Welcome. Good morning. Alright. Get ready for sixty minutes of talking. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. To open, I humbly make a land acknowledgement.
I would like to recognize and acknowledge the indigenous people of this land: the Lenni
Lenape, Shawnee, and Hodinöhšönih -- the six Nations, that is, the Mohawk, Oneida,
Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga and Tuscarora. We are gathered today on Jö:deogë’, an
Onödowa'ga or Senaca word for Pittsburgh or “between two rivers”: the welhik hane
and Mënaonkihëla. These are the Lenape words for the Allegheny
and Monongahela rivers, which translate to the “best flowing river of the hills”
and “where the banks cave in and erode.” While a land acknowledgement is not enough,
it is an important social justice and decolonial practice that promotes indigenous visibility
and a reminder that we are on settled indigenous land. Let this land acknowledgement be an
opening for all of us to contemplate a way to join in decolonial and indigenous movements
for sovereignty and self-determination. Lastly, I am grateful to Melissa Borgia-Askey and
Sandy Gajehsoh Dowdy for valuable etymological and pronunciation help (even though I'm still needing more tutoring on that). Also, I thank Andrea
Riley Mukavetz and the American Indian Caucus for helping me with this land acknowledgement,
and providing the convention and hopefully future conventions with similar language for all of us to use in our sessions this year. Now, I must prepare everyone for what I’m
about to say. The message I offer comes from a deep sense of love and compassion for everyone
who makes the sacrifices it takes to teach writing and rhetoric in our world today. I
know you are good people. And because I love you, I will be honest with you, but it may
hurt. I promise you, it hurts not because I’ve done something wrong, but because I’m
exposing your racial wounds. These wounds are the precursors to the killing referenced
in my title. I also ask many of you to be patient as I first address my colleagues of
color, but the fact that I must ask you to be patient to do this is evidence of the White
supremacy that even we, conscientious teachers of writing, are saturated in.
My colleagues of color, to you I wink and nod. We will break the steel cage of White supremacy,
of White racial bias, of the many bars (don't worry about all the details, it's just there so you don't look at me), like the physical bars of the jails and prisons
that house the 2.3 million U.S. inmates, 67% of which are our brothers and sisters of color,
yet we make up only about 37% of the U.S. population (“Who’s in Prison”; “Incarceration”).
I know, I don’t need to tell you this. You know it. With Black men being jailed at rates
five times that of their White peers, and Latinos at twice the rate of Whites, it’s
likely that some of us know friends or family members who have had physical cages placed
around them. We academics of color in this room have many things in common with the U.S.
prison population, one being the steel cage of racism. The cages are also figurative, no less
real in their effects. Michelle Alexander recounts Iris Marion Young’s metaphor for
oppression, applying it to the racism that causes such incarceration rates. Among many
other injustices, I add to this list the way we judge, assess, give feedback to, and grade
writing by students of color in our classrooms. Yes, the way we judge language form some
of the steel bars around our students and ourselves -- we too maintain White supremacy,
even as we fight against it in other ways. We ain’t just internally colonized, we’re
internally jailed. As Alexander reminds us, and we likely feel each day, the overdetermined
nature of racism explains why we can change or eliminate one unfair thing in a system,
or school, or classroom -- like our curriculum or our bodies’ presence -- yet still find
that our students of color struggle and fail -- even when we are there to help them, showing
them that others like them have made it. We hold up the flag of opportunity and say, “please,
don’t give up. Follow me!” But we in this room made it despite the system,
not because of it, yet we are part of the system now. We are the exceptions that prove
the rule, as Victor Villanueva has told us. We are contradictions. Again, my colleagues
of color, I don’t need to tell you this. You live it, but sometimes we have to remind
ourselves of the magnitude of shit -- that we are not oppressed alone. We need to commiserate
together here in this place because often we may be alone at our home institutions.
