ANTI-RACIST ACTIVISM: TEACHING RHETORIC AND WRITING
Elizabeth Boquet (2002), in her book Noise from the Writing Center, and especially her chapter "Tutoring as (Hard) 'Labor': The Writing Clinic, The Writing Laboratory, The Writing Center," explores the implications of conceptions of tutoring, and writing center work in general, as women's work. She reconsiders metaphors like that of the midwife and "the cleaning lady" (p. 19, 16), and I can't help but think of the connections between women's work in the labor force and women's work in homes, in families. One metaphor that sometimes circulates around writing center conversations is that of "family." The metaphor of writing centers as families works for a lot of people (I won't force it on you) because they see similar constructions between the Writing Center and an "ideal" family home—one where the people who make up the Writing Center community supposedly understand your problems, respect you, give you a comfy couch to sit on, coffee, and advice (if you ask for it) more so than the harsh, cruel outside world of academia. This is, of course, the same kind of idealization that Boquet (2002) writes against. "Where is the noise?!" (p. 19).
We can break down this metaphor of family.
This construction of "the ideal family," even without applying it to the Writing Center, is already racially-loaded and steeped in white culture, which has a specific idea of what family should be like: one that privileges whiteness (as seen in white ideas of "politeness," "professionalism," and "caring") and pretends to be the one true universal family ideal when it doesn't necessarily deserve that credit (and, worse, even when its family structure doesn't work for, or even harms, some people).
In Oklahoma, we might understand an even more specific ideal structure of "family" that has crept into our Writing Center as including white Southern hospitality and white Southern politeness as its values. A white-supremacist culture that claims to value "politeness" and "professionalism" and "hospitality" will often use these empty ideals to silence or demean people who are hurt by white supremacy and choose to speak up about it (Jensen 2005). In this way, the ideals end up mattering more than the dignity and the emotions of the people they systematically abuse through white supremacy. Enforcing these ideals is a self-preservation tactic for white supremacist culture in the face of racial confrontation about abuse, and white Southern/Okie conceptions of these ideals certainly contribute to its white supremacist culture.
But white supremacist culture isn't the only abusive culture we're steeped in: we also deal with patriarchy. Like white supremacy, patriarchy is embedded in society, running concurrently, and the two are often intermingled together and alongside further abusive systems. Patriarchy comes into play in the Oklahoma idea of "Family" because one more specific ideal of family structure that has a lot of traction in Oklahoma is that families should include as their unquestionable leader a man to be "head of the house." There's a lot to be said about the damage done by strict patriarchal family structure (Garrison 2011). It's the kind of family structure idealized in the community I come from, even though I'm not from Oklahoma. While patriarchal family structure may work for some people, it's another structure in particular that can very easily lead to abuse, since it views wives as submissive and children as obedient inferiors (some feminists would go so far as to say property) whose fates as individuals are inextricably tied to the success of the family as a whole, and since it functions through its inferior members fearing and serving its patriarch member in order to secure their individual survival.
Even though patriarchy as an abusive family system is not exclusive to white people, we can use it to uncover white supremacy as racial abuse while inhabiting the Writing Center metaphor of "family." In our Writing Center family, the figure I see playing the role of the fearsome, abusive patriarch father is the larger academic structure of capitalism which we all fear and serve. All of our funding comes from certain channels, along with certain restrictions. This capitalism-abuser structure came from conversations within our article writing group where we described feelings of fear and helplessness in conjunction with the Writing Center's model of capitalist systems, workers, and products. If any of us would take on actively racist roles, for example, we would be working in conjunction with the abuser. This abuser system dictates ideals like "politeness" and holds them in higher esteem than any of the human beings who serve under it. This abuser system is white supremacist, and it does not accept any corrections on this point from any underlings within the system it controls. The message we are given from it is this: just try surviving without me. How DO you separate yourself from an institution?
The other role creeping into our Writing Center family from the patriarchal Oklahoma ideal family structure is the mother. In Boquet's chapter, she describes the role of the mother as being one of "labor," both in the sense of birthing and of serving the family/keeping it together. In many families containing an abuser, this labor for mothers has a common pitfall of doing the abuser's psychological enforcing, sending messages like, "Your abuser doesn't know what he's doing," "He can change," "I love both you and your abuser, and that's why I'm not leaving him," or even "Your attempts to protect yourself from your abuser are hurting the family." In this structure, the mother isn't the one who created the rules or the one who abuses (she may even be a victim of abuse, too), but she thinks she can somehow remain "neutral" in others' abuse while enabling and apologizing for their abuser, and is therefore complicit in abuse.
Here's where colorblindness, to me, is most baldly exposed as a kind of abuse. When writing centers think they are remaining value-neutral on race, they're really complicit in the work of white supremacy. When they send messages to students that white supremacist structures in academia are "just how it is," or, worse, when they say "that issue doesn't have anything to do with racism," "you're being too sensitive/emotional/ungrateful," or "you're going against our policy of politeness," they're playing a family role just as much as when they offer free waffles (which we do): the difference is, this family role is abusive.
There's a reason the dominant Oklahoma concept of "family" shouldn't and doesn't work for everyone, and why we should take more care in what kind of "family" our Writing Center is becoming. The Oklahoma family ideal which serves whiteness is the dominant one in our university context, but that doesn't mean we should passively accept it. There are infinite other family models we can consider—I want you to think about the values your family modeled about "Southern politeness" vs. more aggressive/open models of sarcasm, straight talk, lecturing, and yelling. What worked in your context? Think, also, about how your family divided up authority or power—was there a designated patriarchal role, a team of people who worked as family leaders, or some other way of working out rules and responsibilities? What messages did your family send about hospitality—was there a limit to the kinds of actions that would be welcome in your home, or were all family members allowed to do and say whatever they wanted? By what criteria were new members of the family (in-laws, spouses, step-family members) judged worthy or unworthy? How openly could people judge them? How were members allowed to question more powerful family members—or were they at all? How did members of your family enforce their own values and the values of other members?
What I want to pull from this is that if there is abuse in the family (and in a white supremacist patriarchal culture, there is likely to be abuse in our metaphorical one in the Writing Center), then we can't continue to plow over its abused members in pursuit of attaining this ideal of "family." Our only hope, if we still want to build a family in this climate, is to have constant, open talks about racial abuse that seek to arm ourselves enough to protect each other and jointly separate from whoever our abusers may be. The risk is that our Writing Center might look ideal, but for the inner lives of its members—who are isolated from support through our complicity—it might be in wreckage.
My last point is a note of caution: although all struggles are intersectional, and ending oppression from white supremacy and ending oppression from patriarchy are as intertwined as any issues of abuse in human lives are intertwined, it would be a mistake to think that any individual who understands only one understands the other implicitly, or that experience with one equals experience with the other. White readers (and writers!) who think they understand living as a body of color under a system of white supremacy because they have had run-ins with other kinds of abuse would do well to take a step back and listen to others' voices.
Zhang, Phil, St. Amand, Jessie, Quaynor, J, Haltiwanger, Talisha, Chambers, Evan, Canino, Geneva, & Ozias, Moira. (2013, August 7). "Going there": Peer writing consultants' perspectives on the new racism and peer writing pedagogies. Across the Disciplines, 10(3). Retrieved from http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/race/oziasetal/index.htm
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