for governing relationships;
•Cognitive capacity is the ability to think rationally, logically, and objectively, with rigor, clarity and consistency valued most;
•All problems are defined as those situations or conditions that are out of control, that disrupt autonomous functioning. (Myser, 2002, pp. 6-7)
Whiteness as a discourse and set of expectations in writing, then, like the dispositions distilled from Barnett’s summary, can be boiled down to a focus on individualism and self-determination, Descartes cogito, individuals as the primary subject position, abstract principles, rationality and logic, clarity and consistency, and on seeing failure as individual weakness, not a product of larger structural issues.
These dispositions are very similar to Brookhiser’s (1997) six traits of WASP whiteness in the U.S.13 The important thing about whiteness, as Barnet and many others have identified about whiteness generally, is that it’s invisible, often denied as being whiteness. This is the nature of whiteness as a habitus. Ross Chambers (1997) explains that whiteness remains unexamined through the “pluralization of the other and the homogenization of others” (p. 192). He says that whiteness has been “unexaminable” (or rather, “examinable, yet unexamined”) because it is not only the yardstick by which difference (like quality of writing) is judged and identified in the classroom and out of it, but whiteness is bound to “the category of the individual” first through “atomizing whiteness” by homogenizing others, which allows it to be invisible (p. 192). This invisible and universalizing nature of the above dispositions gives some reason for why the first two items are the most telling, and perhaps contentious. These two dispositions (hyperindividualism and the primacy of the cogito) alone make up much of Faigley’s (1992) discussion of tastes in the ways teachers described the best student writing in their courses found in Coles and Vopat’s collection, What Makes Writing Good (1985). What did most teachers say was good writing? Writing that exhibited a strong, authentic, honest voice. And what does strength, authenticity, and honesty look like as textual markers? It is a self-reliant voice that is focused on itself as a cool, rational, thinking self in the writing and in its reading of writer’s own experiences or ideas. This isn’t to say these are bad qualities in writing, only that they are linked to whiteness and this link often has uneven racist consequences in classroom writing assessments.
To put it more bluntly, a white racial habitus often has racist effects in the classroom, even though it is not racist in and of itself. Citing Mills (1997) and his own studies of whiteness (2001), Bonilla-Silva argues that “whiteness is the foundational category of ‘white supremacy’ …. Whiteness, then, in all of its manifestations, is embodied racial power” (2003a, p. 271; emphasis in original). The maintenance of whiteness and white supremacy, even if tacit as in the “new racism” that Bonilla-Silva and Villanueva (2006) describe, is vital to maintaining the status quo of society’s social, economic, and racial hierarchies, the structuring structures that (re)produce a white racial habitus. Bonilla-Silva (2003a) explains that the new racism isn’t just “racism lite,” but manifests through five key structures that I argue destroy many healthy writing assessment ecologies:
•racial language practices that are “increasingly covert,” as with those who argue that using a local SEAE as the privileged discourse in a writing classroom is not racist because the course is about the appropriate language use for college students, without questioning why that brand of English is deemed most appropriate or providing ways in the class to examine the dominant discourse as a set of conventions that have been “standardized” by the hegemonic;
•racial terminology that is explicitly avoided (or a universalizing and abstracting of experience and capacities), causing an increasing frequency of claims that whites themselves are experiencing “reverse racism”;
•racial inequality that is reproduced invisibly through multiple mechanisms, reproduced structurally, as in my critique of the EPT or others’ findings in the SAT;
•“safe minorities” (singular examples or exceptions, often named) that are used to prove that racism no longer exists, despite the larger patterns and statistics that prove the contrary, such as the Fresno State Hmong and African-American student racial formations;
•racial practices reminiscent of the Jim Crow period (e.g., separate but equal) that are rearticulated in new, non-racial terms, such as the new use of the EPT as a de facto entrance exam that by result attempts to stem the tide of students of color in California universities without ever being explicitly about race. (p. 272)
In many ways, the new racism discussed by Bonilla-Silva and Villanueva occurs more frequently in our classroom writing assessments because we uncritically promote (often out of necessity) a dominant academic discourse that is associated with a local SEAE. While these discourses and sets of linguistic conventions are not bad in and of themselves, they do need interrogating with students as structuring structures that give us certain tastes in language and thought. But writing classrooms cannot leave white racial habitus at that, at just critical discussions of language and texts, without also using those discussions in some way to change the writing assessment ecology of the classroom. This isn’t easy work, but I hope to show ways I’ve attempted to do this in Chapter 6.
Racial Formation, Racial Projects, and Racism
To conceive of and use an antiracist classroom writing assessment theory, we need concepts like racial habitus and white racial habitus, but while these concepts reference racialized bodies and suggest a definition of racism, the terms do not inherently explain racism as a phenomenon. They also do not explain how to reference actual bodies in the classroom. As I’ve reiterated above, racial habitus is not a term that directly references students’ material bodies, and racism affects real people, real bodies, not habitus. Thus I use the term racial formation to do this referencing. Racism then affects racial formations.
Omi and Winant define “racial formation” “as the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (1994, p. 55). Any racial formation, then, is a part of a dynamic, historical process, constantly changing. These changes occur because of numerous “racial projects” that create, represent, and organize human bodies in particular times and places. These racial projects “simultaneously … interpre[t], represen[t], or explai[n] … racial dynamics,” and “reorganize and redistribute resources along particular lines” (Omi & Winant, 1994, pp. 55-56). In short, all notions of race are (re)created by various racial projects in society and schools. Individual racial formations, such as the Hmong of Fresno, are constructed subjectively and projectively through racial projects in schools, society, in the EPT, in the university, etc.
Thus racism, Omi and Winant say, isn’t simply a consequence of bigotry or prejudice. Historically in the U.S. it has been an “unavoidable outcome of patterns of socialization which were ‘bred in the bone,’ affecting not only whites but even minorities themselves.” They explain that discrimination, inequality, and injustice have been “a structural feature of the U.S. society, the product of centuries of systematic exclusion, exploitation, and disregard of racially defined minorities” (1994, p. 69). Thus today, a racial project is racist “if and only if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on essentialist categories of race” (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 71). In the introduction to their collection, Race and Writing Assessment, Inoue and Poe (2012a) provide this way of understanding the concept of racism in light of Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory:
If racial formations are about the historical and structural forces that organize and represent bodies and their lived experiences, then racism is not about prejudice, personal biases, or intent. Racism is not about blaming or shaming white people. It is about understanding how unequal or unfair outcomes may be structured into our assessment technologies and the interpretations that we make from their outcomes. (p. 6)
If it’s not