We need to lament together. Of course, I commiserate with you today in the presence of White people,
so there are other reasons I remind you about the steel cage of racism. We should lament
together. It builds coalitions among the variously oppressed, such as our LGBTQIA colleagues,
many of whom are White. The metaphor of the cage of racism reminds
me of the famous “iron cage” metaphor coined by Max Weber in 1905. The term in German
he used was, “stalhartes Gehäuse,” (I don't know German very well so I hope I got that right) which was translated into English as “iron cage”
but has also been translated as “shell as hard as steel.” What Weber was describing
was the way in which Capitalist societies, particularly in the U.S. with its strong Protestantism,
created conditions in which people self-govern their actions and beliefs, even their desires
through overdetermined structures in the market economy. This is due to the fact that no matter
what you as an individual believe or do, you always are implicated and circulate in market
economies that dictate the nature of the cage around you -- that is, dictate your own self-governance,
your boundaries and desires. You are always beholden to the market. The market I call
your attention to today is the market of White language preferences in schools, although
it is also not hard to find the connections between it and the flows of Capital. I am overly simplifying Weber, but I call
his ideas to your attention, my colleagues of color, because many White folks wish to
make the racist problems we experience, like prison and educational racism, and the White
bias of those systems, as about something else, about mostly economics, laziness, or
bad values. But these are interconnected and intersectional dimensions. In fact, Ronald
Takaki calls on Weber’s “iron cage” metaphor to highlight both the steel cage
of racism, and of, what he terms “republicanism,” which is another way of saying American whiteness.
Even us academics and teachers of color are trapped in cages of such American whiteness. And if we are going talk about cages and racism,
we should remember the first published instance of cages of racism. In Paul Laurence Dunbar’s
1899 poem, “Sympathy,” the bird sees the bright sun, the grass, the stream, but it
cannot fly. It is caged, beating bloody wings against the bars, singing, not “of joy or
glee,” but “a plea.” The poem’s narrator, perhaps Dunbar himself, ends: “I know why
the caged bird sings!” While they are both speaking of the Black experience in the U.S.,
Maya Angelou’s famous poem, inspired by Dunbar’s, explains the context for the cage
of racism that we, all people of color, feel around us all the time but not in the same
ways. That context is White bias, or Takaki’s cage of republicanism, only Angelou’s Whiteness
is that which is not in the cage. It is the market that makes up Weber’s stalhartes
Gehäuse, his “shell as hard as steel.” The free bird thinks of another breeze
And the trade winds soft through The sighing trees
And the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright Lawn and he names the sky his own. (Angelou) Who has been allowed to name people, places,
things, the processes of writing and revision, theories of rhetoric? Who has named your sky?
Who has named your writing, my friends? Who has named your pedagogies? Who has named your
ways of judging language, my colleagues of color? The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill of things unknown
but longed for still and his tune is heard
on the distant hill for the caged bird
sings of freedom. (Angelou) “A fearful trill” that is “longed for
still” that is “freedom.” What does it mean for you, my colleagues of color, to
sing your freedom in your classrooms, your scholarship, your pedagogies? Is it the freedom
from the White naming that is such a thick part of our disciplines’ histories? Is it
freedom from the White habits of language that cover us all -- is it freedom from White
language supremacy? Again, I know, many of you are also doing
this work, speaking these truths. I have heard and seen you do so. I have seen White people
around you smile at your words, then not take them, turn and go on in their White world,
a world that rewards their silence and hesitation. I thank you, my brothers and sisters of color.
And I stand up here today asking everyone to listen, to see, to know you as you are,
to stop saying shit about injustice while doing jack shit about it. We are all needed
in this project, this fight, this work, these labors. But because most in the room, in our
disciplines, are White, I have to speak to them too, many of whom sit on their hands,
with love in their hearts, but stillness in their bodies. Let us have tough compassion for our White
colleagues. They don’t have the years of anti-White language supremacy training we
do. They’ve been paid off too many times to even recognize the bribes. Many even think
they earned the brides they take. It is their wages, or as David Roediger says, it is the
“wages of whiteness.” They’ve never lived in the same worlds we have. And it ain’t
all their fault. But finding fault ain’t the point. Change is. Revolution. Reconciliation.
