white state was filled with friendly teachers, eager to help, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that when I wrote, I was writing at a deficit, that I always had to make up for where I came from and who I was. It seemed obvious to me in class, a brown spot in a class of white milk. Everyone talked and wrote differently than me, it seemed. We shouldn’t forget that environments, places, are often (usually) raced, affecting how discourses are valued and judged.
Second, ecologies (re)create the living organisms and environments that constitute them through their relationships with each other. If living organisms and their environments create and recreate each other, then one cannot easily separate people from their environments and expect those people or environments to stay the same. To put this in simpler terms: we are defined by where we live, work, and commune. Places, environments, help make us who we are, and we help make places what they are. The issue that this observation brings up for an antiracist writing assessment ecology is one about the historical relationships between particular racial formations and institutions. White, middle and upper class people have been associated more closely to those who go to college because they have been the ones who have gone to college and who have controlled those institutions. Colleges and writing classrooms have been places of white settlement and communion. And this helps us understand why the dominant discourse of the classroom is a white discourse, and informed by a white racial habitus.
To work against this in our writing assessments, I find it helpful to think in terms of labor, in terms of what people do. In one sense, we might think of a student as only a student because of the work she does and the associations she has to particular places, locations, or sites, like a college campus, or a writing classroom. Those locations have certain labors associated with them as much as they have certain people associated with them. A student’s relationships to classrooms and a school helps constitute her as a student, and the school is constituted as a school because she and other students like her inhabit and labor in that place. As my earlier discussion of racial habitus explains, among other things, the ways that environments affect people are discursively, performatively, and materially, changing us as we dwell and labor because we dwell and labor in those places.
To acquire things by our labors is also seen historically as good and ethical, especially in matters of learning. After making a rousing argument for his young students’ willingness to study rhetoric for civic betterment by “disdain[ing] a life of pleasure; when they might have saved expense and lived softly,” as many of their contemporaries do, Isocrates argues that his students labor at their studies to know themselves and learn, to be better citizens (2000, pp. 346-347). He ends with an argument for an ethics of labor:
Pray, what is noble by nature becomes shameful and base when one attains it by effort? We shall find that there is no such thing, but that, on the contrary, we praise, at least in other fields, those who by their own devoted toil are able to acquire some good thing more than we praise those who inherit it from their ancestors. And rightly so; for it is well that in all activities, and most of all in the art of speaking, credit is won, not by gifts of fortune, but by efforts of study. (p. 347)
If our students’ gifts of fortune are the racial habitus they bring with them, and some habitus provide some students an unfair inheritance in today’s academy, then we must use something more ethical to assess them by, especially in writing classrooms. Isocrates suggests that we already value in learning those who work hard to attain such learning and that in the study of rhetoric “credit is won” by “efforts of study.” While I know Isocrates has particular things in mind that students might learn, but not too particular, since his rhetorical philosophy was at its center kairotic, I read him at face value. What we might learn from the study and practice of rhetoric will depend on the practical things that need doing in the now. Our most important asset is the labor we do now, the effort we expend on rhetoric, not our nature gifts, or our racial habitus. Adjusting our assessment systems to favor labor over the gifts of racial habitus sets up assessment ecologies that are by their nature more ethical and fairer to all.
Thus in antiracist writing assessment ecologies, it is important to focus on labor, as we all can labor, and labor can be measured by duration, quantity, or intensity, not by so-called quality, or against a single standard. This makes for a more equitable ecology, particularly for those who may come to it with discourses or habitus other than the dominant ones. Thus, one important aspect of an antiracist writing assessment ecology is an attention to labor, or more precisely, a valuing of labor over so-called quality, even though often our goals may be to help students become more fluent in the dominant discourses of the academy.23
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