ANTI-RACIST ACTIVISM: TEACHING RHETORIC AND WRITING
Composition instructors often feel, and rightly so, that writing can serve as a vehicle for change in the world. Based on how people write and communicate, their perceptions and attitudes can shift or be reinforced. There is much gravitas in the teaching of writing, then, so it's important to keep in mind a few things about the context of the First-Year Composition program in our university. In the first place, it is predominantly graduate teaching assistants who are teaching this material. Other than a handful of adjunct faculty, grad students working on their Masters' and Doctorates are the instructors who deal with this material. This is not to say that young 20-somethings such as myself (not all grad students are in their twenties) should not address this material in the English classroom (though we are certainly not authorities on the sociological data). Indeed, I found in my courses that it was actually a very beneficial topic to cover: first-year composition students had to confront the role of race in understanding education, literacy, and language, and they were being instructed by someone who, like them, is a student at the university trying to juggle a multitude of responsibilities from work and school to social and family life. True, students see this in all of their graduate teaching assistants, but as a composition instructor, I'd like to think that students are particularly engaged in my course because of the deeply personal act of writing that students must do every day in a composition course. Maybe these are rose-colored glasses I have on.
But the class is unique for students in more tangible and practical ways. The University of Oklahoma's student population is heavily made of traditional students who are coming directly from high school. Most often, the course is taken by students in their first semester at the university when they are taking other general requirements such as a mathematics and science course or an introduction to fields like psychology or anthropology. These are often large courses, sometimes with several hundred students. So entering a composition class that is capped at 19 students can be a very different academic experience. The small class size allows students to engage in group work, small discussions, as well as class wide discussions and impromptu questions that are more difficult to facilitate in a class of 300 that is more easily run as a lecture. This means that the composition course is one of the more inviting opportunities for students to not only try on new academic genres or writing styles, but also new perceptions about how and why language and the world are the way they are. Hence, writing courses should be able to discuss issues of race, class, and social power structures. But this opportunity is sadly missed at times; worst of all, missing this opportunity can have an adverse effect on student perceptions of race. I, Evan, have failed my students on this issue. Yet I do believe that writing still holds this opportunity, which makes the work of the writing center all the more necessary.
In the efforts to be the most open, inclusive, and neutral place we can be, sometimes writing centers will fall into the trap of dividing content from form. That can be sort of terrifying, if you take it to its logical conclusion, which would be having neo Nazis come into the Writing Center and us being good little products, helping them to be the most eloquent racists they can be by improving their argument! (Unfortunately, this concept has actually been espoused seriously.)
Aside from the clear ethical failure here, the argument just doesn't make pedagogical sense. Not if you work in any university that I've worked in. Not if you think that writing is more than typing
grammar and spelling
contextless rhetorical structures?
Instructors in the university, aside from composition teachers, do not assign writing just for students to spout off whatever comes to mind. And even comp teachers, as Evan points out, will give their students a subject to handle…up to and including race. But regardless of the subject, writing is employed as a vehicle to accomplish one or more of the following pedagogical objectives:
All of these efforts require more than the construction of simple meaningless sentences… so why do we try to divorce meaning from writing again?
Oh, yeah… because talking about race isn't polite!
Though there will be some assignments in which the students are asked to "just give their opinion," that is not the bulk of assignments they will be given, nor the bulk of what we will see in the Writing Center. If you assume that it is our job not to rewrite papers for students, nor to edit their papers for grammar solely, but rather to help students with higher order and lower order concerns, and thereby make (say it with me) better writers not better papers (North, 1984)…
Then wouldn't an effort towards helping them develop critical thinking skills, with regard to race whenever it comes up, move us somewhere towards that goal? Sliding down the slippery-slope here, I can hear a concerned objector moving back into the space of claims of unprofessionalism and discomfort. The writer might become less than comfortable. And we cannot have that! It will bring the house down!
This line of thinking neglects a few complications:
However–
Although… maybe. But that's beside the point.
At our center, we want to be able to seize upon the moments that flicker briefly through which we might have a chance to make learning happen in unplanned ways. We delight in our notion, in the words of The Everyday Writing Center, of ourselves as having "a Trickster mind, one that can be awakened to and can awaken moments of discernment about uncertainty" (Geller, Eodice, Condon, Carroll, Boquet, 2007, p. 16). We want to be capable of shapeshifting in the moment, of training ourselves to have multiple tools on our belt, multiple personas to approach each of many, many possible situations that come up when working with writers. We want to make ourselves flexible enough to question how knowledge is formed, where the origin of that wisdom lies, and who benefits most from how the structures of our beliefs are formed.
