people, news reporters, and radio stitons were saying that on May first no one should go out & boycott by not buying anything that day, and not even going to work. That was getting known, so that point was to do a lot of peoples ears but not everyone did it about sixty to seventy percent of people I bet did not listen to them, if they were not going to work who was going to pay them for those hours lost no one, but, the other thirty to forty person of people did do the boycott. They did no care about it they want the law to pass.
Everyone has the right to advertise. But its not like your going to go buy something just because come one else did. You have to follow your thought do what you wanna do not do what you see other people do. (CSU Office of the Chancellor, 2009, p. 22)
The guide offers these judgments on the “serious flaws” of the 2-essay:
•The writer begins by responding to the topic of celebrity advertising and the proposal to boycott it, but then goes off topic and writes about another kind of boycott entirely.
•The essay reflects a lack of understanding of Jozui’s arguments and seems instead to be discussing the right of celebrities to be in advertisements and the consequences for people who participate in boycotts.
•The essay has no apparent focus or organization. After agreeing with Jozui, the writer tries to mount a pro and con argument, and by the third paragraph resorts simply to a stream of consciousness.
•The lack of command of language makes it difficult to understand what the writer is saying: “If a celebraty want to be advertised with a product or something of their own I think they have the right to.”
•A variety of serious errors occur throughout the essay. The third paragraph is composed almost entirely of a single run-on sentence. (CSU Office of the Chancellor, 2009, pp. 22-23)
If we assume that the prompt, a familiar kind of argumentative prompt, was free of structural racism—that is, we assume that such tasks are typical in the curricula of schools where this student comes from and are typical of the discourses that this student uses—and we assume that the expectations around the first four items on the rubric are not culturally or racially biased (we can more easily assume that the last two items are racially biased), then we can conclude that the above judgments are “serious flaws” in the essay, and perhaps the essay deserves a score of 2. But what if we assumed that the prompt itself is already biased toward a dominant discourse that is associated closely to a white body and a white discourse?
Putting aside for the moment the many errors and miscues in the essay (some of which can be accounted for by the impromptu nature of the test), this essay might be one that engages in a rhetoric that could be a product of some other discourse(s), a discourse other than the dominant white one promoted in the EPT test prompt, rubric, and explanations of judgments that are assumed to be normative. Take the most problematic, third paragraph, which is judged as “off topic” and “stream of consciousness.” This paragraph surely contributes to the assessment that the essay lacks focus and organization. But the paragraph does offer a material perspective on the discussion. It takes the abstract discussion of boycotting advertisements that use celebrities and juxtaposes a discussion of something that allegedly occurred on May 1 in California, an actual boycott. There is a clear connection, but it’s labeled by the guide as off topic. While there could be explicit connections to the current discussion about celebrities in ads, this discursive strategy might be associative or working from a logic of juxtaposition. These are logics that usually do not expect explicit connection to be made by the writer. But is the guide’s assessment of the essay racist because it refused to value this paragraph in this way?
While this is purely speculative, since I don’t know when this essay was written exactly, only that it was written before 2009, the publication date of the guide. The paragraph could be referring to the “Great American Boycott” of 2006 and 2007 (Associated Press, 2007), in which millions of Latino/a immigrants boycotted schools and businesses for one day in order to show the degree to which the U.S. depends on them financially. It is a decisively racial reference, which likely most EPT readers at the time would have been aware of, since Los Angeles was one of the cities with the largest turnout in 2006, estimated at 400,000 (Gorman, 2006). In fact, it is reported that in L.A., the protesters chanted, “Si, se puede” (“Yes, it can be done”) (Glaister & MacAskill, 2006), which was the motto of the United Farm Workers organization, headed in part by César Chavez.9 While the writer of the 2-essay doesn’t mention any of these details, one could read them underneath the text. The references to “not even going to work,” “hours lost” from work, and the sense that many “did not care” that they lost some money but wanted social and economic change seems to be sentiments felt or experienced by those in the student’s community.
These changes are not simply about labor, but about Latino/a labor in California, about immigration policies, and racially defined immigrants and their material struggles with participating in social justice projects, like a boycott. They are about the experience of Latino/a immigrants engaging in a boycott that is meant to affect advertising and consumer consumption. These references are only off topic if you don’t find such Latino/a cultural references valid in a discussion about the marketing of consumer products. If a reader’s primary relation to such advertisements is that of a buyer, and not the laborer or retail worker working in the department store stocking and selling the soap or cereal, then this paragraph may seem off topic. But what if a reader imagined that her primary relation to the production and distribution of such advertisements was as a laborer who made such items available to customers? Then, I think, this paragraph, with its reference to the Great American Boycott, is far from off topic and racialized as Latino/a in a California context. It calls upon the common relations of Latinos/as in California to Capitalist consumption.
Yes, I read a lot into the essay, maybe too much, but that is the point. White discourses and dispositions tend to lean on abstraction, and avoid such racially politicized readings of texts. I don’t think the writers of the prompt or the guide intended for such an assessment to be valid of this essay because it racializes it. Does this mean that the essay should get more than a rating of 2? I think so. In the above ways, it addresses material concerns in a pretty unique way, in a way that matters to many in California, in a way that stretches the prompt to be more applicable than simply about an abstract idea like celebrities in ads, in a way that may very well matter to the student writer.
I cannot argue definitively that the guide or any judge would consciously see the markers of this text as racialized stigmata, but it doesn’t matter. What the guide does promote is a particular ideal text, one that values only abstract ideas, with no sensitivity to the way particular racial formations might respond differently, respond from their own social conditions. This ideal text, I argue, is informed by a dominant white discourse, seen in the rubric and the way it asks readers to judge from it. The assessment that the guide promotes seems to ignore the possibility that what is “off topic” is culturally and socially constructed by a dominant, white discourse, and that any response will be constructed by one’s material relations to the ideas around advertising and consumer economies in a racially divided California. Judging essays in the way the guide asks teachers to do produces the uneven and racist consequences that we see in Fresno State’s remediation rates and its Early Start and Bridge programs. One cannot know who this writer is, but that’s not the point. The point is what gets read and stigmatized in the text while not explicitly about race ends up having racist consequences.
Racial Habitus
Up to this point, my use of the term race has been imprecise. At the same time, race as an abstraction or as a social dimension in which people are grouped or group themselves is tricky to define too finely. It encapsulates an historically organizing set of structures that structure social interactions and society, to draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase for habitus (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72). The term habitus gives us a way to think about race as socially constructed in at least three ways:
•discursively
