live in racial contradictions, we should be engaging in antiracist projects. The use, for instance, of a Standardized Edited American English (SEAE), a hegemonic discourse, is not an indicator of racism on my part because of what and why I say what I do. No, my discourse is an indicator of my subversive success at making a local SEAE and dominant discourse my own, making that discourse less white and more universal by diversifying it, and pushing us all to interrogate our uses of it in our classrooms. I’ve worked hard to have the voice I have in the academy, made some linguistic sacrifices, changed my ways with words and my dispositions toward texts, but I’d argue my voice and what it says changes the academy too, just as others’ voices have.4 SEAE, of course, is often a racial marker, a marker of whiteness, but not a marker of one’s racial formation, nor a marker of racism unless it is used against students in a writing assessment as the standard. Its use by a researcher or teacher isn’t necessarily a racist act, neither is identifying those standardized structures as racialized, and people who historically have been racialized by them. The point isn’t to get rid of race. Race is one way we mark diversity and complexity, difference. The point is to get rid of racism, unfair racialzied hierarchies. Haswell would have me avoid race completely in hopes that it withers and dies for lack of attention, which then creates a nonracist world. But to deny race is just another way to deny diversity, which is natural and needed in all systems. So it is how writing assessments deploy discourses and judgments that make them racist not our references to difference.
As Haswell notes, there are contradictions, aporias. SEAE is learned, but not always by choice. I will be the first to admit that I lost my ghetto English a long time ago (but not the swearing) for the wrong reasons, for racist reasons. I cannot help that. I was young and didn’t understand racism or language. I just felt and experienced racism, and some of it was due to how I talked and wrote in school. I was captivated by the kind of English I read in the first few books of my literary life, White Fang, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird. It sounded smart and clever, even magical, magical in the ways that Gorgias speaks of language in his famous fragment, Encomium of Helen. Language bewitched me quite literally. Part of that spell had racist components. Since then, I’ve come to see that language as a hegemonic discourse that, like all others, can be helpful and harmful depending on how it is used and what it communicates.
I don’t expect everyone to see my project as the best beginning to antiracist writing assessments, but don’t tell me there isn’t racism in writing classrooms. Don’t tell me we can ignore it and that doing so will make it go away. Don’t tell me we shouldn’t see race and that’s the answer to racism. Doing so tells me that my experiences of racism in school and out are just figments of my imagination, that they must have been something else, that we just cannot know if there is racism anymore, that we just have to ignore it and all will be well, that we just wait a little while longer. As a middle-aged man, I know better. Waiting is complicity in disguise. I’ve seen and experienced too much. It ain’t my imagination. Any denial of racism in our writing assessments is a white illusion. It upholds a white hegemonic set of power relations that is the status quo. It is in the imagination of those too invested in a white racial habitus, regardless of their racial affiliation. Hell, I denied it when I was younger. I had to. It would have eaten me alive, and I likely would not be able to do what I do today if I hadn’t. More aporias around racism.
Chapter 1: The Function of Race in Writing Assessments
In order to understand why an antiracist project is so important to any classroom writing assessment ecology, even before I define that ecology, the concepts of race, racial formation, and racism need to be discussed and defined. Therefore in this chapter, I argue for a term, “racial habitus,” as a way to understand the function of race in writing assessment ecologies, making all writing assessment ecologies racial projects of some kind.5 I distinguish racial habitus from Omi and Winant’s (1994) term, “racial formations,” which I use to refer to the actual people that populate schools and writing classrooms. I discuss the term “racism,” which might initially be understood as a larger set of historical structures, assumptions, and effects (or consequences) of any racial project. Through my discussions of racial habitus and racism, I address several criticisms or resistances by those who may feel that a focus on racism in classroom writing assessment ecologies may be misguided or wrong. What I hope to make clear is that we have no choice in thinking about racism in our writing assessments. And if we care about antiracist or social justice projects in the writing classroom, we need to care about and address explicitly the way race functions in our classroom writing assessments. Thus, I ask in this chapter: how might we define race and understand its function in classroom writing assessments so that we can articulate antiracist writing assessments?
The Importance of Race
Race is an important social dimension, a lived dimension of everyone’s life despite its socially constructed nature (Ferrante & Brown, 1998; Gossett, 1963). No one can avoid the way race is structured in our lives, even those who do not wish to see it, and even though it isn’t real in the same way someone has black hair or brown eyes. Our social, economic, and political histories in the U.S. are underwritten by the construct of race, as many have discussed already, particularly by looking at whiteness and the creation of white bodies and people (Hannaford, 1996; Ignatiev, 1995; Lipsitz, 1998; Mills, 1997; Roediger, 1999). The influence of the concept of race is in the coded ways we talk about each other, the words we use for race and to avoid its reference (Bonilla-Silva, 2003a, 2003b; Villanueva, 2006). It is in the way we behave and perform our identities (Inda, 2000; Young, 2004, 2007), which can also be seen in discussions of gender performativity (Butler, 1990; Salih, 2002). Many in composition studies have argued that race is an important social dimension that we must pay attention to if we are to teach better, assess better, and build a more socially just future (hooks, 1994; Hurlbert, 2012; Prendergast, 1998; Villanueva, 1993, 1997; Young, 2007).
Even those who promote multilingual and translingual pedagogies (Horner & Trimbur, 2002; Horner et al., 2011; Jordan, 2012), which are not focused on race but linguistic difference from the dominant academic discourse, often assume racial structures that support and are associated with the linguistic and language competencies of all students. In other words, even if we wish to avoid talking about race and just talk about linguistic difference, which appears to be about a real difference in groups of people in the writing classroom, appears to be a dimension without prejudice, appears safer to notice and judge because we’re judging writing, not race, the people who most often form multilingual English students or linguistic difference from the dominant academic discourse are racialized in conventional ways, as are their languages and writing. In fact, our discursive performances are some of the ways race is produced as a social dimension that distinguishes people (Inda, 2000). Race is often marked through language. In short, those who identify primarily as African-American, or Latino/a, or Asian-Pacific American often are the multilingual students or the linguistically different in schools.
As a social construction, race is complex, often composed of multiple factors that intersect in one’s life despite the fact that it is a fabrication by people over time. We made up race, then it became something real. But it is not real, just as gender isn’t real. I’m reminded of Stephen J. Gould’s (1981) discussion of the reification of the construct of IQ. In his well-known book, The Mismeasure of Man, Gould (1981) draws out historically the ways that IQ tests and the testing of intelligence through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries led to clear racist consequences by creating the construct of IQ and using it against non-white populations to show their inferiority to whites. Gould shows how easy it is for people to “convert abstract concepts into entities” (1981, p. 24), meaning once a test becomes accepted, its results, like an IQ number or an SAT or EPT score, are “reified,” which then allows the reification to be deployed in a number of ways in society. While we act as if the signifier of an IQ or EPT or SAT score is something real, the test itself created this thing. We forget that the construct that the scores allegedly measure are created by the tests and do not actually exist before those tests.
In his compelling sociological account, F. Allan Hanson (1993) comes to this same conclusion, showing historically
