their own racial subjectivity. And this is likely because they fit into a white racial habitus that often doesn’t have such contradictions in school.
Thus these two dimensions of race, subjective and projective, may not match up in any given particular person, but they operate simultaneously. Our writing assessments should struggle with these two ways of experiencing race, race as subjectivity and race as projection by others. Although tangled and flawed, race as discursive, material, and performative are good ways to organize inquiries into what happens in writing assessments, since our life experiences, whether we acknowledge them or not as racialized, are often organized by racial subjectivity and projection to some degree, just as gendered habitus organize our experiences. Racial habitus offers language that calls attention to the dynamic, (re)productive structuring structures of discourse, materiality, and performance that are central to judging student writing. The term helps us talk about race as sets of structures—as parts in and of systems—structures that are not categorical, nor static.
To think of race as racial habitus has been approached by Edwardo Bonilla-Silva (2003) in his sociological work on racism and whiteness, only he focuses on a white habitus that produces particular language about race. In his study, Bonilla-Silva examines the ways that students from various U.S. universities use certain discursive “frames” (e.g., abstract liberalism, naturalization, cultural racism, and minimization of racism) to articulate their racial ideology and cloak it in linguistic “styles” (e.g., “I’m not prejudiced, but …” (p. 57), “I’m not Black, so I don’t know” (p. 58), “anything but race” (p. 62), “they are the racist ones …” (p. 63)).11 This color-blind racist discourse used primarily by white students attempts to ignore, erase, or minimize the structuring structures in language that construct racial difference and racism. He explains that “social and spatial segregation” in different communities creates a “‘white habitus,’ a racialized, uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters” (2003, p. 104). Thus whites have structuring structures that construct local white racial formations, just as Hmong and Mexican-Americans do in Fresno.
Arguing that writing teachers and writing assessment theorists need to “interrogate and refashion our racial politics of assessment,” Nicholas Behm and Keith Miller (2012, p. 125) provide a detailed account of Bonilla-Silva’s (2006) study of color-blind racism, and explain his concept of a white habitus in which whites are socialized. Behm and Miller explain that a white habitus is a set of “historically and culturally constructed dispositions, feelings, and discourses, which ‘conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters’” (2012, p. 129, emphasis in original). But habitus may be more complex than this. Sometimes it is unconscious, so it may be more accurate to say that we participate in already existing racial habitus, participating in structures that are to some degree outside or beyond individuals, making habitus structuring structures we make our own, nuancing them in the ways that Young (2007) discusses code-meshing. Furthermore, when I speak of white racial habitus below, it is not necessarily linked to a racialized body, a white body, as it appears to be in Bonilla-Silva’s study. Instead, the structuring structures of a local white racial habitus make white students, or ideal students, in writing assessment ecologies of the classroom. A white racial habitus exists beyond or outside of bodies, in discourse, in methods of judging, in dispositions toward texts, etc.
And so using a term like racial habitus can keep us from thinking of these structuring structures as simply dwelling in individuals, as inherent characteristics of individuals – since I’m rarely taking about individuals when I discuss issues of race and racism in classroom writing assessments. Instead, racial habitus foregrounds the macro-level phenomena, foregrounds the structures and social structuring, foregrounds the patterns among many people who associate or find themselves geographically and historically in the same places and circumstances, without forgetting that these patterns exist in individuals who augment them.
White Racial Habitus
Important to seeing racial habitus as a determining aspect of any classroom writing assessment project is seeing a white racial habitus as fundamental to all classroom writing assessment, whether we promote it, critique it, or actively promote something else. Many have discussed how to define whiteness as a construct that affects writing pedagogy (Frankenberg, 1993; hooks, 1994; Keating, 1995), which has bearing on how writing is judged in classrooms by teachers using a local SEAE or other academic expectations for writing.12 Timothy Barnett (2000) synthesizes five statements about whiteness that the scholarship on whiteness overwhelmingly confirms, and is a good way to begin to understand whiteness as a racial habitus in classroom writing assessment ecologies, or as a set of structuring structures that are performed or projected onto student writing:
•Whiteness is a “coded discourse of race,” that “seems invisible, objective, and neutral”;
•Whiteness maintains its power and presents itself as “unraced individually” and “opposed to a racialized subjectivity that is communally and politically interested”;
•Whiteness is presented as a non-political relational concept, defined against Others, whose interests are defined as “anti-individual” and political in nature;
•Whiteness “is not tied essentially to skin color, but is nevertheless related in complex and powerful ways to the perceived phenomenon of race”;
•Whiteness maintains power by defining (and denying) difference “on its own terms and to its own advantage” (my emphasis, p. 10)
As a habitus that is practiced in language, expected in classroom behaviors, and marked on the bodies of students and teachers, whiteness, then, is a set of structuring structures, durable, transposable, and flexible. As Barnett summarizes, these structures construct whiteness as invisible and appealing to fairness through objectivity. The structures are unraced (even beyond race), unconnected to the bodies and histories that create them. They are set up as apolitical, and often deny difference by focusing on the individual or making larger claims to abstract liberal principles, such as the principle of meritocracy. These structures create dispositions that form reading and judging practices, dispositions for values and expectations for writing and behavior. Echoing Lippi-Green and Greenfield’s arguments that connect race to language, Barnett offers a succinct way to see whiteness as a racial project in the classroom, which can easily be a way we might describe any classroom writing assessment as a default white racial project:
“Whiteness,” accordingly, represents a political and relational activity disguised as an essential quality of humanity that is, paradoxically, fully accessible only by a few. It maintains a distance from knowledge that depends on the power of authorities, rules, tradition, and the written word, all of which supposedly guarantee objectivity and non-racial ways of knowing, but have, not incidentally, been established and maintained primarily by the white majority. (2000, 13, emphasis in original)
In her discussion of the pervasiveness of whiteness in bioethics in the U.S., Catherine Myser defines whiteness as a marker and position of power that is situated in a racial hierarchy (2002, p. 2). She asks us to problematize the centrality of whiteness in bioethics as a field of study and industry, which I argue we should do in the writing classroom too. By looking at several studies of whiteness, Myser provides a rather succinct set of discursive and performative dispositions that could be called a white racial habitus that writing teachers often enact:
•[A focus on] Individualism, hyperindividualism, self-determination, autonomy, and self-reliance, self-control;
•The person is conceived in purely individual terms, as a rational and self-conscious being (the Cartesian “I” or cogito ergo sum), making failure an individual weakness and not a product of larger structural issues;
•Relationships are understood
