Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. Asao B. Inoue
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we deal with the above assessment issues in classrooms as economic ones and not racial ones? We could, but we’d be denying the way economics constructs racialized experiences and subjectivities in the U.S. and in our classrooms.
Furthermore in the U.S., we just do not uniformly act or behave based on fine-tuned, ethnic or cultural distinctions because the tensions among various groups have always been about maintaining or gaining power, privilege, property, or rights. Culture, language, and ethnic differences to a hegemonic whiteness are used to construct power relations, but they tend to be used to create broader racial differences. It’s much easier to use a broader category like race, than distinguish between ethnic Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Hmong, etc. It’s easier just to say Asian. Because the bottom line is, historically the main reasons to identify the differences in any group in the U.S. has been to subordinate that group to white power and deny privileges. And even though the motives may not be what they used to be, the effects of the structures that remain are the same.
Education and literacy, the keys to the kingdom, are a part of these power relations because they tend to be seen as a way to confer privileges and jobs. Consider the discussions of literacy in the U.S. as white property, particularly around the decisions of Brown v. Board of Education (Bell, 2004; Prendergast, 2003). Or more broadly, consider the ways whiteness has been used as a way to claim and hold onto jobs and property by whites (Lipsitz, 1998; Roediger, 1999). Perhaps the most powerful term that explains how race often is used to maintain power, property, and privilege is in Pierre L. van den Berghe’s term, “herrenvolk democracy” (; Roediger, 1999, p. 59; van den Berghe, 1967, pp. 17-18). Herrenvolk democracy explains the way a society, through laws and norms, creates a democratic system for a dominant group, but simultaneously offers a considerably less democratic one for subordinate groups. Race is a convenient and well-used way to construct subordinate groups, ones with less access to property, jobs, literacy, and education. Today, we use language to do this subordinating, which racializes all writing assessment.
It isn’t hard to see the denial or dramatically less access to education, jobs, privilege, and social power to people of color, particularly African-Americans, Latinos/as, and Native Americans (Asians are a set of complex racial formations, uneven in their access to power). While no one is denying college entrance to, for instance, Black students because they are Black, almost all colleges use SAT and ACT scores to help determine candidacy. As mentioned earlier, Breland et al. (2004) found that SAT scores are hierarchical by race, with whites performing the best and Blacks the worst. Furthermore, GPAs and other extra-curricular activities are used by colleges in their application processes also. This means if you are poor, you likely will have gone to a high school that couldn’t prepare you well for college. According to the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, Blacks and non-white Hispanics live in poverty at the highest rates of all racial groups, with just over a quarter of non-white Hispanics and 27.2% of Blacks living in poverty (National Center for Law and Economic Justice, n.d.).16 Many more Blacks and Latinos/as live in poverty than whites, thus they are more likely to go to schools that do not prepare them for college in traditional ways, and any application they may submit likely will be viewed as weaker than their white counterparts. Economics, tax laws that fund schools unequally, and the like are some of the structuring structures that seem not to be about race but are racialized, and they structure the racial habitus of students. A herrenvolk democracy in schools, from elementary to college, itself structures inequality into just about all writing assessments by working from laws and norms that racially privilege a white racial habitus that is nurtured in some places and starved in others.
It is important to remember, though, as Bourdieu’s habitus makes clear, that there is no “conscious aiming at ends.” There are no racists, just structural and systemic racism. The herrenvolk democracy of a classroom writing assessment happens through a variety of means, such as valuing a local SEAE, but it produces a two-track system of privilege that rewards a white habitus exclusively. This is why translingual approaches (Horner et al., 2011), world Englishes, and code meshing pedagogies (Canagarajah, 2006; Young, 2004, 2007, 2011; Young & Martinez, 2011) are important to develop; however, I have yet to see a serious attempt at developing classroom writing assessments from such approaches. Understanding racial habitus as a set of historically generated discursive, material, and performative structuring structures that are both subjective and projective in nature seems a good place to begin thinking about how writing assessments might understand the Englishes they attempt to judge and make decisions on.
Race as Part of a Global Imaginary of Writing Assessment
But if teachers are not consciously trying to be racist, and usually attempting to do exactly the opposite in their classroom writing assessments, which I think is the case, then what is happening? How can race affect a teacher’s practices if she isn’t thinking in terms of race, or if she is trying not to let race be a factor in the way she reads or judges student writing? How can my classroom writing assessments be racist if I’m not racist and I try to treat everyone fairly, try not to punish multilingual students or Black students or Latino/a students for the languages they bring with them into the classroom? In fact, I try to celebrate those languages. In short, the answer to these question has to do with larger, global imaginaries about education and race that started long before any of us were teaching our first writing courses.
Again, the Fresno Hmong are instructive in addressing these questions. There are only two ethnic formations in Fresno that can be called refugees, the Hmong and Armenians. The experiences of Hmong in Fresno are racialized. Hmong are the newest, having arrived in three waves, between 1975 and 1991, 1992 and 1999, 2000 and the present (Yang, 2009, p. 79). The Hmong originally came to Fresno not by choice but because it was the only way out of persecution and the eroding conditions in the refugee camps of Laos and Thailand (Chan, 1994; Dao, 1982; Lieb, 1996, pp. 17-20). Coming in three distinct periods and under very similar conditions makes the Hmong racial formation quite consistent in regards to living conditions, cultural ties and practices, employment, languages spoken, and educational experiences. However because they share Asian physical traits and come from Asia as refugees after the Vietnam war, Hmong tend to be seen and treated as foreigners, as the racial other, despite the fact that most Hmong in college are U.S. born citizens. This is historically the way all Asian immigrants and Asian-Americans have experienced racialized life in the U.S., including me (just consider my experiences in the trailer park). The U.S. government’s treatment of its territories of Guam and American Samoa epitomizes this racialize alien othering. These territories are not considered sovereign states, yet are governed by the U.S., and those born there do not receive automatic U.S. citizenship, but they are allowed to join the U.S. military. American Samoa has the highest rate of U.S. military enlistment anywhere (Total Military Recruits, 2004). Guam was acquired in 1898 as part of the Treaty of Paris after the Spanish-America war, while American Samoa was occupied by the U.S. Navy in 1900 and officially named a territory in 1911. A U.S. territory was originally meant to be a short-term political designation that referred to areas that the U.S. was acquiring, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The long reluctance to make these territories (among others, like Puerto Rico) states suggests the associations of Asians and Pacific Islanders as perpetual foreigners, as racialized alien others.
Angelo Ancheta (1998) shows historically how Asians have been legally deemed the other, denied rights, property, and citizenship. Robert Lee (1999) demonstrates the ways Asians have been represented in U.S. culture over the last century as the racial other, as the “Heathen Chinee” “Coolie,” “gook,” and “model minority.” Vijay Prashad (2000) demonstrates the complex relationship that the U.S. has had with the East as mysterious, filled with menageries, harems, and gurus, but these associations always reinforce the idea of Asians as perpetual foreigners. Christina Klein (2003) shows the way a cold war mentality in the U.S. affected the Orientalism that constructed the ways Americans tend to relate to Asians, most notably through narratives of “sentimental education” that offered cultural and racial integration on a global scale after WWII. And this sentimental education, one of parental guidance for the childlike Asians (similar to the sentimentality voiced in Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden”) has bearing on Hmong students in Fresno. The parental language that says, “we know what’s best for them,” is pervasive in schools and college and is the rationale for the EPT and Early Start program, even though the test does not