is, through discourse and language practices;
•materially and bodily, or through people’s material conditions and the bodily and material markers that our environments leave on us; and
•performatively, or through the ways we perform, behave, and act, which includes what we consume in conspicuous ways.
Bourdieu defines habitus as “not only a structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices, but also a structured structure: the principles of division into logical classes which organizes the perception of the social world itself the product of internalization of the division into social classes” (1984, p. 170). That is, race as habitus structures and is structured into our lives, bodies, languages, actions, behaviors, expectations for writing, reading practices that judge writing, etc. Quoting Pierre Bourdieu, E. San Juan uses this definition of habitus:
Bourdieu means “the conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence that produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them.” (2002, p. 52)
For Bourdieu, habitus is multiple, historically situated structures composed of and conditioned by practices, material conditions, and discourses, that iterate into new structures (i.e., structuring structures), all the while these structures are durable and transposable, even when history and conditions alter them superficially. Racial habitus, then, is one way one might think of race as a set of structuring structures, some marked on the body, some in language practices, some in the ways we interact or work, write, and read, some in the way we behave or dress, some in the processes and differential opportunities we have to live where we do (or get to live where we can), or where we hang out, work, go to school, etc. Thus, racial habitus places an emphasis on the continual (re)construction of race as structures, as sets of dispositions that are discursive, material, and performative in nature. We speak, embody (are marked materially), and perform our racial designations and identities, whether those designations are self-designated or designated by others. Another way to say this is that racial habitus explains the way race is made up of discursive, material, and performative structuring structures.
To complicate further the concept of race as a social dimension, race has two ways of being experienced and referenced in the world that make it slippery and ambiguous in any given situation beyond the historically changing nature of it.10 It is a dimension that can organize one’s own subjectivity in the world, the way one acts, speaks, relates to others, and behaves. This is its subjective dimension. Everyone experiences race subjectively, or from a particular subject position and set of experiences, which intersect with other dimensions of experience (e.g., class, gender, sexuality, disability, etc.). One might consciously or unconsciously reproduce particular racial structures in language, dress, behavior, appearance, etc. that structure one’s own sense of one’s racial subjectivity. In this sense, race is consciously a set of discursive, material, and performance choices.
Race is also commonly seen or understood by others through physical, linguistic, social, and cultural markers, structuring structures themselves that have uneven and various meanings to others. This second dimension is race’s projective dimension, or one of others’ perceptions and expectations placed upon the person or persons in question. It is the dimension of race that people or institutions use in order to know people and organize them either privately or institutionally. Even though we may not publically act on or voice assumptions about racial formations or individuals in our midst, we all have such assumptions. It’s hard not to given the way our minds work to help us make sense of things, people, and experiences, particularly the unknown. In this sense, race is projected onto individuals and groups for a variety of purposes, often institutional.
Allow me to offer an example that illustrates how racial projection affects assessments (sets of judgments and decisions about people), despite a contradictory racial subjectivity. Growing up in Las Vegas, I was at least five or six shades darker than I am today. I was short, skinny, with jet black hair and brown eyes. In that context, among the working class whites at school and in our neighborhood, I was a “beaner,” a “dirty Mexican,” a “trouble-maker.” In that context, where local Mexican-American communities were vying for working class jobs against whites, any brown-skinned, brown-eyed boy was a Mexican. It didn’t matter that my name is as Japanese as you can get, very obviously non-Anglo, but that marker itself was read as a marker of the racial other that was most at odds with working class whites in my neighborhood and school. Unlike ethnicity, race is usually a broad brush stroke, not a fine penciled line. All my actions, all that I did, walking past a fence or a neighbor’s trailer, knocking on a door to see if a friend could play, or trying to get a soda from a vending machine at the trailer park’s office, all were seen as suspicious activities, ones that suggested I was surely up to no good.
I’m not making up this feeling of being suspect everywhere, every day, by everyone. The stigma was real, so real that a group of white trailer park tenants and the manager (also white) got together, wrote a letter to my family, listing all the activities my twin brother and I had done in the last year. One more misstep and we were evicted, kicked out. Interestingly, there were a list of activities and wrong-doings attributed to my brother and me during the previous summer, a summer we had spent with our grandmother in Oregon. We were not even in the state, yet all bad things were attributed to us, the Mexicans in the trailer park. To my white, working class neighbors, it seemed obvious and clear that all wrong-doing in the trailer park were markers that my brother and I had been there. Our skin tone, eyes and hair were judged to be Mexican, which told them about our natures as boys.
I have always been proud to be Japanese-American, to be Asian-American, despite the racial and ethnic ambiguity that has often followed me. This is why I’ve placed extra effort and labor in my racial subjectivity, even back then, even as a pre-teen and teenager. It didn’t matter what I said, or what I claimed to be. My performance, my physical and material appearance, even my discourse, which was quiet around adults, especially men (having almost no contact with men until deep into high school), was assessed as Mexican, as trouble-maker, as racial other. No matter what I did or said, it was seen as suspicious or bad. And because I was raised by a single-parent, my mom, who didn’t have a college education, worked several low-paying jobs just to keep the lights on, our clothes were not the newest or nicest. They were clean and cared for, but there were several years in which we had to make do with last year’s school clothes, last year’s shoes. These economic constraints only reinforced the other material markers that constructed me as Mexican in the eyes of the whites around me.
I believe writing teachers, as good-hearted and conscientious as most are, use racial projection in the same ways that I experienced as a boy. Perhaps they do not make the same exact assessments when working with students of color, but we do racially project our notions and expectations onto others we meet, others we read, others we evaluate and grade in the writing classroom. If we didn’t, it would be difficult to teach, to interact with any group of students, to understand the language offered us in writing by our students. We have to have assumptions, otherwise nothing makes sense. Now, I realize that some may find my conclusion about racial projection difficult to accept. They might say that they don’t have to see race or assume and project some set of racial attributes in order to get along and work with others who appear different from them. Fair enough. Yet, I too find the typical alternative conclusion, that we can escape such racial projections in our interactions with our writing students when reading their writing, including multilingual writing, equally unacceptable and unrealistic. This practice of ignoring racial habitus in our lives, in reading and writing practices, and in our dispositions for judging, is essentially an attempt to negate much of what makes all of us who we are and how we communicate. It means that a teacher who tries not to see race is forced to assume a non-racial set of dispositions, which amounts to a white racial habitus (discussed below). But