Redemption. My colleagues of color, I hope I offer you fuel, words of charcoal and fire
to go back to your schools and institutions and make things burn -- melt the steel bars
of racism and White language supremacy in your places. So please know, I’m speaking
with you, my colleagues of color. You are with me. You too are speaking, have spoken. Now, let me ask the White folks in the room
a question. When I addressed only my colleagues of color just a minute ago, how did you feel?
How did it make you feel in your skin to be excluded? How did it feel to be talked about
and not talked to, to be the object of the discussion and not the subject? How does it
feel to be the problem? How does it make you feel to be the one in the way of progress,
no matter what you have said or what your agendas are, how hard you worked, or how sincere
you are? It’s unfair, isn’t it? You are good people. And yet you are the problem,
but you don’t want to be. Think about that for a minute. You can be a problem even when
you try not to be. Sit and lament in your discomfort and its sources. Search. If our
goal is a more socially just world, we don’t need more good people. We need good changes,
good structures, good work that makes good changes, structures, and people. Are you uncomfortable yet? Do you feel misunderstood?
Are you thinking, he’s not talking about me -- he’s speaking of those other White
folks, the less conscious ones. Are you thinking: I know, he ain’t talking about me. I’m
so woke, I use the word “woke.” But I am talking about all of you. No White person
escapes it. And because I am often racially ambiguous, I cannot exclude myself either.
In the right light, I can be White -- even if I don’t get all the privileges that habitus,
or that set of dispositions, is meant to confer in our society. So, I’m not going to tell
you that you are going to be alright. I’m not going to say that you -- you White folks
in this room -- are the special ones. You thinking you’re special is the problem.
It always has been, because you, White people just like you who came before you,
have had most of the power, decided most of the things, built the steel cage of White
language supremacy that we exist in today, both in and outside of the academy -- and
likely, many of you didn’t know you did it. You just thought you were doing language
work, doing teaching, doing good work, judging students and their languages in conscientious
and kind ways, helping them, preparing them, giving them what was good for them. Just as it is unfair that in our world most
indigenous, Latinx, and Black Americans will never get the chance to do what we do, to
be teachers, or professors, or researchers, or something else that taps their own potentials
because of the racist steel bars set around them, it is equally unfair that you perpetuate
racism and White language supremacy not just through your words and actions, but through
your body in a place like this or in your classrooms, despite your better intentions.
Let me repeat that to compassionately urge you to sit in some discomfort: White people
can perpetuate White supremacy by being present. You can perpetuate White language supremacy
through the presence of your bodies in places like this. That feels unfair to say so bluntly, doesn’t
it? You perpetuate White language supremacy in your classrooms because you are White and
stand in front of students, as many White teachers have done before you, judging, assessing,
grading, professing on the same kinds of language standards, standards that came from your group
of people. It’s the truth. It ain’t fair, but it’s the truth. Your body perpetuates
racism, just as Black bodies attract unwarranted police aggression by being Black. Neither
dynamic are preferred, neither are right, but that’s the shit -- the steel cage -- that we’re
in. The sooner we can accept this fact, the sooner we can get to cutting the bars. Now, I’m not saying you need to leave. Far
from it. We need you, my White colleagues. This is the elephant in the room. It’s big
and white and obscures everyone’s view. And we all need to see it in order to see
around it. And it gets in the way of understanding our practices of language as a weapon that
we use against our students? So what does any of this have to do with answering
the question: How do we language so people stop killing each other? I’m trying to set
up the problem of the conditions of White language supremacy, not just in our society
and schools, but in our own minds, in our habits of mind, in our dispositions, our bodies,
our habitus, in the discursive, bodily, and performative ways we use and judge language.
