Teaching While Black: Witnessing and Countering Disciplinary Whiteness, Racial Violence, and University Race-Management (original) (raw)

2015, Literacy in Composition Studies

Abstract

The late Critical Race Theorist, Derrick Bell, argued that we must see racial progress as cyclical, sometimes regressing in catastrophic ways and, at other times, incrementally moving forward (Bell, Delgado). He called this position Racial Realism and saw it as the most hopeful and pragmatic theoretical lens and praxis to do anti-racist work. His reminder of the importance of Racial Realism seems all the more portent today given the brutal murder of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, the treatment of Rachel Jeantel’s court testimony about Trayvon’s murder, the nationwide protests that have animated young activists, the discursive somersaults that law enforcement and state institutions continually maneuver to justify racial profiling, and the obvious and constant reminder that to be black in the United States is to be the target of a ruthless racial violence. Most days, it feels like I am still an undergraduate during the 1992 rebellions in South Central Los Angeles when the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King got us to our feet. Sylvia Wynter reminded us, as best captured in her writing called “‘No Humans Involved’: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” as we protested on our campuses, that we be sure to keep the epistemological frameworks and knowledge systems of our disciplines in focus. She passionately urged us to decode the symbolic violence that was encoded into our disciplinary sense-making that was ideologically wedded to the very same violence waged against Rodney King and South Central Los Angeles. I propose to take up Wynter’s charge here: 1) that, we begin to notice the violence in the classrooms and research that we sustain, and; 2) that, we question the disciplinary apparatus that makes it possible that racially subordinated students of color will experience racial violence at the site where they are supposed to be democratically educated: the composition classroom. I’m talking about the kind of social and political processes that we need in order to prevent racist logics as viable membership in this community that we call composition-rhetoric and I am calling these racist logics of the same order of violence as the murder of Trayvon Martin and dismissal of Rachel Jeantel. Wynter was always sure that undoing racial violence is an intellectual and epistemological task, but only if we see the work in front of us. I am not interested here in general discussions about moral and philosophical principles of equity, equality, or diversity. I am offering my own personal experiences and stance of bearing-witness as more than just one individual’s observations but an indication of the levels of systemic racism that we do not address. I take up the tools that Allan Luke privileges: the tools of “story, metaphor, history, and philosophy, leavened with empirical claims,” all of which Luke argues are as integral to truth-telling and policymaking as field experiments and meta-analyses (368). I take up these tools in the context of myself as a writer and researcher of black language, education, and literacies as well as an educator of future compositionists. I use two main-frame narratives to offer stories of institutional racism that compositionists--- and thereby, our field--- have maintained. These frames offer a place to decode the symbolic violence that is encoded into our disciplinary sense-making and move towards what a theory of Racial Realism might entail for our classrooms and discipline.

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

References (54)

