Chapter 1: The Function of Race in Writing Assessments

      In order to understand why an antiracist project is so important to any classroom writing assessment ecology, even before I define that ecology, the concepts of race, racial formation, and racism need to be discussed and defined. Therefore in this chapter, I argue for a term, “racial habitus,” as a way to understand the function of race in writing assessment ecologies, making all writing assessment ecologies racial projects of some kind.5 I distinguish racial habitus from Omi and Winant’s (1994) term, “racial formations,” which I use to refer to the actual people that populate schools and writing classrooms. I discuss the term “racism,” which might initially be understood as a larger set of historical structures, assumptions, and effects (or consequences) of any racial project. Through my discussions of racial habitus and racism, I address several criticisms or resistances by those who may feel that a focus on racism in classroom writing assessment ecologies may be misguided or wrong. What I hope to make clear is that we have no choice in thinking about racism in our writing assessments. And if we care about antiracist or social justice projects in the writing classroom, we need to care about and address explicitly the way race functions in our classroom writing assessments. Thus, I ask in this chapter: how might we define race and understand its function in classroom writing assessments so that we can articulate antiracist writing assessments?

      The Importance of Race

      Race is an important social dimension, a lived dimension of everyone’s life despite its socially constructed nature (Ferrante & Brown, 1998; Gossett, 1963). No one can avoid the way race is structured in our lives, even those who do not wish to see it, and even though it isn’t real in the same way someone has black hair or brown eyes. Our social, economic, and political histories in the U.S. are underwritten by the construct of race, as many have discussed already, particularly by looking at whiteness and the creation of white bodies and people (Hannaford, 1996; Ignatiev, 1995; Lipsitz, 1998; Mills, 1997; Roediger, 1999). The influence of the concept of race is in the coded ways we talk about each other, the words we use for race and to avoid its reference (Bonilla-Silva, 2003a, 2003b; Villanueva, 2006). It is in the way we behave and perform our identities (Inda, 2000; Young, 2004, 2007), which can also be seen in discussions of gender performativity (Butler, 1990; Salih, 2002). Many in composition studies have argued that race is an important social dimension that we must pay attention to if we are to teach better, assess better, and build a more socially just future (hooks, 1994; Hurlbert, 2012; Prendergast, 1998; Villanueva, 1993, 1997; Young, 2007).

      Even those who promote multilingual and translingual pedagogies (Horner & Trimbur, 2002; Horner et al., 2011; Jordan, 2012), which are not focused on race but linguistic difference from the dominant academic discourse, often assume racial structures that support and are associated with the linguistic and language competencies of all students. In other words, even if we wish to avoid talking about race and just talk about linguistic difference, which appears to be about a real difference in groups of people in the writing classroom, appears to be a dimension without prejudice, appears safer to notice and judge because we’re judging writing, not race, the people who most often form multilingual English students or linguistic difference from the dominant academic discourse are racialized in conventional ways, as are their languages and writing. In fact, our discursive performances are some of the ways race is produced as a social dimension that distinguishes people (Inda, 2000). Race is often marked through language. In short, those who identify primarily as African-American, or Latino/a, or Asian-Pacific American often are the multilingual students or the linguistically different in schools.

      As a social construction, race is complex, often composed of multiple factors that intersect in one’s life despite the fact that it is a fabrication by people over time. We made up race, then it became something real. But it is not real, just as gender isn’t real. I’m reminded of Stephen J. Gould’s (1981) discussion of the reification of the construct of IQ. In his well-known book, The Mismeasure of Man, Gould (1981) draws out historically the ways that IQ tests and the testing of intelligence through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to clear racist consequences by creating the construct of IQ and using it against non-white populations to show their inferiority to whites. Gould shows how easy it is for people to “convert abstract concepts into entities” (1981, p. 24), meaning once a test becomes accepted, its results, like an IQ number or an SAT or EPT score, are “reified,” which then allows the reification to be deployed in a number of ways in society. While we act as if the signifier of an IQ or EPT or SAT score is something real, the test itself created this thing. We forget that the construct that the scores allegedly measure are created by the tests and do not actually exist before those tests.

      In his compelling sociological account, F. Allan Hanson (1993) comes to this same conclusion, showing historically how various tests and examinations create the very attributes and competencies they purport to measure. Thus there is no IQ before IQ tests, no remedial status before the EPT. One might say (although it isn’t completely true), in the case of Fresno, there is no racial hierarchy until the EPT produces it. While the EPT is not testing race, per se, race is a complex set of material and discursive factors that create groups of students with similar competencies and literacies in the test. Race functions through the EPT because the test does not account for the multiple literacies, the multilingual capacities, of all the students currently taking the test. It uncritically and unknowingly accounts for one kind of literacy, a dominant one, a hegemonic one, a white, middle class discourse (I’ll offer evidence of this claim later in this chapter).

      It is no coincidence, then, that race was used to understand the results of intelligence tests early in the 20th century. One example should do. As Norbert Elliot (2005) explains, the army alpha and beta tests that determined intelligence, thus opportunities for taking positions in the military, were given to recruits in the second decade of the twentieth century (pp. 59-60). A part of the concerns that the test makers had once they began testing recruits was the high frequency of illiteracy in southern Black and immigrant recruits, which they associated with mental deficiency or lack of intelligence (Elliot, 2005, pp. 64-66). It didn’t occur to the test makers that perhaps the construct of intelligence in their tests was not universal, and required particular experiences and cultural references that Blacks from the south and immigrants just didn’t have access to (for different reasons). Instead, Robert Yerkes, the man in charge of the tests, concluded that the illiteracy of any group of recruits was dependent on the number of Black recruits in the group. Additionally, he concluded that most immigrants from Italy, Poland, and Greece were illiterate (and thus less intelligent), than their English, Scottish, and Irish immigrant counterparts (Elliot, 2005, p. 66). Race functioned to make sense of the test results, validating their findings.

      In these obvious ways, race has had a strong connection to assessment generally since assessment tends to confer social and economic privileges. Tests like the army alpha and beta, the SAT and EPT, often are gateways to educational and economic access, privilege, and jobs. Many have shown the ways that U.S. society in general has been designed to protect such privileges and access for whites and kept them at arm’s distance to racialized others (Ignatiev, 1995; Lipsitz, 1998; Mills, 1997; Roediger, 1999). Many of these structures still exist, even if only as lingering, familial economic privileges (or lack of privileges) gained by past generations and available to the present generation. Many of these structures exist in everyday reading and judging activities that teachers do with student writing, as Lester Faigley (1992) convincingly shows. In his discussion of Coles and Vopat’s collection, What Makes Writing Good, Faigley demonstrates that particular class—and I argue racial—dispositions function