This means, many of us can acknowledge White language supremacy as the status quo in our
classrooms and society, but not see all of it, and so perpetuate it. I’m trying to
explain the conditions in our classrooms that cause your judgements to be weaponized as
a White teacher, or even a teacher of color who must take on a White racial habitus to
have the job you have. It takes conditions of White language supremacy to make our judgements
about logic, clarity, organization, and conventions a hand grenade, with the pin pulled. All we
have to do is give it to another and let go of the hammer. These judgements, these
standards, seem like they're just about language, just about communication, just about preparation
for the future, just about good critical thinking and communicating. Here’s a hint: when we
start qualifying our ideas with the word “just,” we are trying to convince ourselves of the
lies we are telling. We are trying to convince ourselves of a diminished sense of the power
and significance of rhetoric, of words, of language. So, back to my title. It comes from Mary Rose
O’Reilley’s invocation of Ihab Hassan’s question. Hassan was an Arab American literary
theorist, born in Egypt, which I believe made his asking of the question quite real, not
figurative or imaginative. O’Reilley’s short 1989 article in which she offers the
question is a kind of rumination on her teaching life to that point, which began in the 1960s.
So how do we language so people stop killing each other? The practices of languaging are
fundamentally practices of judging. What is reading rhetorically or considering the rhetorical
situation for a writer or speaker, if not a series of judgements? In a world of police
brutality against Black and Brown people in the U.S., of border walls and regressive and
harmful immigration policies that traumatize and separate children from parents, of increasing
violence against Muslims and LGBTQIA, of women losing their rights to control their own bodies,
of overt White supremacy on U.S. streets, of mass shootings in schools, of the conscious
poisoning of Black and Brown people’s communities, of a complete disregard for indigenous people’s
rights to their lands and cultures, of blatant refusals to be compassionate to the hundreds
of thousands of refugees around the world, where do we really think this violence, discord,
and killing starts? What is the nature of the ecologies in which some people find it
necessary to oppress or kill others who are different from them, who identify or think
or speak or worship or love differently than them? All of these decisions are made by judging
others by our own standards, and inevitably finding others wanting, deficient. People
who judge in these ways lack practices of problematizing their own existential situations
and lack experience sitting in the discomfort that problematizing brings. They lack an ability
to sit with paradox, guilt, pain, and blame, and make something else out of it.
Again, let me compassionately urge you to sit in discomfort: If you use a single standard
to grade your students’ languaging, you engage in racism. You actively promote White
language supremacy, which is the handmaiden to White bias in the world, the kind that
kills Black men on the streets by the hands of the police through profiling and good ol’
fashion racism. So, how do we, English and literacy teachers,
judge language so people stop killing each other? I have argued that labor-based grading
contracts explicitly address in writing classrooms the problem of grading locally diverse students
(Antiracist; Labor-Based Grading Contracts), the paradox of teachers who are by necessity
steeped in a White racial habitus, steeped in white language bias already, while many of their
students are not -- a White racial bias that if you are White you cannot fully see,
hear, or feel (the social world has trained you not to), yet it is the source of your
privileges, likely part of the reason you are in front of the class in the first place.
