Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. Asao B. Inoue
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perform better regardless of the assessment ecology, but some ecologies mitigate the racist effects better than others. The uneven effects of these same ecologies demonstrates a problem. But if you still need a racist cause, there is a common cause for all the course grades: the courses’ writing assessment ecologies that produced the grades.
Part of my argument for racism in classroom writing assessments, like those mentioned above, is that there are larger societal structures that are racist that create and influence the classroom. As my discussion of white racial habitus suggests, the structures of our writing assessments come from our society, our academic disciplines, and educational institutions, which have been organized to keep whites and whiteness dominant. In Charles Mills’ (1997) award-winning book, The Racial Contract, he argues that Western civilization historically has cultivated and maintained a “racial contract” for the purposes of maintaining such white racial dominance in society at large. In one sense, Mills’ could be arguing that there is an over-arching racial project that Western societies have participated in historically. We can hear how the racialized consequences of the racial contract are easily translatable to the consequences of college writing assessments in Mills explanation of the racial contract:
set of formal or informal agreements or meta-agreements (higher-level contracts about contracts, which set the limits of the contracts’ validity) between the members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated by (shifting) “racial” (phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria C1, C2, C3 … as “white,” and coextensive (making due allowance for gender differentiation) with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as “nonwhite” and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled politics … the general purpose of the Contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them. All whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some whites are not signatories to it. (1997, p. 11)
One good way to subordinate nonwhite groups in California generally would be to maintain the EPT as a placement and entrance writing assessment, since doing so would in effect keep more students of color out of college and allow more (relatively speaking) white students in. A good way to validate its uses so as to maintain white racial supremacy is to do so abstractly, using disciplinary meta-agreements about what constitutes validity and bias, despite the contradictions those agreements create when applied to the literacy competencies of locally diverse students in, say, Fresno. This racial contract flows into, is then assumed in, all writing classrooms.
Furthermore, a part of the racial contract is the categorizing of other things that lead to racial hierarchies, such as an uncritical privileging of a local SEAE in college writing courses, or an unreflective expectation of the fictional, monolingual English speaker and writer that many have critiqued (Horner & Trimbur, 2002; Horner et al., 2011; Jordan, 2012; Lu, 1994). Before writing teachers can breach the racial contract, we have to recognize it as such, and see it as informing our past and present classroom writing assessment ecologies because it has informed the U.S. history and Western society.
There is one adjustment, however, to the language of Mills’ racial contract theory that I make for use in classroom writing assessment. His language suggests that the purposes, perhaps even intent, of the racial contract’s sets of agreements are to privilege whites, but I think, at least in the realm of classroom writing assessment, it should be emphasized that the purpose of the racial contract might be more accurately identified as its function, which is beyond or despite intentions or purposes. The racial contract involved in any writing assessment ecology cannot be said to regulate explicitly the assessment’s purposes. Purposes are connected tightly to people, and have particular associations with writing assessments. It would be extremely rare, in my opinion, to find a writing assessment whose purposes are explicitly to subordinate students of color or deny them opportunities in a writing classroom. However, I emphasize that the racial contract for these same writing assessments functions in the same way that Mills describes, but not from an expressed purpose to do so, instead the racial contract of writing assessments usually functions in these ways despite our antiracist intentions or good purposes because the racial contract is structural in nature and privileges a white racial habitus.
To put it bluntly, when the function of a writing assessment is primarily to promote a local SEAE or dominant discourse, without regard to the literacies that various racial formations bring to the classroom, or the various ways that particular racialized linguistic structures are judged by the teacher, then many students may be treated unfairly. The writing assessment may be racist, and all in the name of an abstract liberal principle: to teach all students the same English, the dominant one, to maintain the tacit whiteness associated with the local SEAE and the writing assessment itself. My implicit argument is that this project (to assess everyone by standards of the same discourse, the same English) is an inherently racist project.
Often writing teachers claim to assess everyone by the same standards or expectations because this practice is inherently fair. If only we could stop being so fair, we might have a chance at making serious antiracist change. Fairness is often articulated as a white liberal value, but it often protects white interests by maintaining racist practices and effects by appealing to an abstract liberal principle, such as, “everyone should be treated the same.” This value makes no sense when we try to transplant the abstract principle of fairness to, say, fruit. Is an orange better than an apple because it is juicier? Of course not, they are just different. And their differences are acknowledged and accepted. But when we deny racialized difference in the writing classroom, we tend to judge apples by their orangeness. I realize the metaphor breaks down, but my point is: it is not fairness that we need in antiracist writing assessment ecologies, or any antiracist project—it is not judgment by the exact same standard that we need—it is revolutionary change, radically different methods, structures, and assumptions about the way things are now and how to distribute privileges.
As I’ve argued similarly elsewhere (Inoue, 2007), fairness in any writing assessment ecology is not an inherent quality, practice, or trait that then allows us to claim an assessment is fair for everyone. Judging everyone by the same standard is not an inherently fair practice in a writing classroom. Fairness is a construction of the ecology itself. It is contingent, and its primary constituents are agreement and participation by those in the ecology. When you don’t have enough agreement (not consensus), participation, and an acknowledgement of fairness as a dynamic and shifting construct of the ecology, it is difficult to have a fair writing assessment.
Criticisms of Race as an Organizing Principle
Some may argue that the problems we see, for example in the Hmong student populations and their lower performance on the EPT or the failure rates in the writing program I showed above, are mostly economic in nature, or a product of different cultural values about school or language practices, or a result of some social dimension that has nothing to do with race, that there is no need to think in terms of race because race doesn’t really exist. It just confuses and muddies the waters. In short, some may argue that it is not race but other non-racial, more fundamental factors that affect any writing assessment’s results.
I do not deny that such factors as economics are involved. African-Americans and Hmong in Fresno are often some of the poorest in the community, with very high poverty rates, higher than those of whites—and this intersection of economics and race is not a coincidence so we shouldn’t treat it as such. These kinds of factors intersect and make up racialized experiences as political, as relations of power. In the U.S., power usually is organized around three nodes of difference: gender, race, and economics. These non-racial factors are the structuring structures that racial habitus references. These structures become racialized when they pool or gather into patterns in groups in society, creating distinctions from the white hegemonic group. These structures then are used as markers of difference that then justify the denial of privilege, power, and access to opportunities, such as education. Using a local SEAE as a way to determine the merit of a student, her fitness for college, or the value of her literacies in college are clear cases of societal structures that become racialized when they are used to maintain white privilege. Just because we don’t call our valuing of