Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. Asao B. Inoue
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structuring structures that are performed or projected onto student writing:
•Whiteness is a “coded discourse of race,” that “seems invisible, objective, and neutral”;
•Whiteness maintains its power and presents itself as “unraced individually” and “opposed to a racialized subjectivity that is communally and politically interested”;
•Whiteness is presented as a non-political relational concept, defined against Others, whose interests are defined as “anti-individual” and political in nature;
•Whiteness “is not tied essentially to skin color, but is nevertheless related in complex and powerful ways to the perceived phenomenon of race”;
•Whiteness maintains power by defining (and denying) difference “on its own terms and to its own advantage” (my emphasis, p. 10)
As a habitus that is practiced in language, expected in classroom behaviors, and marked on the bodies of students and teachers, whiteness, then, is a set of structuring structures, durable, transposable, and flexible. As Barnett summarizes, these structures construct whiteness as invisible and appealing to fairness through objectivity. The structures are unraced (even beyond race), unconnected to the bodies and histories that create them. They are set up as apolitical, and often deny difference by focusing on the individual or making larger claims to abstract liberal principles, such as the principle of meritocracy. These structures create dispositions that form reading and judging practices, dispositions for values and expectations for writing and behavior. Echoing Lippi-Green and Greenfield’s arguments that connect race to language, Barnett offers a succinct way to see whiteness as a racial project in the classroom, which can easily be a way we might describe any classroom writing assessment as a default white racial project:
“Whiteness,” accordingly, represents a political and relational activity disguised as an essential quality of humanity that is, paradoxically, fully accessible only by a few. It maintains a distance from knowledge that depends on the power of authorities, rules, tradition, and the written word, all of which supposedly guarantee objectivity and non-racial ways of knowing, but have, not incidentally, been established and maintained primarily by the white majority. (2000, 13, emphasis in original)
In her discussion of the pervasiveness of whiteness in bioethics in the U.S., Catherine Myser defines whiteness as a marker and position of power that is situated in a racial hierarchy (2002, p. 2). She asks us to problematize the centrality of whiteness in bioethics as a field of study and industry, which I argue we should do in the writing classroom too. By looking at several studies of whiteness, Myser provides a rather succinct set of discursive and performative dispositions that could be called a white racial habitus that writing teachers often enact:
•[A focus on] Individualism, hyperindividualism, self-determination, autonomy, and self-reliance, self-control;
•The person is conceived in purely individual terms, as a rational and self-conscious being (the Cartesian “I” or cogito ergo sum), making failure an individual weakness and not a product of larger structural issues;
•Relationships are understood as being between informed, consenting individuals, but individual rights are primary, placing an emphasis on contracts, laws, and abstract principles for governing relationships;
•Cognitive capacity is the ability to think rationally, logically, and objectively, with rigor, clarity and consistency valued most;
•All problems are defined as those situations or conditions that are out of control, that disrupt autonomous functioning. (Myser, 2002, pp. 6-7)
Whiteness as a discourse and set of expectations in writing, then, like the dispositions distilled from Barnett’s summary, can be boiled down to a focus on individualism and self-determination, Descartes cogito, individuals as the primary subject position, abstract principles, rationality and logic, clarity and consistency, and on seeing failure as individual weakness, not a product of larger structural issues.
These dispositions are very similar to Brookhiser’s (1997) six traits of WASP whiteness in the U.S.13 The important thing about whiteness, as Barnet and many others have identified about whiteness generally, is that it’s invisible, often denied as being whiteness. This is the nature of whiteness as a habitus. Ross Chambers (1997) explains that whiteness remains unexamined through the “pluralization of the other and the homogenization of others” (p. 192). He says that whiteness has been “unexaminable” (or rather, “examinable, yet unexamined”) because it is not only the yardstick by which difference (like quality of writing) is judged and identified in the classroom and out of it, but whiteness is bound to “the category of the individual” first through “atomizing whiteness” by homogenizing others, which allows it to be invisible (p. 192). This invisible and universalizing nature of the above dispositions gives some reason for why the first two items are the most telling, and perhaps contentious. These two dispositions (hyperindividualism and the primacy of the cogito) alone make up much of Faigley’s (1992) discussion of tastes in the ways teachers described the best student writing in their courses found in Coles and Vopat’s collection, What Makes Writing Good (1985). What did most teachers say was good writing? Writing that exhibited a strong, authentic, honest voice. And what does strength, authenticity, and honesty look like as textual markers? It is a self-reliant voice that is focused on itself as a cool, rational, thinking self in the writing and in its reading of writer’s own experiences or ideas. This isn’t to say these are bad qualities in writing, only that they are linked to whiteness and this link often has uneven racist consequences in classroom writing assessments.
To put it more bluntly, a white racial habitus often has racist effects in the classroom, even though it is not racist in and of itself. Citing Mills (1997) and his own studies of whiteness (2001), Bonilla-Silva argues that “whiteness is the foundational category of ‘white supremacy’ …. Whiteness, then, in all of its manifestations, is embodied racial power” (2003a, p. 271; emphasis in original). The maintenance of whiteness and white supremacy, even if tacit as in the “new racism” that Bonilla-Silva and Villanueva (2006) describe, is vital to maintaining the status quo of society’s social, economic, and racial hierarchies, the structuring structures that (re)produce a white racial habitus. Bonilla-Silva (2003a) explains that the new racism isn’t just “racism lite,” but manifests through five key structures that I argue destroy many healthy writing assessment ecologies:
•racial language practices that are “increasingly covert,” as with those who argue that using a local SEAE as the privileged discourse in a writing classroom is not racist because the course is about the appropriate language use for college students, without questioning why that brand of English is deemed most appropriate or providing ways in the class to examine the dominant discourse as a set of conventions that have been “standardized” by the hegemonic;
•racial terminology that is explicitly avoided (or a universalizing and abstracting of experience and capacities), causing an increasing frequency of claims that whites themselves are experiencing “reverse racism”;
•racial inequality that is reproduced invisibly through multiple mechanisms, reproduced structurally, as in my critique of the EPT or others’ findings in the SAT;
•“safe minorities” (singular examples or exceptions, often named) that are used to prove that racism no longer exists, despite the larger patterns and statistics that prove the contrary, such as the Fresno State Hmong and African-American student racial formations;
•racial practices reminiscent of the Jim Crow period (e.g., separate but equal) that are rearticulated in new, non-racial terms, such as the new use of the EPT as a de facto entrance exam that by result attempts to stem the tide of students of color in California universities without ever being explicitly about race. (p. 272)
In many ways, the new racism discussed by Bonilla-Silva and Villanueva occurs more frequently in our classroom writing assessments because we uncritically promote (often out of necessity) a dominant academic discourse that is associated with a local SEAE. While these discourses and sets of linguistic conventions are not bad in and of themselves, they do need interrogating with students as structuring structures that give us certain tastes in