If we can confront such paradoxes in our judgements of language, in our habitus, then maybe some
of the killing may stop. But first, we have to painfully reconcile our habits of judgement,
and that means painfully reconciling the paradox between ourselves and our actions. As Bourdieu’s
term, habitus, makes clear, one’s judgement is not simply one’s own individual judgement
of something. It's never simply an individual practice. It is consubstantial, interconnected,
to the social world we live in. As many of you know, in Freire’s Pedagogy
of The Oppressed, problem-posing education moves through a process of listening to the
community outside of the classroom, identifying problems or issues, then dialoguing with student-participants
using codes, or cultural artifacts that embody language, such as media, newspapers, articles,
TV shows, movies, plays, etc. that represent many sides of the problem or issue (Shor 38),
that reveal the problem as paradoxes. From these codes, participants again listen carefully
to them in order to describe what they see, hear, and feel, offering their own experiences
that relate to those codes, questioning the codes, and of course, moving to articulate
things to do as a response (Shor 39; Brown 40-41). This means that problem-posing is
an ongoing process of interrogating the paradox of judgement, how we see, hear, or feel, how
we language the world into existence, how we are simultaneously right and wrong, and
how that languaging makes and unmakes us simultaneously. Put another way: Our personal choices and
judgements of our students are both personal and a part of larger social and disciplinary
structures that also form the boundaries within which we act and judge. Raymond Williams describes
this dynamic as simultaneously a “setting of limits” and an “exertion of pressures”
in a particular direction (87). So part of being a woke writing teacher, then, is a constant
posing of problems about my own existential writing assessment situation, a continual
articulating of paradoxes in my judgement that complicates how I make judgements, how
I read and make meaning of the symbols my students give me and that I give back to them (and you can't see the last thing, it should say White language supremacy underneath) ,
how White language supremacy places limits on and pressures me, despite my efforts to
counter such things, just as they do my students. To see such paradoxes in how we judge is
to see through the natural, or to see things that are natural as paradoxes, thus not natural
at all, but contrived by determined systems and choices (Villanueva 54). And in our classrooms,
journals, committee rooms, and writing standards, what do you think the natural is? What have
you left unquestioned about your ways of judging language or students? Do you think that White
racial habitus, that the historical White language biases in our disciplines and lives,
have affected these places, or the building of something like the “Framework for Success
in Postsecondary Writing”? Or our pedagogies? Or your own ways of judging student writing,
what you see, and can see, as clear, effective, and compelling? Do you think you’re special,
immune to the biases? Let’s look at one sacred cow in our discipline.
What do you think the habit of mind that the Framework calls “metacognition” is and
looks like in students in your classroom? How do you evaluate it or grade it? Where
did you get those ideas? Think of 2 or 3 writers or texts that have markers of such a habit
of mind, perhaps ones you might show as examples of such a practice. Where did those writers
and texts get their habits from, their dispositions to do this exemplary work? How might you characterize
those writers or their texts’ performative, bodily, and discursive dispositions? Did they
magically escape the White biases in their worlds or educations? Were they the exceptions?
Are they special? What I like about the Framework is its de-emphasis
on hierarchy and ranking performances that that fall within any given habit of mind.
But is that how departments and programs use the Framework? Or do they use it to dismantle
hierarchies within student social formations? Or is it just a pedagogy and not an assessment
philosophy, not a philosophy that structures the way you judge and grade writing in your
classrooms, the way you dole out opportunity? Do you still have a standard next to the Framework?
Is the Framework being used as method to get students to write White, but not used to attend
to the ever-widening universe of reflective discourses? But White language supremacy has crafted the
Framework in more insidious ways. This makes the framework’s presence still dangerous
if we don’t see it for what it is. As I’m sure most of you know, we live in a deeply
segregated society. The Washington Post’s May 2018 story shows maps from demographic
data, illustrating just how segregated by race we are. Here’s the city we are currently
in. The red dots are white residents, the blue Black residents. The downtown area where
the three rivers converge is a White center of commerce and tourism, the business district,
the heart of a White supremacy. That’s where we are, the place where they make the steel
bars. Let’s not forget that. And when you go to dinner tonight, or you move from
session to session, notice who serves you. Who picks up after you, or fills water containers
in the White center? How are we not in this “steel city” in a steel cage of White
supremacy? So the 23 good, smart members of the team
that created the Framework were mostly White and were produced by such a segregated society.
