Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 18, No. 3 (2021)
Productive Disruptions: The Struggle Towards Equity in Writing Center Work
Tyler Thier
Hofstra University
Tyler.Thier@hofstra.edu
Aisha Wilson-Carter
Hofstra University
Aisha.M.WilsonCarter@hofstra.edu
Marilyn Buono-Magri
Hofstra University
Marilyn.F.Buono@hofstra.edu
Jennifer Marx
Hofstra University
Jennifer.Marx@hofstra.edu
Joseph Chilman
Hofstra University
Joseph.Chilman@hofstra.edu
Andrea Rosso Efthymiou
Hofstra University
Andrea.R.Efthymiou@hofstra.edu
Abstract
This article responds to Laura Greenfield’s theorizing of the power and privilege inherent in writing center work. We draw on Romeo Garcia’s theory of transformative listening that defines the way bodies understand and are understood within a particular socio-historical context to anticipate ways those bodies can exist in the future. Through enacting transformative listening, the authors theorize how privilege circulates at Hofstra University’s writing center, revealing how privilege protects some and makes others vulnerable to multiple manifestations of institutional oppression. Further, the authors engage with Audre Lorde’s understanding of productive uses of anger to identify a range of responses to oppression. While empathy is often a response to the discomfort that results from the disruption of privileged positions, this article identifies the limitations of empathy, highlighting how empathy does not imply action; rather, it is a comfort experienced by white people in a writing center at a predominantly white institution. The authors explore the language that writing center administrators and faculty tutors use to mark a range of identity categories: race, gender, body difference, and mental illness. The piece further considers how privilege around such categories operationalizes oppression and models how mindful, individual reflections about privilege are part of the messy process towards collective action and greater equity.
Introduction
As writing center practitioners, we experience and witness many of the ways our institutions duplicate systems of privilege and oppression that exist beyond our walls. In response to institutional oppression, our field has moved towards greater inclusivity through expanding our consideration of identity categories that are implicated in these systems of power. For example, in his call for “transformative listening,” in “Unmaking Gringo Centers” Romeo Garcia identifies that “writing centers function within a tapestry of social structures, reproducing and generating systems of privilege” (32), and Garcia goes on to ask those of us within these systems to practice mindfulness of difference. The author theorizes transformative listening as a kind of checkpoint that both defines the way bodies understand and are understood within a particular socio-historical context, as well as anticipates ways those bodies can exist in the future. To engage in transformative listening, then, implies that we are mindful of how we define and are defined, while anticipating growth. Our work here performs such mindfulness, making visible the distinct racial identities of the people who move through our spaces, complicating the black-white racial binary that pervades much of writing center work on racial difference. While black people are the most visible recipients of trauma in American culture, trauma manifests based on any markers that identify the self as other. In this piece, we explore the language that we, as writing center administrators and faculty tutors, use to mark a range of identity categories: race, gender, body difference, and mental illness. We further consider how privilege around such categories operationalizes oppression in ways that we work to be mindful of and ultimately resist.
But to be mindful is not a passive act. It requires conversations with others, and active collective and individual reflection. The authors of this piece work through such reflection here in an attempt to model this individual and collective work of developing awareness of how privilege and oppression exercise power. This piece does not serve as a how-to guide on enacting social justice in the writing center, but rather a documentation of the process of grappling with how we are all implicated within these systems of oppression. After all, such oppression is built into the very foundations of the institutions where our writing centers exist. As Laura Greenfield notes in Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement, “[i]ndependent of the personal feelings or values of individual people, the discrepancies in power among different populations are maintained through everyone’s participation in the normalized activities of the institution” (21). While we move through our writing center spaces and larger institutions, the demands and pressures of our daily work lives allow oppression to appear as business-as-usual, so much so that we are hardly aware of its workings. Ultimately, this facade of institutional neutrality enacts a particular kind of replicable violence that writing centers are positioned to extend, if unchecked.
