"Going there": Peer Writing Consultants' Perspectives on the New Racism and Peer Writing Pedagogies

Introduction: A Reader's Guide

by the Legion of Going There

So much, we believe, of what draws folks to writing center work is our individual and collective investment in being careful, caring, and reflective in teaching and talking with students about their writing. To begin to realize and account for the possibility that racism is woven into that identity too, wound through even those practices that we hope are expressions of our most dearly-held principles, is to experience profound dislocation. —Geller, Eodice, Condon, Carroll, Boquet, 2007, p. 95

Language is as real, as tangible in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations … but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in old cycles, our process may be "revolutionary" but not transformative. —Rich, 1979, p. 247-8

This article represents our process, as a group, of coming to terms with our experiences with racism, both situational and systemic, in our writing center. The search began by telling stories about ourselves and about our experiences in the writing center, on our campus, and in our communities. We spent the better part of a semester discussing the ways race affects the work of a writing center through our professional development practicums, looking at scholarship and interrogating the sessions we had been a part of. We tried on different languages for their potential to help us both to understand the stories and to help us imagine new possibilities for working for racial justice and against systemic racism. The coming to terms, it turns out, was just as much a search for terms. How do we talk about the racism that we encounter—both individualized and systemic—and what language do we use in describing our responses to such racism? Even further, how does this language shape our actions and reactions in response to racism?

Finding an appropriate response to this has been difficult. As members of our university's writing wenter, we have had an opportunity to see students, faculty, assignments, and policies from across campus that have challenged our notions of what it is that we actually provide to the university. Are we an academic support service? As such, what is our role in confronting racism? Is it limited to moments when we encounter blatantly racist ideology in consultations with student writers, or do we have a broader mandate to work alongside students, faculty, and other members of the university community in responding to more elusive individual and institutionalized forms of racism, as well? The effort to create an atmosphere for anti-racism means not only being an ally against an issue when it is overwhelmingly evident. We must remain vigilant in even the subtlest version of prejudice.

What you see here is not a neat, tidy, and untroubled argument for one way of speaking about and understanding what a transformative antiracist peer writing center pedagogy is. Rather, it is a representation of the fact that such a pedagogy is always in process. Why? Because central to both peer writing pedagogy and antiracism is the idea that knowledge, especially knowledge that leads to transformed/transformative practice, is always in the process of becoming. It is dialogic and attentive to the racial power dynamics of particular situations. These power dynamics themselves shift and turn—this is part of how systemic racism remains entrenched in institutional fabrics—and a responsive, transformative pedagogy must attend to them in everyday, lived ways.

In light of this, though, this collaborative group first recognizes our limitations in any ability to "reveal" the racism inherent at our university. We also admit to our own implication in the enforcement and acceptance of this system. But that admittance is what has led us to our exigency in writing this. For, if we cannot discuss openly how racism has been at work within our institution, our ability to fight against racism in any meaningful way is completely undermined; this is what makes the "new racism" so difficult (Villanueva, 2006; Young, 2010). It is not enough to denounce macroagressions, but we must confront the ways racism has informed and shaped many of the positions, requirements, and occurrences at our university, often under the guise of diversity. The naivety of colorblindness has informed writing assignments, and the heralding of our "race exemplars" has glossed over horrific histories across our campus.

So, we as writing consultants and writing center leaders are learning to attend to the power dynamics of racism moment by moment; we are developing our ability to imagine an array of alternative negotiations and responses that can call into question, undermine, subvert, or directly confront racism when we see it. Sometimes the racism appears in a paper we read in the writing center, sometimes it appears in an interaction between consultants or writers, sometimes it appears as a normalized way of institutional functioning, and it always appears in the contextual fabric (historical, institutional, systemic) surrounding us. Thus, instead of lauding a "safe space" in which safety is defined by creating a place where people are free from feeling uncomfortable regardless of their actions, we, as consultants, have the chance to create an environment in which anti-racism can thrive. This place will not always sponsor complacency. Rather, it will challenge people's underlying assumptions, whether conscious or unconscious, and those instilled within our institutions through the workings of history and satisfaction with the present day status quo. We, then, have a choice, or rather choices, in how we respond. And these choices require us to consider our responsibilities as writing consultants, as fellow students, as human beings.

Creating a co-authoring group as large as we did made answering these questions in one, uni-dimensional way difficult, and indeed impossible. Yet this impossibility has necessarily made us confront something about the work of antiracism that is perhaps more important than a set of standards or protocols for "confronting racism." It has shown us that the work against racism is an ongoing process that will continually need to adapt. Though Plessy v. Ferguson may have been formally undone, new forms of racism continue to be circulated and reproduced in our everyday lives. Recognizing this has, at times, left us with a communal Sysiphus-like feeling, like we are continuously making strides forward against racism, only to reenter the conversation and find that we must begin again at anti-racism 101. But the very act of writing this article will hopefully serve as a catalyst for action against racism.

Rather than being an argument for a particular pedagogy or practice, what you will find here is a collection of thought-pieces, each informed by the others, by our campus context, and by the readings we've shared with one another. By using the separate experiences that we have as individuals in a multiracial co-authoring group, we can engage in an "ongoing explicit pursuit of personal and systemic change advanced daily […] among black, brown, red, yellow and white allies" (Young, 2010, p. 2). This collaborative pursuit has helped us to develop ways to address our responsibility as allies, consultants, and humans on an interactional and relational level, at the least within the confines of the Writing Center. With the use of writing as a vehicle, consultants can further themselves as a strong force in creating anti-racist spaces. And, we hope, writing can likewise be a similar vehicle for those we work with at the Writing Center. Writing provides an avenue to be able to discuss, confront, and explore, making it perhaps one of our most promising processes in meeting and overturning the everyday racism we experience and live with in our community.

• "Going There": A Conversation Between Consultants
• Writing as a Vehicle for Learning & Activism
• On Family and Abuse
• A Response to the New Racism (poem)
• Author Profiles