Let me dramatize this for you. Here’s the Framework’s task force. Where do you think
these folks learned their languaging? Who do you think most or all of their friends
were in school? What schools do you think they went to? Now, I don’t know the answers
to these questions for these individuals, but I do know the patterns in the U.S., which
they cannot escape. If you’re White, you kick it with White people. If you’re Black,
you kick it with Black people, but you may work with White people. It may seem melodramatic
to show all these White faces when I could have just told you that 18 or 19 of the members
of the Framework’s designers were White. It may appear that I’m pointing fingers
at individuals unnecessarily. Calling out people for things they do not control. If
you think that, you are missing the point. You are feeling your White fragility. I ask you compassionately: notice your
White fragility. The point is the inevitable and embodied Whiteness. It can be very visceral,
thick in the air, for us people of color. I need you to feel how Whiteness in good-hearted,
smart people, like these folks, who do great work, can fill a room with their Whiteness
to the point that the one or two people of color in the room can feel suffocated. I want
you feel how a good group of folks like this can silence the few bodies of color in the
room, and never examine their own habits of judgement, then canonized those White habits
as simply habits of everyone’s mind. I want you to see how this steel bar is installed
in the cage of White language supremacy that imprisons us all. But there’s more. White language supremacy
also looks like this. The four authors of the article in CE that explains the process
and the Framework were all White women. To the leaders of the task force’s credit,
who are the authors of this article, they point to the place one can find all the task
force members and their bios, a website. The paradox in this is that, Peggy, Linda, Anne,
and Cathy, do not control their Whiteness. But they do control how it's deployed, how
they make it visible and the privileges of leadership it conveys to them. This is not
to say they have not worked hard, or deserve credit for their work, or even that the work
they did isn’t good work. It is to say that problematizing their own Whiteness should
reveal this kind of painful paradox: that good work, done by conscientious White people,
can still kill people of color by codifying White language supremacy. The presence of
their White bodies perpetuates historical racial injustices. Damned if they do, damned
if they don’t. There are no easy way outs of the steel cage of White language supremacy. How do we check this in our lives? One key
practice in problematizing is deep listening -- it anchors everything in the process. We
cannot problem-pose without deep listening. Krista Ratcliffe named a similar cross-cultural
practice, “rhetorical listening,” as a response to Jacqueline Jones Royster’s CCCC
chair’s address. Royster asks us: “how do we listen,” how do we do more than “talk
back,” how do we exchange, negotiate, and collaboratively create perspectives, meaning,
and understanding? Ratcliffe offers a way that centers on acknowledging Whiteness and
listening deeply to others, or “consciously standing under discourses that surround us
and others . . . letting [them] wash over, through, and around us and then letting them
lie there to inform our politics and ethics”. These listening practices are important, but
let’s not forget that Ratcliffe is a critical, White academic who realizes she must listen
likely because that is not the habit of language most White academics practice, particularly
White males. The “we” and “us” is White teachers and academics. The other side
to this practice is the body of color talking, being heard by the White listener -- Royster
being listened to by Ratcliffe. Ten years after O’Reilley wrote the article
from which I derived my title, she revisited her teaching in Radical Presence: Teaching
as Contemplative Practice. In that book, she describes the practices of deep listening
in her classroom, concluding that “One can, I think (these were here words), listen someone into existence, encourage
a stronger self to emerge or a new talent to flourish” (21). It’s attractive, isn’t
it? But wait, doesn’t it reenact a whitely stance of control and agency? Who’s doing
the making here? The teacher listening her students into existence? It’s Pygmalion all over
again. It’s the Whitely Rex Harrison languaging Audrey Hepburn into existence when we know,
ain’t nothin’ wrong with Audrey but Rex’s judgements. This isn’t quite what Royster I think
had in mind. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese monk and long-time
social justice activist, bases most of his teachings about peace on a kind of deep listening,
or as I prefer to think of it, a deep and mindful attending to the other in our presence.
This reveals “listening” as limited, as it is only an auditory metaphor. Attending
is more holistic and embodied. Hanh reminds us that every person has a “suchness”
that can be understood and attended to, on the other’s terms. He explains, “[i]f
we want to live in peace and happiness with a person, we have to see the suchness of that
person” (68). We have to understand others without trying to control or change them.
