be said that I’m being overly harsh to local writing teachers, of whom I have been one, and the designers and readers of the EPT. I do not deny that these are well-intentioned, good people, trying hard to offer a quality education to all students in California. I do not deny that writing teachers in the area explicitly attempt to provide educational experiences to Hmong students, most of whom are multilingual, in ways that will help them in their futures in school and careers. But I wonder how many of us have considered the way a Hmong racial habitus is or is not accounted for in our writing assessments, in the ways we judge, in the expectations we have for writing, in the processes we design. I wonder if many have considered the white racial habitus clearly operating in most writing assessments? I wonder if many have considered the function of a global imaginary of sentimental education in their relations with Hmong students, or Latinos/as, or Blacks? I wonder if many have thought explicitly about the ways race in any way is already in their writing assessments?
A final example I hope will capture the way race functions in classroom writing assessments that cannot help but draw on a global imaginary of sentimental education. For a time, I was the Special Assistant to the Provost for Writing Across the Curriculum at Fresno State. In the first semester I took the job, the dean of the College of Arts and Humanities sent me a package. In it was a memo with an attached marked and graded student draft of a paper from a general education course. The memo was from the professor, whom I’ll call Dr. X. The dean said, “here, now you can deal with him. Apparently every semester, Dr. X would send the dean another paper with a similar memo. The memo proclaimed the illiteracy of “our students,” with the accompanying draft as proof, complete with his copious markings of grammar issues and errors. Now, I would get his memos and sample drafts each semester.
A few semesters later, Dr. X attended one of my WAC workshops, and I asked him about his memos. I said that I appreciated his concerns for our students’ writing, but I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to do, since he never made any call to action or offered any ideas. He simply complained. Dr. X looked at me without hesitation, and said, “I want you to feel bad about our students’ writing.” I told him that I could not feel bad, since what I saw in each draft were opportunities to talk to the student about his or her writing choices. That’s what writing in college is about, making mistakes and finding ways out of them.
The one thing I have not said about these memos and drafts is that almost all of them were from Hmong students. I know this because in Fresno we have about 18 Hmong clans represented and they have distinct last names. So if the last name of the student on the draft is one of these 18 names, he or she is almost certainly Hmong.19 Dr. X seemed to have an Orientalist vision that saw his Hmong students’ writing as flawed and illiterate, so much so that he needed to show someone else in power. He needed to show someone that we were not doing our parental duty toward our Hmong students. We weren’t educating them, and so we should feel bad because we were shirking our duties, or white man’s burden. Dr. X wasn’t alone in his assessment of Hmong students’ writing abilities on campus, and there were certainly some who didn’t see things this way. The point I’m making is that without a global imaginary of sentimental education that determines teachers’ judgments, assessments, behavior, pedagogy, and the like when confronted with multilingual Hmong student writing, Dr. X likely would have had a different reaction to his students’ drafts. Perhaps, the texts he saw from his Hmong students would have indicated that his assignments didn’t fit them very well, or his curriculum might need to be better adapted to his students’ needs.
In many ways, this global imaginary creates a vision that may actually augment reality. For instance, I wonder exactly how many students of Dr. X’s fit into the category of “illiterate.” I asked this question to another professor who complained about a similar occurrence in his general education courses (note: both of these vocal faculty were white males). So I asked him how big the class was? He said 200 students. I asked how many students seem to have these deep language problems in each class? After a few seconds of consideration, he said, “maybe ten.” “So 5% of your class have these problems,” I reiterated. “Yes,” he said. “So 95% of your students are essentially okay,” I asked rhetorically? “I don’t see a pervasive problem,” and I left the conversation at that.
Race as a Nexus of Power Relations
Race, racial habitus, and racism are about power. So when we avoid it in our writing assessments, we tend to avoid addressing important power relations that create inequality. Paying attention to race in our classroom writing assessments isn’t racist. In fact, not paying attention to race often leads to racism. Racism occurs in the nature of assumptions, the production of racial hierarchies, and the effects or consequences of racial projects. And using exclusively cultural or ethnic terms, such as Japanese or Hmong, without connecting them to race (thus leaving them unconnected to racism) have their own problems. Doing so elides the non-cultural and non-ethnic dimensions of human experience in society, defining a social formation primarily by ethnicity or cultural practices that some students may not have experiences with or practice yet still be associated with. Race isn’t solely, or even mostly, about culture, as I hope my discussion above about racial habitus and racial subjectivity and projection reveal.
Race as an organizing term is primarily about understanding power and privilege, not cultural differences. I’m a good example of the way race is about more than culture or ethnicity. Ethnically I’m Japanese-American, Scottish, English, and some Mediterranean (likely Greek or Italian). My father was Japanese from Hawai’i, but I was raised by my mother, who has always identified as white. This means that I was not raised in a Buddhist or Shinto home, nor did I have the chance to go to Japanese school, or speak Japanese. I wasn’t raised with many culturally Japanese practices, yet I am mostly Japanese by blood heritage. I have usually been mistaken for some kind of Latino, depending on the context. I have been the target of many racist remarks, acts, and the like. This is my own racial subjectivity, and I’ve had to come to my own Japanese-American cultural and ethnic practices, history, and awareness as an adult. Racially, I identify as Asian-American, given the power differentials I’ve encountered in my life, yet I do this by repressing or denying to some degree my whiteness and white heritage, which I’m sure has helped me in some ways. I do not think that I’m such a strange occurrence. Ethnicity simply is insufficient for me. Race, however, is an identifier of one’s political position or relation to power in society, and better captures such complexities of subjectivity.
And so, using ethnic identifiers can make us think that we are looking at ethnic differences, when it is more important to see differences of power and privilege, differences produced by social structures associated with sets of racialized dispositions (or discursive, material, and performative structures), ones that may be subjective (self-identifications) or projected onto groups. Regardless of the structures, we are always seeing differences in power and privilege. Using Manning Marable (2002), Carmen Kynard (2013) explains clearly the relationship between race and power:
I also define race as the central, power-defining principle of modern states and, today, as a “global apartheid” that has constructed “new racialized ethnic hierarchies” in the context of the global flow of capital under neoliberalism. This means that white privilege can be more specifically understood as the historical accumulation of material benefits in relation to salaries, working conditions, employment, home ownership, life expectancy rates, access to professional positions, and promotions. (Kynard, 2013, p. 10)
The result of the historical accumulation of material benefits to those who inhabit a white racial habitus is structural racism that provides power, privilege, and access to opportunities that most folks who inhabit other racial habitus simply are denied, and denied for ostensibly non-racial reasons. And this racism amounts to power differentials based on how an individual or group is situated racially in society, school, and the larger global economy. And so, to have an antiracist agenda for classroom writing assessment means that writing assessment is centrally about the construction and distribution of power in all the ways that power is exercised in the classroom. But for the writing classroom, power is mostly exercised through the ability to judge, assess, and grade writing. It is exercised mostly
