gap in the literature, Huot discusses Arnetha Ball’s (1997) very good study on the reading practices of African-American and European-American teachers, which turns out to be different along racial lines. He admits that at least in this case, “teachers with different cultural orientations saw very different things in student writing” (2002, p. 117). This, however, is the end of his comment. He moves from summarizing Ball’s study of race in a writing assessment, which he reads as culture, to talking about Sarah Freedman’s (1984) work, which talks about the culture of schools generally, how they construct roles and expectations for students and teachers. After Freedman, he discusses Faigley’s (1989) important essay, “Judging Writers, Judging Selves,” which helps him identify the ways that readers are situated historically and so have historically changing tastes that affect the way we read and judge student writing.
Huot’s transition from Ball to Freedman is telling in the way he treats race, and by implication racism. He says, “[i]t’s important in talking about the influence of culture in teacher response that we not forget that school itself is a cultural system bound by specific beliefs and attitudes” (2002, p. 117). True enough. No argument here. But what about racism, isn’t that an historical set of beliefs, tastes, and practices too? There is no connection to race or racist practices. Ball’s findings do not come up again. It is important to note again, however, that race is not real, but racism is. And it’s racism that must be considered first.
This avoidance of any deep treatment of racism in his discussion becomes more problematic near the end of this otherwise fine chapter. Huot builds to a very intriguing model for teachers and students for “moving toward a theory of response” (2002, p. 132). There are five elements to the model, but there is no explicit way to interrogate or understand racism in practices in the model. The model offers as its most important term, “context,” which is informed surely by the work of Ball and his earlier discussion. Not surprisingly, context is the center of the visual model, and the other four elements revolve around it, influencing it. Context is described as: “Particular writer, particular moment of a particular work in a particular curriculum, particular institution, particular issues, and particular audiences” (Huot, 2002, p. 132). With all these particulars, one might think that teachers shouldn’t ever think in terms of larger social patterns or effects, or should treat every reading and response scene as one in which we cannot judge it next to others. This means that every judgment, every assessment of every student is unique. In this way, the model attempts to resist being racist by using the abstract liberal tenant of individualism (e.g., we are all unique). It theorizes that the particulars of any context determine what we do, how we read, why we read, what meaning or judgments we can make, etc. But it resists acknowledging in any way race or racism as a phenomenon, resists noticing or acting on larger patterns. By referencing individualism, by referring to all students as individuals, the model loses the ability to see broader patterns by any number of social dimensions. It resists seeing and acting against racism as structural. To many, this model would amount to not seeing racism, ignoring it, then saying that it doesn’t matter. It may not matter, but you cannot know that until you investigate it.
There are many good things about Huot’s theorizing of context for reading and response; however, treating every student as a unique student, as a particular student, isn’t in contradiction to seeing racism as affecting our students of color, seeing larger, broader patterns that reveal the uneven relations to the dominant discourse and the judgments it promotes as unevenly tilted in favor of white students. But this nuance, even in a very nuanced and complex model for reading and responding, is lost because of the way Huot does not treat racism in his discussion. In part, this is because those in the field of writing assessment do not have vocabularies to help them discuss racism.
Most important, Huot’s avoidance of considering racism in his discussion is the larger cause of this theory of reading and responding to lack a necessary attention to an antiracist agenda, which I know he would want to promote. Through it all, Huot, like most others, never attempts to understand context or historically changing values in reading, for instance, through other theoretical lenses that could help reveal racism, such as those of postcolonialism, whiteness studies, and Marxian theories, which could reveal ways that historically changing tastes and values may be influenced by historically changing racial formations in various schools, or the particular manifestation of whiteness in an assessment, or the historical structures of racism that affect who goes to school when and where at what times in U.S. history. This lack of treating racism makes it invisible in this otherwise very good theory of reading and response, which is the thrust of Huot’s chapter.3
About the Resistance to Racism
I get a lot of resistance to explicitly thinking about race and racism in discussions of writing assessment, or I get silence, which I take as one form of resistance. This probably is an unfair assessment of some, I realize, but these discussions in hallways, classrooms, conferences, and over email are a part of why I write this book. And I feel it necessary to address these resistances in this introduction as a way to conclude it.
What troubles me are people who look at racial inequalities, look at racism in writing classrooms and programs, like the numbers and statistics I show later in this book and say, “how do we know that is racism?” My mind often whirls at such questions. Forget for a moment how it happened, inequalities are here. No African-Americans in your classes, few in your school. Where are the Native Americans? Most who are there, do not do well. They fail. Why? Isn’t it enough to see such patterns? Does it really matter whether readers envisioned Latino or Black writers when they judge blindly the writing on the SAT writing exam or the English Placement Test (EPT) in California, which I discuss later in this book, or the writing of African-American students in first-year courses at Fresno State, the ones with a higher failure rate than any other racial formation? Here’s what matters to me. White students uniformly and historically do better on most if not all writing assessments, large-scale or classroom. It may not be intentional, but it is racism, and it is a product of the writing assessment ecologies we create. Do not get me wrong. I do not blame white students or teachers. I blame writing assessments.
Richard Haswell disagrees with me to a degree, but he voices an important critique of the use of racism as a concept and goals in writing assessments. In his review of Race and Writing Assessment (Inoue & Poe, 2012a), Haswell’s (2013) central critique of the book is that there is a contradiction in any investigation of racism in writing assessments. He says, “People cannot go about eliminating racism without constructing the notion of race, and the construction of race can only further racism” (Haswell, 2013). A little later, he makes an even more direct claim, which can be read as a criticism of the present book and its antiracist project: “any writing assessment shaped by anti-racism will still be racism or, if that term affronts, will be stuck in racial contradictions” (2013). What follows are a discussion of four “racial aporias” that we live with because we live with the contradiction of race.
The fourth aporia that Haswell identifies is one about the subject position of the researcher or teacher in an antiracist writing assessment project, such as the one this book attempts to articulate. He states it this way: “Writing scholars position themselves outside institutional racism to understand it but their understanding concludes that there is no outside” (2013). The point that Haswell is making is that no one can escape their own racial subjectivity or the structural influences in society and school that make up what we call race and racism. We taint our own efforts at antiracist writing assessments. Of the contributors of the collection, Haswell claims, “None of them voice the possibility that this pervasiveness of racial formations might include their own relations, conceptions, and identities,” and he concludes, “the editors note that their book, which repeatedly castigates the stylistic criterion of high academic English as a racial formation, is entirely written in high academic English” (2013).
I do not deny these observations at all, but they do not make an antiracist project of any kind, including an antiracist writing assessment theory, impossible to do or wrong-headed. On the contrary, because we are all implicated in racism in our classrooms and in society, because race is already constructed
