Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. Asao B. Inoue
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In this way, the model attempts to resist being racist by using the abstract liberal tenant of individualism (e.g., we are all unique). It theorizes that the particulars of any context determine what we do, how we read, why we read, what meaning or judgments we can make, etc. But it resists acknowledging in any way race or racism as a phenomenon, resists noticing or acting on larger patterns. By referencing individualism, by referring to all students as individuals, the model loses the ability to see broader patterns by any number of social dimensions. It resists seeing and acting against racism as structural. To many, this model would amount to not seeing racism, ignoring it, then saying that it doesn’t matter. It may not matter, but you cannot know that until you investigate it.
There are many good things about Huot’s theorizing of context for reading and response; however, treating every student as a unique student, as a particular student, isn’t in contradiction to seeing racism as affecting our students of color, seeing larger, broader patterns that reveal the uneven relations to the dominant discourse and the judgments it promotes as unevenly tilted in favor of white students. But this nuance, even in a very nuanced and complex model for reading and responding, is lost because of the way Huot does not treat racism in his discussion. In part, this is because those in the field of writing assessment do not have vocabularies to help them discuss racism.
Most important, Huot’s avoidance of considering racism in his discussion is the larger cause of this theory of reading and responding to lack a necessary attention to an antiracist agenda, which I know he would want to promote. Through it all, Huot, like most others, never attempts to understand context or historically changing values in reading, for instance, through other theoretical lenses that could help reveal racism, such as those of postcolonialism, whiteness studies, and Marxian theories, which could reveal ways that historically changing tastes and values may be influenced by historically changing racial formations in various schools, or the particular manifestation of whiteness in an assessment, or the historical structures of racism that affect who goes to school when and where at what times in U.S. history. This lack of treating racism makes it invisible in this otherwise very good theory of reading and response, which is the thrust of Huot’s chapter.3
About the Resistance to Racism
I get a lot of resistance to explicitly thinking about race and racism in discussions of writing assessment, or I get silence, which I take as one form of resistance. This probably is an unfair assessment of some, I realize, but these discussions in hallways, classrooms, conferences, and over email are a part of why I write this book. And I feel it necessary to address these resistances in this introduction as a way to conclude it.
What troubles me are people who look at racial inequalities, look at racism in writing classrooms and programs, like the numbers and statistics I show later in this book and say, “how do we know that is racism?” My mind often whirls at such questions. Forget for a moment how it happened, inequalities are here. No African-Americans in your classes, few in your school. Where are the Native Americans? Most who are there, do not do well. They fail. Why? Isn’t it enough to see such patterns? Does it really matter whether readers envisioned Latino or Black writers when they judge blindly the writing on the SAT writing exam or the English Placement Test (EPT) in California, which I discuss later in this book, or the writing of African-American students in first-year courses at Fresno State, the ones with a higher failure rate than any other racial formation? Here’s what matters to me. White students uniformly and historically do better on most if not all writing assessments, large-scale or classroom. It may not be intentional, but it is racism, and it is a product of the writing assessment ecologies we create. Do not get me wrong. I do not blame white students or teachers. I blame writing assessments.
Richard Haswell disagrees with me to a degree, but he voices an important critique of the use of racism as a concept and goals in writing assessments. In his review of Race and Writing Assessment (Inoue & Poe, 2012a), Haswell’s (2013) central critique of the book is that there is a contradiction in any investigation of racism in writing assessments. He says, “People cannot go about eliminating racism without constructing the notion of race, and the construction of race can only further racism” (Haswell, 2013). A little later, he makes an even more direct claim, which can be read as a criticism of the present book and its antiracist project: “any writing assessment shaped by anti-racism will still be racism or, if that term affronts, will be stuck in racial contradictions” (2013). What follows are a discussion of four “racial aporias” that we live with because we live with the contradiction of race.
The fourth aporia that Haswell identifies is one about the subject position of the researcher or teacher in an antiracist writing assessment project, such as the one this book attempts to articulate. He states it this way: “Writing scholars position themselves outside institutional racism to understand it but their understanding concludes that there is no outside” (2013). The point that Haswell is making is that no one can escape their own racial subjectivity or the structural influences in society and school that make up what we call race and racism. We taint our own efforts at antiracist writing assessments. Of the contributors of the collection, Haswell claims, “None of them voice the possibility that this pervasiveness of racial formations might include their own relations, conceptions, and identities,” and he concludes, “the editors note that their book, which repeatedly castigates the stylistic criterion of high academic English as a racial formation, is entirely written in high academic English” (2013).
I do not deny these observations at all, but they do not make an antiracist project of any kind, including an antiracist writing assessment theory, impossible to do or wrong-headed. On the contrary, because we are all implicated in racism in our classrooms and in society, because race is already constructed for us historically, because racism already exists, because we already live in racial contradictions, we should be engaging in antiracist projects. The use, for instance, of a Standardized Edited American English (SEAE), a hegemonic discourse, is not an indicator of racism on my part because of what and why I say what I do. No, my discourse is an indicator of my subversive success at making a local SEAE and dominant discourse my own, making that discourse less white and more universal by diversifying it, and pushing us all to interrogate our uses of it in our classrooms. I’ve worked hard to have the voice I have in the academy, made some linguistic sacrifices, changed my ways with words and my dispositions toward texts, but I’d argue my voice and what it says changes the academy too, just as others’ voices have.4 SEAE, of course, is often a racial marker, a marker of whiteness, but not a marker of one’s racial formation, nor a marker of racism unless it is used against students in a writing assessment as the standard. Its use by a researcher or teacher isn’t necessarily a racist act, neither is identifying those standardized structures as racialized, and people who historically have been racialized by them. The point isn’t to get rid of race. Race is one way we mark diversity and complexity, difference. The point is to get rid of racism, unfair racialzied hierarchies. Haswell would have me avoid race completely in hopes that it withers and dies for lack of attention, which then creates a nonracist world. But to deny race is just another way to deny diversity, which is natural and needed in all systems. So it is how writing assessments deploy discourses and judgments that make them racist not our references to difference.
As Haswell notes, there are contradictions, aporias. SEAE is learned, but not always by choice. I will be the first to admit that I lost my ghetto English a long time ago (but not the swearing) for the wrong reasons, for racist reasons. I cannot help that. I was young and didn’t understand racism or language. I just felt and experienced racism, and some of it was due to how I talked and wrote in school. I was captivated by the kind of English I read in the first few books of my literary life, White Fang, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird. It sounded smart and clever, even magical, magical in the ways that Gorgias speaks of language in his famous fragment, Encomium of Helen. Language bewitched me quite literally. Part of that spell had racist components. Since then, I’ve come to see that language as a hegemonic discourse that, like all others, can be helpful and harmful depending on how it is used and what it communicates.
I don’t expect everyone to see my project as the best beginning to antiracist writing assessments, but don’t tell me there isn’t racism in writing classrooms. Don’t tell me we can ignore it and that doing so will make it go away. Don’t tell me we shouldn’t see race and that’s the answer to racism.