[slide 20] In fact, love and understanding, or deep attending, are the same for Hanh,
and to practice it, one must ask the other for help. We cannot do it alone. I am taken
particularly by his suggested practice. Hanh says, “sit close to the one you love, hold
his or her hand, and ask, ‘do I understand you enough? Or am I making you suffer? Please
tell me so that I can learn to love you properly’” (80). Imagine this kind of assessment practice
in your classrooms with your students. Assessment might be a problem-posing process that continually
attends to questions like: “Do I understand you enough? Am I making you suffer? Please
help me to read your languaging properly.” What strikes me about deep attending is its
compassion and its potential for growing the patience in all of us that is needed when
we confront students who are different from us, who do not look or sound or come from
the same places as we do. Deep attending also opens space for those of us who have only
been listening, but would like to speak, and be heard. But I’m sure all of us would say
that we listen or attend to our students carefully already. So I reiterate and reframe Royster’s questions:
How are you attending, exactly? What are the markers of your compassionate attending? How
is your attending a practice of judgement that your students can notice? How is it a
practice that recognizes their existence without overly controlling them? I hope you can hear the structural in what
I’m asking. How do we language so people stop killing each other? Part of my answer
is that some must be silent, leaving enough space between utterances, so that problematizing
can happen. I’m not saying we have to change our perspectives, soften our hearts. Our hearts
are not the problem. In fact, I’m actually saying the opposite, that we cannot change
our biases in judging so easily, and that your perspectives that you’ve cultivated
over your lifetime is not the key to making a more just society, classroom, pedagogy,
or grading practice. The key is changing the structures, cutting the steel bars, altering
the ecology, in which your biases function in your classrooms and communities. I’m
saying, we must change the way power moves through White racial biases, through standards
of English that make White language supremacy. We must stop justifying White standards of
writing as a necessary evil. Evil in any form is never necessary. We must stop saying that
we have to teach this dominant English because it’s what students need to succeed tomorrow.
They only need it because we keep teaching it. I’d like to end with a parable. Let me end with a parable. I made it up. Cause it suits my purpose. You are tired and starving, on the verge of
death, needing any kind of sustenance, walking on a road in a land of plenty. You’ve been
walking for weeks. You come upon a house, with a lush garden next to it, full of fruits
and vegetables. You knock on the door. A man answers, and you beg, “please, can you help
me? I’m dying. I need some food, anything you can spare, please, help me. I’ll tend
your garden if you’ll share the food with me.” Now, the man has lived in this house his whole
life. He inherited it and the beautiful garden, from his parents. In fact, he made it bigger
and more fruitful. He worked hard at it and in it. He has so much now that he sells the
excess. His house has become bigger. The man has lived his entire life with this beautiful,
fruitful garden, tending it carefully, working hard in it. It is his, even though one cannot
really own earth, or its products. Who can really own earth? It was here before the man
and will be here after he is dead. But the illusion of possession is there because the
garden has always been there for him, always served him, and he has watered it with the
language of possession. This is my garden, he says. I tend this garden of mine. I own
this garden. I have worked this garden. It grows for me. Its bounty is mine.
So when you come to his door, and ask him for food, he feels uncomfortable -- he’s
never really had to share. In fact, he kinda feels that sharing may not help you. How will
you know the benefits of laboring in your own garden? Charity won’t get you your own
garden, will it? So he says, “I’m sorry. I really do understand how hungry you are,
how tired, how much you need food right now to live right now, but I don’t feel comfortable
giving you my food. I’ve never done that before. I want to help you in the right way,
and that takes time to know. It will take time, so please, come back tomorrow,
and maybe then I’ll be ready to share my food.” What a blind sense of privilege it is to tell
a starving person at your doorstep, in your house of plenty, in a land of abundance, that
you just don’t yet feel comfortable enough to share your food. It isn’t just that in
the fable the man’s privilege allows him to make a decision based on his own selfish
sense of comfort, his selfish sense of readiness, or that he feels he knows the best timetable
for helping the other in his midst. The deeper, more galling problem here is that his comfort
comes at the cost of your pain. The deeper problem is that you, the starving person at
the doorstep, cannot wait -- you are fucking starving. And the man with plenty asks
from his privileged position to wait, come back tomorrow. Please, my comfort and readiness
to give, he implicitly says, is more important than your safety or health. Now, my fable isn’t meant to offer lessons
in helping others, or being compassionate -- although, one could hear those lessons.