  1. Alfred, Mary. "Reconceptualizing Marginality from the Margins: Perspective of African American Tenured Female Faculty at a White Research University. " Western Journal of Black Studies 25.1 (2001): 1-11. Print.
  2. Barone, Thomas. "Narrative Researchers as Witnesses of Injustice and Agents of Social Change?" Educational Researcher 38.8 (2009): 591-97. Print.
  3. Bell, Derrick. "Diversity's Distractions. " Columbia Law Review 103 (2003): 1622-1633. Print.
  4. ---. Faces at the Bottom of the Well. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Print.
  5. ---. "Racial Realism. " Connecticut Law Review 24.2 (1992): 363-79. Print.
  6. ---. "Racial Realism in Retrospect. " Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence. Eds. Joshua Rosenkranz and Bernard Schwartz. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1997. 199-206. Print.
  7. ---. Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform. New York: Oxford UP, 2004. Print. Black Women's Health Imperative, 2002. Web. 15 July 2010.
  8. Blay, Yaba. "A Care Package for Tiana: Locs of LOVE. " Dr. Yaba Blay: Professor, Scholar, Producer, 6 Sep. 2013. Web. 6 Sep. 2013.
  9. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Print.
  10. Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. New York UP, 2008. Print.
  11. Carretta, Vincent. Phillis Wheatley: Biography of A Genius in Bondage. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2011. Print.
  12. Cleveland, Darrell. A Long Way to Go: Conversations about Race by African American Faculty and Graduate Students at Predominantly White Institutions. New York: Lang, 2004. Print.
  13. Coulter, Cathy, and Mary Lee Smith. "The Construction Zone: Literary Elements in Narrative Research. " Educational Researcher 38.8 (2009): 577-90. Print.
  14. Darling-Hammond, Linda. "What Happens to a Dream Deferred? The Continuing Quest for Equal Educational Opportunity. " Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education. Eds. James Banks and C. McGee. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2004. 607-30. Print.
  15. Delgado, Richard. "Derrick Bell's Racial Realism: A Commentary on White Optimism And Black Despair. " Connecticut Law Review 24 (1992). Print.
  16. Dixson, Adrienne, and Celia Rousseau. Critical Race Theory in Education: All God's Children Got a Song. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
  17. Doak, Robin S. Phillis Wheatley: Slave and Poet. Minneapolis: Compass Point, 2007. Print. Fenelon, James. "Race, Research, and Tenure: Institutional Credibility and the Incorporation of African, Latino, and American Indian Faculty. " Journal of Black Studies 34.1 (2003): 87-100. Print. Gates, Henry Louis Jr. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters With the Founding Fathers. New York: Basic Civitas, 2003. Print.
  18. Gee, James Paul. "The New Literacy Studies: From 'Socially Situated' to the Work of the Social. " Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context. Eds. David Barton, Mary Hamilton, and Roz Ivanic. Psychology Press, 2000. 180-96. Print.
  19. Gillborn, David. Racism and Education: Coincidence or Conspiracy? New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Gonick, Maria and Janice Hladki. "Who Are the Participants? Rethinking Representational Practices and Writing with Heterotopic Possibility in Qualitative Inquiry. " International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18.3 (2005): 285-304. Print.
  20. Guinier, Lani. "Admissions Rituals as Political Acts: Guardians at the Gates of Our Democratic Ideals. " Harvard Law Review 117.1 (2003): 113-224. Print.
  21. Guinier, Lani and Gerald Torres. The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002. Print.
  22. Gutiérrez y Muhs, Gabriella, Yolanda Flores Niemann,, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris, eds. Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 2012. Print.
  23. "Income and Poverty in Communities of Color: A Reflection on the 2009 U.S. Census Bureau Data. " Center for Research and Policy in the Public Interest, 2010. Retrieved Summer 2010. PDF file.
  24. Jacobs-Huey, LaNita. "The Natives are Gazing and Talking Back: Reviewing the Problematics of Positionality, Voice, and Accountability among 'Native' Anthropologists. " American Anthropologist 104.3 (2002): 791-804. Print.
  25. Kynard, Carmen, and Robert Eddy. "Toward a New Critical Framework: Color-Conscious Political Morality and Pedagogy at Historically Black and Historically White Colleges and Universities. " College Composition and Communication 61.1 (September 2009): W24-W44. Print.
  26. Ladson-Billings, Gloria. Crossing Over to Canaan: The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001. Print.
  27. ---. "Is the Team All Right? Diversity and Teacher Education. " Journal of Teacher Education 56.2 (2005): 229-34. Print.
  28. ---. "Preparing Teachers for Diverse Student Populations: A Critical Race Theory Perspective. " Review of Research in Education 24.1 (1999): 211-47. Print.
  29. Ladson-Billings, Gloria and William Tate. "Toward a Theory of Critical Race Theory in Education. " Teachers College Record 97.1 (1995): 47-68. Print.
  30. Langley, April C. E. The Black Aesthetic Unbound: Theorizing the Dilemma of Eighteenth-Century African American Literature. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2008. Print.
  31. Leonardo, Zeus. Race, Whiteness, and Education. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.
  32. Luke, Allan. "Generalizing Across Borders: Policy and the Limits of Educational Science. " Educational Researcher 40.8 (2011): 367-77. Print.
  33. Moses, Michele and Mitchell Chang. "Toward a Deeper Understanding of the Diversity Rationale. " Educational Researcher 35.1 (2006): 6-11. Print. National Healthcare Disparities Report, 2003. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2003. Web. 15 March 2015.
  34. Orfield, Gary. "The Access Crisis in Higher Education. " Educational Policy 19 (2005): 255-61. Print.
  35. Powell, Malea. "Stories Take Place. " College Composition and Communication 64.2 (2012): 383-406. Print.
  36. Richardson, Elaine. African American Literacies. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Print.
  37. Richardson, Laurel. Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1997. Print.
  38. ---. "Getting Personal: Writing Stories. " Qualitative Studies in Education 14.1 (2001): 33-38.
  39. ---. "Poetic Representations of Interviews. " Postmodern Interviewing. Eds. Jaber Gubrium and James Holstein. London: Sage, 2003. 187-201. Print.
  40. ---. "Writing: A Method of Inquiry. " The Handbook of Qualitative Research. 2 nd Ed. Eds. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2000. 923-48. Print.
  41. Roediger, David. How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Obama Phenomenon. New York: Verso, 2008. Print.
  42. Ross, Thomas. "The Rhetorical Tapestry of Race: White Innocence and Black Abstraction. " William & Mary Law Review 32.1 (1990): 1-40. Print.
  43. Sadao, Kathleen, and Linda Johnsrud. "The Common Experience of 'Otherness': Ethnic and Racial Minority Faculty. " Review of Higher Education 21.4 (1998): 315-42. Print.
  44. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People. Zed Books, 1999. Print.
  45. Stanley, Christine. Faculty of Color: Teaching in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities. Bolton: Anker, 2006. Print.
  46. Stanley, Christine et al. "A Case Study of the Teaching Experiences of African American Faculty at Two Predominantly White Research Universities. " Journal of Excellence in College Teaching 14.1 (2003): 151-78. Print.
  47. Swartz, Ellen. "Diversity: Gatekeeping Knowledge and Maintaining Inequalities. " Review of Educational Research 79.2 (June 2009): 1044-1083. Print.
  48. Thomas, Gloria and Carol Hollenshead. "Resisting from the Margins: The Coping Strategies of Black Women and Other Women of Color Faculty Members at a Research University. " Journal of Negro Education 70.3 (2002): 166-75. Print.
  49. Turner, Caroline. "Incorporation and Marginalization in the Academy: From Border Toward Center for Faculty of Color. " Journal of Black Studies 34.1 (2003): 112-25. Print.
  50. Wynter, Sylvia. "Do Not Call Us Negros": How Multicultural Textbooks Perpetuate Racism. San Francisco: Aspire, 1990. Print.
  51. ---. "'No Humans Involved': An Open Letter to My Colleagues. " Forum N.H.I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century 1.1 (1994): 42-72. Print.
  52. ---. "'No Humans Involved': An Open Letter to My Colleagues. " Voices of the African Diaspora: The CAAS Research Review 8.2 (1992): 13-16. Print.
  53. Yosso, Tara, Laurence Parker, Daniel Solorzano, and Marvin Lynn. "From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action and Back Again: A Critical Race Discussion of Racialized Rationales and Access to Higher Education. " Review of Research in Education 28 (2004): 1-26. Print.
  54. Young, Morris. Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005. Print.