, 1994; Keating, 1995), which has bearing on how writing is judged in classrooms by teachers using a local SEAE or other academic expectations for writing.12 Timothy Barnett (2000) synthesizes five statements about whiteness that the scholarship on whiteness overwhelmingly