It is meant to be an allegory for how we make decisions as writing and literacy teachers,
particularly about classroom grading and assessment practices, about how we use a particular dominant,
White standard. It is about our decisions to continue to reinforce White language supremacy
in our classrooms that give many of us power over students, while we tell our students
how much right they have to their languages, how much we care and embrace the diversity
of languages that they bring and use, yet we tacitly contradict these messages by asking
them to wait just a bit longer for us to feel comfortable enough to change our classroom
practices, to change the way standards work against them, despite the linguistic truths
we know about the communicative effectiveness of all languages. We delude ourselves by saying that it’s
what others less enlightened than us will judge their languaging on, so we must use
these dominant standards today, thinking that our soft words and kind eyes and good intentions
will salve the pain and harm and erasure that the use of a single, universal standard inflicts.
We act as if we have no power whatsoever in changing such language judgement practices
-- us, language teachers and researchers, have no power with language? Our decisions to NOT build more radical, antiracist,
and anti-White language supremacist assessment ecologies in our classrooms often are based
on our own selfish sense of comfort, selfish senses of not being ready to share our gardens.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard writing teachers, ones who are conscientious,
critical, and experienced, say to me, “I’m just not ready . . . I don’t feel comfortable
yet, maybe next semester.” What a blind sense of privilege! What a lack of compassion
-- if compassion is more than feeling empathy, but a doing something, a suffering with others.
What a lack of asking the deep attending and problematizing question: Am I causing you
to suffer? Many of your students of color, your students who do not embody enough of
the White habits of language that make up your standards, stand at your classroom doors
and die for your comfort, die as they wait for you to be ready. I realize that it may sound as if I’m being
overly dramatic and using a flawed metaphor. Our students of color, for instance, are not
linguistically starving. We need nothing given to us to be effective language users. We already
are and always have been. We are Eliza Doolittle speaking well. Food is not a metaphor for
language in my parable. It is a metaphor for power. People of color have never controlled
the standards in schools, or disciplines. Standards of English have never come from
us, unless we allowed ourselves to be colonized -- and let’s not fool ourselves, all teachers
of color are colonized to some degree. Even for those who resist that colonizing, being
colonized is how you get to be teachers of color, that’s why “color” is added to
the term. It’s a shitty compromise, to sacrifice some bit of your body, to cut
out a part of your tongue, to let some of your soul wink out of existence, in order
to live, prosper, or make change in the world for those who come after you. So, don’t get hung up on the nuances of
the allegory. Food in the story is not language. It is power, the power to judge, and make
or control standards. The point is a Marxian one. Who owns the means of opportunity production
in the classroom? We all may hate it, but most of us are still required to give grades,
and those are the keys to opportunity. Just because our students of color are linguistically
rich does not mean that by default those riches can be exchanged in your classroom economies
if the economy is not set up to accept those riches. Some of your students may be starving
with pockets and purses full of useless coins in the bustling market of your classrooms,
because you don’t accept their money, even though you tell them how valuable it is. Hold
on to it, you say. It’s your identity, your heritage. But everywhere we go, those heritage
coins ain’t worth shit in the White economies of the academy and marketplace. So, you tell
them, you gotta exchange that currency, code-switch. But we tell you, I don’t have access to
the money-changer, and he charges interest that I cannot afford -- there's some value lost
in the exchange. And you say, try anyway. Am I being overly dramatic with this parable,
with this talk? Are your students really dying in front of you? Do we, students, teachers,
and academics of color really cut out a fleshy chunk of our tongues just to have the pleasure
of pretending to be the equal of Whites in the academy? Do the vast majority of you do
harm by using a single standard of English to assess and grade in your classrooms, all
the while patting yourselves on the backs for how much good you are, how much
you’re helping your poor students of color? Does your dominant, White set of linguistic
habits of language kill people? Is your body in the places you circulate part of the problem
of White language supremacy? This I think is the problematizing we must all do. Thank you and peace to you all. Thanks.