We design consultant development around thinking about ways to redirect sessions and to employ more than one mode of learning in each session. So it is not off-the-wall to have a variety of tactics for a consultation session in general, nor a consultation session in which race becomes an issue. The most clearly appeasing (to use GenderBitch terminology; Hope, 2009) of these tactics (and by that I mean, while still taking action) might in fact never mention the dreaded R-word that sends white folk a-frothing, but rather go directly to the text. The consultant addresses assumptions. Asks questions. Helps the writer develop on the level of critical thinking and consider alternative perspectives (plural), moves them perhaps so far as back to invention, and then sets a plan for revision.
Thus, the writing itself, as a rhetorical creation, becomes the vehicle for activism, using the gentlest tools that we have at our disposal. We are well trained to deal in logical fallacies, unclear statements, unbacked assumptions, and writing that only skims the surface rather than delving in depth. And in some moments, this tactic is the best way to approach the issue, from the perspective of where the writer and the consultant are respectively coming from. In other moments, it is not. And in these other moments, sometimes, we have to move beyond a rhetoric of comfort, find tactics that will best suit the writer, consultant, and the situation, and elect to actively teach critical thinking and antiracism instead of passively teaching silence and approval.
Even the most gentle criticism of someone's writing might make them uncomfortable. I assume that most people who teach writing will have to do it sometime. I also assume that it may be the case that even with all this gentleness, the student will not want to change their paper (and generally, we can't and won't make them). Why, then, does it become an entirely different equation when race is the issue we are discussing? Why is it so terribly political (coded as bad) to address race when race arises as an issue?
On the other side of these tactics, then... maybe the consultant is not so gentle. Have tutors and consultants never been firm? Would it destroy the teaching/peer moment? Is learning such a fragile thing that it must be cradled and coddled at all moments, even in the moments when the gentle touch of a skilled consultant is not causing any learning to happen?
From the simple observation that not ALL of my best learning moments in writing have happened when I was being nurtured, rather, outright shamed for not doing well enough, I can attest to the fact that learning can still happen even if you are uncomfortable. Even if you are intensely uncomfortable.
Returning to the consultant: The consultant has begun reading the paper, and race has entered the session. In this instance, the consult notices a racist assumption on the part of the writer and beating around the bush is not cutting it. If the consultant says that she thinks the assumption sounds racist, or she points out that racist groups have similar ideology, or she probes further on where the student got that idea, the writer will at least remember being taught that some audience members will not casually go along with their assumptions, and perhaps the consultant can give the writer a clearer idea of how ideas and arguments do not exist in a vacuum. If the consultant shows that he is hurt by what the writer has written, the writer will at least see that her words have impact on her audience. Her learning may not, in that moment, convert her completely to anti-racist activism, but as with many of the lessons we attempt to impart upon writers, hopefully a seed can plant in her mind and continue to grow long after she has left the Writing Center.
If one consultant has to tell another consultant that what he just said was narrow-minded or does call out the racism in his words, the learning should not just stop in that moment of quickened heartbeats and social confrontation. But sweeping it under the rug and ignoring it definitely won't make learning happen and produce an environment where race can be productively addressed.
The fact of the matter is, there is a belief that "professionalism" cannot be equated with "emotionalism." And when someone becomes emotional, then they have lost the game, or they are being manipulative. This is a double-bind for anyone working in anti-racism, and especially people of color.
The argument goes like this:
But! At the same time:
There's not much that can dent the ironclad illogic of privilege. It will remain invisible and deniable until the very, very end. It is sort of unlikely the person arguing with you about how you called them racist was open enough to begin with to step off your neck.
In the meantime, we are aware that writing papers based on assumptions swallowed whole without any consideration for their truth-value is not the best writing by any means, regarding the argument or for the audience, or for those casual bystanders who will have to bear the sting that regurgitating those beliefs will cause. We are aware that racism that comes from within the Writing Center, as consultants fumble and assume, or as a writer slinks away from the tall, black consultant they have been paired with, is there.
We are aware that there is more than one way to teach. Gentle and interested peer, devil's advocate, Socratic questioner, offended audience member. We have many roles we can play, and it is disingenuous to assume that when race appears, all of these roles disappear, and we can only make more silence.
The noise won't bring the house down.
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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