A regional writing center conference call for proposals allowed us to see these theories in practice in our own center. Our center is located at a predominantly white, private, four-year university thirty miles east of New York City. While current and past directors have worked intentionally in the service of diversity and inclusion in our center, we still struggle to have meaningful and sustained conversations about difference in our writing center. The 2020 Mid-Atlantic Writing Centers Association (MAWCA) call for “Decolonizing Writing Center Practice: A New Vision for a New Decade” initiated a much-needed dialogue between writing center administrators and faculty tutors in our center, as the call drew on the scholarship of Greenfield and conference keynote speaker Garcia to frame writing center work as implicated in a system of violence characterized by whiteness and race-based oppression. This call for proposals served as a call-to-action for the six authors of this piece during a staff meeting in Fall 2019 dedicated to conference preparation. As we shared our individual responses to the MAWCA call, our exchange highlighted the ways systemic oppression was at work in our institutional space and the extent to which we were willing to engage in transformative listening. Through enacting transformative listening, we heard the experiences of some colleagues in our own center, discovering truths that helped us see how privilege protected some of us and made others vulnerable to multiple manifestations of institutional oppression. Thus, our reflections were our actions. What we offer, then, is a model for reflecting collectively and moving from individual responses and thoughts to communication and inclusivity. The sections that follow represent what we shared at MAWCA 2020, and are an invitation to our audience to consider the questions we had been asking each other in our own center in an effort to dismantle oppression. Often, conversations about social justice focus on the final product; however, our intent was to reveal the inherent messiness of the process. As a result, our presentation was well received for its raw glimpse into the process of transformative listening.
Although the MAWCA conference focused on oppression within writing centers, the work we started there coincided with systemic injustices in society beyond the institution. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we moved into conducting remote staff meetings via Zoom later in Spring 2020 and conversations about the pandemic and injustices intersected. Less than two weeks before our presentation, Ahmaud Arbery, a young black man jogging through his suburban Atlanta neighborhood, was gunned down by a white father and son. Within days of our presentation, Breonna Taylor, a young black woman and EMT in Louisville, was murdered in her home by police officers who mistook her residence as a drug den. These crimes and others like them surged to the fore of American consciousness with the murder of George Floyd at the hand of police officers in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020.
In order to better understand oppression, we move through considerations of racial violence, as well as marginalization that is not racialized, to explore the various ways in which privilege circulates. In her essay “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” Audre Lorde identifies how anger can work in the service of change, for “anger is loaded with information and energy” (8). Lorde’s work, in conversation with Garcia’s and Greenfield’s, initiated disruption in our comfortable writing center, and our article represents how we engaged in a kind of transformative listening. Each individually-authored section herein attempts to understand the self in relation to the other, as we begin to move forward to a future where we are all agents of change. In an effort to sustain the work we start here, we consider how invitational rhetoric (Foss & Griffin) might facilitate future conversations and we understand how empathy—for any marker of difference—is only a beginning. We are cautious of the limitations of empathy, since empathy is a feeling, a state of being, and not an action. We highlight how comfort is a privilege experienced by white people in a writing center at a predominantly white institution, we reflect on moments where we were silent in the face of oppression, we struggle to keep moments of violence alive in public memory for the very reason that we do not want to forget the oppression we have experienced nor dismiss the oppression of others, and we share our distinct and collective relationships to privilege as a hopeful prelude to many more productive and disruptive conversations that will yield not only transformative listening, but also transformative action.
If We Don’t Get It, Shut Us Down: Theorizing Disturbance in a Writing Center
Tyler Thier
Laura Greenfield argues that “despite our many successes, the collective influence writing centers are having on the world is simultaneously violent” (9). As we drafted our collective response to Greenfield and the 2020 MAWCA conference call, the six co-authors of this piece were far from unified in their reactions. In fact, Greenfield’s use of the term violent resulted in fractured interpretations and plausibility among our staff. How could we—faculty tutors, administrators, people in a university space who talk and consult about writing for a living—possibly enact violence? When terminology arises that implicates our work in a violent context, we will inevitably be jolted into a sense of critical distance, whether in a curious and concerned way, in a perplexed way, or in an aggravated way.
From our privileged positions—as writing center practitioners who have enough institutional support to engage in intellectually stimulating conversations during paid hours—we run the risk of growing too comfortable with a pedagogical framework. Perhaps that framework is beneficial to some still, but to others (i.e., marginalized or underserved students) it has failed or proven to further alienate. So, considering these factors, it is required that we be alienated from what we do in order to approach that work with a more critical and discerning lens. It is therefore necessary to deem such an exclusionary or complacent pedagogy “violent” even if no physical violence has yet occurred. Destabilizing our comfort in such a way distances us to the extent that we have no choice but to look on from an “outsider” perspective.
