writing assessment ecologies are racial projects, regardless of their purposes, our intentions, or their designs. These racial projects may produce fair, good, and equitable outcomes or something else. I’m sure the EPT is not intended to be racist, nor to exclude, nor to create educational barriers for Hmong students, but that is exactly what it does as a racial project, making it a racist project. The EPT as a racial project directly affects the students in writing classrooms, and affects those classrooms’ writing assessment ecologies as well, because it affects how students get there, how they see themselves, and what the curriculum offers them. Despite the best antiracist intentions, any classroom writing assessment ecology can easily be racist if it doesn’t explicitly account for how students get there and how they are constituted subjectively and projectively by writing assessments.
To give you an example, consider Fresno State’s writing program. The conventional grading systems used in the writing program before we redesigned the curriculum, installed a grading contract, and implemented the Directed Self-Placement14 (DSP) process, produced racialized failure rates and grade distributions among our four main racial formations, which can be seen in the first row of Table 2 (listed as “2005-06 (Engl 1)”).15 Without any ill intentions on the part of writing teachers, many of whom were and are very conscientious about issues of fairness and racism in their classrooms, almost all writing classrooms reproduced higher levels of course failure in Hmong, Latino/a, and Black racial formations, with white students having the least amount of course failure.
The changes made to the program were almost all assessment-based, reconfiguring all the classroom writing assessments, from how students get into courses (DSP), to how most courses calculated final course grades (the grading contract), to the curriculum and pedagogies available (a program portfolio). As can be seen in Table 2, the failure rates in 2009-10 for the new end course, Engl 5B (equivalent to the old Engl 1) dropped by about half in all formations, except the Black racial formation, and the failure rates generally became more even across all racial formations.
Table 2. Students of color fail writing courses at consistently higher rates than their white peers in Fresno State’s First-Year Writing Program (reproduced from Inoue, 2014b, p. 338)
| African-American | Asian-American (Hmong) | |||||
| Academic Year | n | No. failed | % failed | n | No. failed | % failed |
| 2005–06 (Engl 1) | 198 | 45 | 22.7% | 454 | 90 | 19.8% |
| 2009–10 (Engl 5B) | 130 | 25 | 19.2% | 158 | 16 | 10.1% |
| 2010–11 (Engl 5B) | 109 | 18 | 16.5% | 195 | 19 | 9.7% |
| 2011–12 (Engl 5B) | 66 | 11 | 16.7% | 160 | 16 | 10.0% |
| Latino/Latina | White | |||||
| Academic Year | n | No. failed | % failed | n | No. failed | % failed |
| 2005–06 (Engl 1) | 843 | 188 | 22.3% | 788 | 121 | 15.4% |
| 2009–10 (Engl 5B) | 682 | 75 | 11.0% | 292 | 21 | 7.2% |
| 2010–11 (Engl 5B) | 685 | 65 | 9.5% | 273 | 23 | 8.4% |
| 2011–12 (Engl 5B) | 553 | 78 | 14.1% | 158 | 10 | 6.3% |
In this very limited way, classroom writing assessment ecologies in the program can be seen as racial projects, as projects that produced particular kinds of racial formations associated closely with failure and success. No one is trying to be racist, but it is happening systemically and consistently, or structurally through the various classroom writing assessment ecologies. What should be clear is that racism isn’t something that is always a “conscious aiming at ends,” rather it is often a product of overlapping racial structures in writing assessments that are subjective and projective. Racism is not usually produced by conscious intentions, purposes, or biases of people against others not like them. Racism is a product of racialized structures that themselves tend to produce unequal, unfair, or uneven social distributions, be they grades, or access to education, or the expectations for judging writing. Conversely, antiracist projects must be consciously engaged in producing structures that themselves produce fair results for all racial formations involved.
Some may argue that the above failure rates may not be showing some form of racism, rather they only demonstrate that racial formations of color have performed worse than the white racial formation, so there is no clear racist project occurring here since the cause of the above effects cannot be determined to be racial in nature. How do we know racism in writing assessments is the cause of the course failure and not something else? This critique comes from a discourse of whiteness, from a white racial habitus that demands that such racialized conclusions reveal in a logical fashion racist intent by teachers, disregarding effect or results, as those are typically attributed to the individual (e.g., failure). The white racial habitus informing this question also assumes that there be a clear cause and effect relationship demonstrated in such conclusions about racism, conclusions from observations that make no assumptions about race. But as the literature on whiteness explains over and over, there is no getting around race in our epistemologies. The assumptions around needing clear racist causes that then lead to racist effects stems from a white disposition, a rationality that is calm and cool, for such things when we discuss racism (racism is hardly a calm and cool discussion in the U.S.). What seems clear to me in the above figures is that whites perform better regardless of the assessment ecology, but some ecologies mitigate the racist effects better than others. The uneven effects of these same ecologies demonstrates a problem. But if you still need a racist cause, there is a common cause for all the course grades: the courses’ writing assessment ecologies that produced the grades.
Part of my argument for racism in classroom writing assessments, like those mentioned above, is that there are larger societal structures that are racist that create and influence the classroom. As my discussion of white racial habitus suggests, the structures of our writing assessments come from our society, our academic disciplines, and educational institutions, which have been organized to keep whites and whiteness dominant. In Charles Mills’ (1997) award-winning book, The Racial Contract, he argues that Western civilization historically has cultivated and maintained a “racial contract” for the purposes of maintaining such white racial dominance in society at large. In one sense, Mills’ could be arguing that there is an over-arching racial project that Western societies have participated in historically. We can hear how the racialized consequences of the racial contract are easily translatable to the consequences of college writing assessments in Mills explanation of the racial contract:
set of formal or informal agreements or meta-agreements (higher-level contracts about contracts, which set the limits of the contracts’ validity) between the members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated by (shifting) “racial” (phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria C1, C2, C3 … as “white,” and coextensive (making due allowance for gender differentiation) with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as “nonwhite” and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled politics … the general purpose of the Contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them. All whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some whites are not signatories to it. (1997, p. 11)
One good way to subordinate nonwhite groups in California generally would be to maintain the EPT as a placement and entrance writing assessment, since doing so would in effect keep more students of color out of college and allow more (relatively speaking) white students in. A good way to validate its uses so as to maintain white racial supremacy is to do so abstractly, using disciplinary meta-agreements about what constitutes validity and bias, despite the contradictions those agreements create when applied to the literacy competencies of locally diverse students in, say, Fresno. This racial contract flows into, is then assumed in, all writing classrooms.
Furthermore, a part of the racial contract is the categorizing of
