Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laura Greenfield is the founding director of the Transformative Speaking Program and a faculty associate of communication and education in the School of Critical Social Inquiry at Hampshire College. Her research and teaching interests include the intersections of language, power, and education, with a particular focus on race and gender. Her first book, Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change, with Dr. Karen Rowan, was the winner of the 2012 International Writing Centers Association's Outstanding Book Award. Previously she served as the founding director of the nonprofit Women's Voices Worldwide, Inc. and as associate director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts at Mount Holyoke College, where she brought its Speaking, Arguing, and Writing Program into international prominence.

Karen Rowan is professor of English and associate graduate coordinator at California State University, San Bernardino. Her teaching and research attend to the intersections of writing and literacy, pedagogy, antiracism, and language. She is coeditor of Writing Centers and the New Racism, winner of the 2012 IWCA Outstanding Book Award.

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WRITING CENTERS AND THE NEW RACISM

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: A Call to Action Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan..................................................................................................................11 The Rhetorics of Racism: A Historical Sketch Victor Villanueva.................................................................................................................172 The "Standard English" Fairy Tale: A Rhetorical Analysis of Racist Pedagogies and Commonplace Assumptions about Language Diversity Laura Greenfield............................333 Should Writers Use They Own English? Vershawn Ashanti Young....................................................................................................................614 Retheorizing Writing Center Work to Transform a System of Advantage Based on Race Nancy M. Grimm...............................................................................755 Bold: The Everyday Writing Center and the Production of New Knowledge in Antiracist Theory and Practice Anne Ellen Geller, Frankie Condon, and Meg Carroll.....................1016 Beyond the "Week Twelve Approach": Toward a Critical Pedagogy for Antiracist Tutor Education Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan..................................................1247 Organizing for Antiracism in Writing Centers: Principles for Enacting Social Change Moira Ozias and Beth Godbee................................................................1508 Bias in the Writing Center: Tutor Perceptions of African American Language Nancy Effinger Wilson...............................................................................1779 Diversity as Topography: The Benefits and Challenges of Cross Racial Interaction in the Writing Center Kathryn Valentine and Mónica F. Torres.............................19210 Racial Literacy and the Writing Center Michelle T. Johnson....................................................................................................................21112 "The Quality of Light": Using Narrative in a Peer Tutoring Class Ann E. Green.................................................................................................25513 Caught in a Firestorm: A Harsh Lesson Learned Teaching AAVE Barbara Gordon....................................................................................................27314 On the Edges: Black Maleness, Degrees of Racism, and Community on the Boundaries of the Writing Center Jason B. Esters........................................................290Index.............................................................................................................................................................................300About the Authors.................................................................................................................................................................302

Chapter One

A Historical Sketch

Victor Villanueva

I want to make a convoluted claim. The claim is that though there has always been a distinction that contemporary eyes might view as racism, racism is relatively new. There have always been ways of distinguishing the usses from the thems and of ranking the usses as superior to the thems, but racism in the ways we tend to think of the concept hasn't always been the means whereby that discrimination has been made. A claim I don't wish to make is that there has been some evolution or devolution that has led to racism. Whereas George Frederickson sees something of a circle—a bigotry that begins as theological, develops into the biological, and returns to the theological in contemporary times—I will argue that the matter is more like Antonio Gramsci's sedimentations, that elements from prior historic blocs are never quite lost. I argue that the first distinctions were rhetorical, even prior to the theological, and that today's racism, though very clearly having material, economic effects, is again more steeped in the rhetorical, though now containing the sedimentations of the theological, geographical, biological, and the like. This, in effect, is an argument laid out as sketch of racism of the West.

NOMOS AND THE BARBARIAN

A standard gambit in the classroom is to assert that it's no coincidence that racism, the Enlightenment, capitalism, and trans-hemispheric expansion all coincide. Some student will invariably say something like, "Wait a minute! Are you saying racism is two hundred years old?" To which I'll say something about maybe 500 years but formalized about two hundred years ago, yeah. And then, some really smart student will bring up classical Athens.

The argument is that the Athenians had their own brand of bigotry. And that's true. That's what gave rise to imperialism and to slavery, but Athens's form of bigotry wasn't tied to more contemporary notions of "race." Though the "Greeks" did distinguish by means of something like phenotype, those visual, physical markers are not what distinguished superior from inferior, civilized from barbarian. There might not have been a unified Greek state (giving rise to my use of scare quotes), but there was a unified distinction, likely reified by way of the Delian League, so that those holding allegiance to the central political power of Athens— by way of language—would be separated from the barbarian. It will take the Romans to convert the word barbarian to a physical reference—the wearers of beards, hairy ones. But the Greeks coined the word from the Chinese, according to Edith Hall (1989, 4), a term originally onomatopoetic for nonsense speech, a Chinese version of blah-blah-blah. And Frank Snowden (1970), in Blacks in Antiquity, pointed out some time ago that though Athenians recognized the physical characteristics of sub-Saharan Africans as those with burnt faces—Ethiopians—that was only an identifier of place: the burnt-faced ones were the people from that place down there. In Before Color Prejudice, Snowden (1983) notes that though there were all kinds of associations between blackness and evil, none of those references carried over to people. For the Athenians, the measure of superiority was language, the language to rise above physis, the language of nomos, the language of arête, terms we have come to associate solely with the Elder Sophists, thanks to John Poulakos (1983), Harold Barrett (1987), and others, but which applied to the whole of Greek culture as centered in the Athenian city-state. We can infer as much from George Kennedy's (1991) choice of a subtitle to his version of Aristotle's rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. No one would claim Aristotle was a sophist. It was in these terms, physis, nomos, arête—the uses of language to create and to maintain a political order that would rise above our natures—that Athenian culture saw its superiority to those who could only speak as by nature, not by gift of reason. The barbarian was barbarian by nature of discourse, of rhetoric, of politics, not by what we have come to see as "race."

The closest the Romans come to a notion of race is the gens: a community bound...