Greenfield’s accusation of violence is a healthy form of disturbance; it opens us up to something that needs to be talked about, no matter how reluctant or offended one might be to that something at first. Rasha Diab, Thomas Ferrel, and Beth Godbee build on this initial provocation with the notion of “a willingness to be disturbed—that is, a willingness to cultivate a tireless investment in reflection, openness, and hope for a better, more fulfilling future for us all” (20). By embracing difficult discussions concerning our own positions of privilege, we push our personal narratives of what we thought (or failed to think) about in our writing center work ever so slightly closer to “collective, transpersonal, and resistive knowledge. [...] Collective interpretation of narratives—that is, testifying and processing together—is crucial to collective recognition of our problems, our commitments to counter them, and our efforts toward making commitments actionable” (24). Our work here, at a place of critical distance, puts our varied reactions to the disruption of Greenfield’s statement into conflict and conversation, gauging how they differ or compare, and reassessing or recontextualizing for the sake of a wider audience. These difficult, turbulent, even messy conversations among colleagues might be a long way from attaining a collectively inclusive pedagogy, and from decolonizing the institutional organs we represent, but they are a necessary starting point.
In the vast shadow of systemic oppression, an isolated moment of critical insight is not enough to dismantle much of anything. After all, “the political is always experienced on a personal level when people feel that their aspirations are undermined, stifled, or thwarted by political formulations that reproduce specific power articulations” (Diab et al. 24). We can share our confessional accounts and pause and reflect, striving to be more aware and to serve with a more racially conscious engagement from that point onward, but this conversational work cannot remain a one-time reassessment. To the theorists mentioned here and the current antiracism movement worldwide, this is a long-term, deep-rooted struggle. Similar to how our tutoring pedagogy embraces transfer of rhetorical skills, confidence in voice, and agency of authorship, we must embrace being estranged from our comfort zones and sustain empathy, on an exhaustive basis, for as long as systemic violence might permeate or even inform that very pedagogy.
To draw an analogy directly to the streets, a prolific demand of Black Lives Matter activists is “What do we want? Justice. When do we want it? Now. If we don’t get it, shut it down.” Justice might be defunding the police or arresting the officers who murdered Breonna Taylor, for instance. If those demands are not met by the system, the system must be dismantled for justice to be attainable. We, here in the writing center, are a system ourselves; we are a resource of an institution, an extension of its values, and therefore complicit in racial bias, microaggressions, and discriminatory practices embedded and replicated within. If we are failing to see how the term “violent” can hold us accountable when that privilege goes unchecked, or to acknowledge that our silence feeds injustice, then shut us down until we do.
Black Trauma: Moving Past Empathy to Productive Disruption
Aisha Wilson-Carter
As a black woman, I know that rhetoric has to disrupt and disturb an audience in order to provoke discussion and hopefully change. On the one hand, I understand how discomfort, language, and delivery can lead to withdrawal and barriers to conversation. My colleague will further define this discomfort in the next section of this piece. Yet on the other hand, changing systemic inequalities necessitates people being uncomfortable while remaining open enough to have meaningful dialogue. However, as the previous section identifies, Greenfield’s language defining violence in our centers—disruptions that we’ve collectively encountered—can lead to feelings of being “called-out” and offended. Such disruptions sometimes cause defensive behavior, where participants are no longer willing to listen. This leads me to wonder: how can this disruption be more productive?
In our own center, as I shared my personal experiences with oppression, microaggressions, and frankly the trauma that comes with being Black in America, my colleague's reaction to Greenfield’s argument began to shift. Initially, I questioned why my narrative caused a change of heart, these were of course the same experiences BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) have been recounting for hundreds of years. As a black scholar discussing race within the confines of inherently oppressive institutional spaces, determining how disturbed or “called-out” the privileged are willing to be before they retreat, ignore, and shut down is a means of survival. In 2020, are the marginalized and the oppressed still expected to soften the blow when educating audiences on social injustices, advocacy, and systemic racism? The answers to these questions are not black and white; rather, they are layered in emotional complexities. It takes practice and consistency to “hold each other accountable while doing extremely difficult and risky social justice work” (Ross). I appreciate the empathy shown to me and my family by my colleagues and am happy to make the data tangible with personal narrative, but I also resent the dance of making others comfortable during these discussions. Performing this dance contributes to Black trauma. Black trauma can be unequivocally seen in the totality of nuanced ways Black Americans respond to, cope with, and survive the lie of inferiority: a lie that has internalized feelings of inferiority at its source. Although working through productive disruption can be problematic, I remained focused on the goal; the goal in the writing center is to unify our social justice work and not to have it splintered by defensiveness and embarrassment (Ross). As I asked my white colleagues to put aside their offense and discomfort, I had to decide to put aside my trauma, at least for the moment. The action, in this case, was to acknowledge their empathy, but also make clear that the dance I had to perform to elicit such empathy overall contributes to black trauma.
Thankfully, in our writing center, we all have the space to inquire and engage, and productive disruptions are encouraged. Once we discussed the ways we all benefit from unearned privilege and suffer from unmerited oppression, we were able to have an open dialogue, which allowed us to empathize with each other. Empathy is needed for action to take place; however, empathy is just a step. Many programs, workshops, and training labeled with the moniker “Diversity and Inclusion” aim to create empathy in participants, but do not foster change or a commitment to becoming antiracist. As one of only three black voices in the writing center, I deemed it necessary to be honest about black trauma, the dance of comfort, and the historic challenges with an approach that elevates empathy over action.
To BIPOC, empathy alone can feel cheap and even further perpetuate feelings of inferiority. The breakdown or inadequacy of these discussions can be traumatic—even violent; at best, empathy can be a form of validation, while at worst, empathy can increase feelings of Black inferiority and White superiority. The idea that empathy alone is sufficient is undone within Critical Race Theory. The empathetic fallacy supposes one can affect a dominant narrative by offering an alternative narrative, expecting that the listener's empathy will override hundreds of years of systemic racist ideology (Delgado and Stefancic 34). Feelings of empathy are not enough to generate transformation without a deliberate focus on antiracist action. Therefore, it is important to encourage participants during difficult discussions to move past empathy by acknowledging their privilege and oppression, then depersonalize the violation by personalizing the solution.
If writing center practitioners are presented with rhetoric that accuses them of violence and racism, they may personalize a claim like Greenfield’s argument, responding with “I don't have a racist BONE in my body” or “our writing center is not violent.” Yet, implicit in these statements is the idea that a reaction to a conversation about race in America can be neutral. As Ibram X. Kendi illustrates, claiming “‘I am not a racist,’ is akin to claiming, ‘neither am I aggressively against racism.’ But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist’” (19). Thus, it is imperative to confront racism as an idea, not a physical trait. This would entail discussing institutionalized oppression as a history lesson, as just a fact that we have all inherited but will continue to exist if we don't actively work to dismantle it. Advancing a social justice agenda sometimes looks like a moment of awakening, but more often it looks like progress from empathy to action. What follows are examples of how we worked through these discussions in our center.
An Invitation to Transformative Listening
Marilyn Buono-Magri
Greenfield’s claim that writing centers, as centers of privilege, contribute to the perpetuation of institutional violence initially provoked feelings of anger and resentment at what I felt were unthinkable and unsubstantiated claims. Moreover, the thought that privilege—white privilege—existed, or was even subtly displayed in our writing center or that I, myself, might be a recipient of this oppressive mantle, shook my being to its core. I was deeply disturbed and felt that I, as well as our writing center, was doing a very good job of being woke, in terms of awareness and sensitivity toward one another as well as the writers who visit our space.
Our first conversations about Greenfield’s work led me to begin to engage in what Garcia calls transformative listening. Some shared my feelings of disturbance, while others aligned themselves with Greenfield’s claim. As the conversation in our center proceeded, and because we are all friends, I began to understand the meaning behind Greenfield’s use of the terms “violence” and “privilege” in a less personal and more informed way. While I maintained my stance that the language was provocative, others pointed out that the phrase was intended to provoke—to disturb—perhaps because many of us are unaware of privileges that we take for granted, that we consider to be the norm.
My colleague’s invitation to discuss and engage productively with my discomfort paved the way for deep reflection on my own part, reflection that I might not have done had I not been disturbed. I came to realize that, despite my liberal leanings and a belief that I was not part of the problem, rather an advocate for the solution, there were quite a few factors I had never taken into consideration; foremost among these was history. Because I am a second generation American of European ancestry, I certainly knew the story of America’s beleaguered past, but I had never truly embraced it as something for which I, myself, was accountable. Then, the Aha! moment came. I have never embraced the negatives of my gratefully adopted American heritage, but I have surely benefited from its positives—for white people.
Developing my understanding of my own whiteness has forced me to become aware of what Diangelo calls white fragility and, consequently, reevaluate my own personal narrative (2). While my grandparents faced persecution and oppression when they first landed in America from Italy in the early part of the twentieth century, the oppression that they faced was based on language and cultural differences, not on the color of their skin. Their assimilation took time, but was able to be accomplished within a generation or less. Their ultimate acceptance was in large part due to gatekeepers accepting them as white. I now have a better understanding of what it means to embody white privilege. I know that this issue goes beyond race; it goes to identity and all that that embodies. Honestly, for all my white privilege, as a woman, as a mother, as one who chose to marry young without a career, then as a single mother, and as an older woman entering into the realm of academia, I too have felt forms of oppression, and admittedly, did not like the feeling at all. If these few oppressive moments in my life had caused me pain, I could not begin to imagine what a lifetime of oppression must feel like. Then again, there is a lot that I could not or did not begin to imagine until I was disturbed. As Lorde notes, “it is very difficult to stand still and to listen to another woman’s voice delineate an agony I do not share, or even one in which I myself may have participated” (8). The willingness to stand still and to listen, to no longer be a silent witness to my colleague’s “dance of comfort,” to no longer hear a call-out in their speech but rather a call-to-action, is a personal and powerful moment of growth engendered by the invitational rhetoric of colleagues invested in change.
Ultimately, I am truly grateful for the wake-up call, and while I initially found the call-out to be delivered in an aggressive way, I came to understand that this language was borne of an inchoate anger that Lorde deems necessary and whose “object is change” (Lorde 8). As she asserts, “any discussion among women about racism must include the recognition and the use of anger. It must be direct and creative, because it is crucial. We cannot allow our fear and anger to deflect us nor to seduce us into settling for anything less than the hard work of excavating honesty” (Lorde 8).
Truthful awakenings rarely come to us in daydreams. I had to be shaken from my reverie by voices loud, strong, and yes, angry, in order to move beyond my empathetic somnolence. I have learned that it is only by unflinchingly hearing these voices that we can remain in that initial place of discomfort long enough to move toward not “privileging the comfort of white people over [the violence of systemic oppression], and to move past guilt into action” (Diangelo 150).
What It’s Like to Literally Not FIT in
Jennifer Marx
I am seriously disturbed by the violence constantly enacted against marginalized individuals. I have no doubt that this violence exists, and I have no hesitation that we must fight it. Imagining the writing center at which I work, however, as a place capable of enacting such violence provoked a jarring reaction in me: a defensive one even. I could not picture this space as one that produced violence. My coauthor’s consideration, in the previous section, of her identity as a white, middle-class, straight woman with a graduate degree echoes my own process of understanding here. I know that I have privilege, and I do not feel it is my place to speak as though I know what it is like to not have privilege. Yet as I considered further, I recognized another layer of identity for myself: I realized that our conceptions of body difference are so severely limited that I had not even recognized my own body difference as a lack of privilege prior to our conversations in the center. In fact, I wonder if this exact type of marginalization even has a specific name—evidence of how little it is seemingly acknowledged. I have been mistaken for other people, inside and outside of our center, with whom I share no other physical similarities aside from our weight: to be precise, that would equate to a size 28 dress. “[Engaging] in reflection and reflexivity” (Garcia 50) allowed me to reach this recognition and to begin working through the aforementioned obstacles.
It is easy to pretend that a mix-up of names neither stings nor silences. It is more difficult to hide the fact that you cannot fit in a chair. Walking into an unknown office space, theater, or classroom regularly raises this dilemma. I once worked in a space where I did not fit in the chairs, and I had to lug out a beaten up, half broken chair from another room every day. Perhaps even more awkward is the fact onlookers will ask why I am switching chairs. Are society’s perceptions so limited that they truly do not know my answer? This reason is a major indication of why we must disrupt and disturb.
Thus, it is crucial that we seriously consider how accessible our spaces are and how in line they are with the ideas of Universal Design for Learning, for example. Something so simple that many people do not have to think about—such as arms on or the weight capacity of a chair—could change whether or not students make in-person appointments with us. In order to accomplish this task, we must consider how we currently define accessibility: Are we comprehensively accounting for all body differences?
People will say marginalization based on body difference is not the same as others because they will state, “Well, it’s your own fault.” My challenge for these critics is the following: Take your greatest flaw. Write it all over your body, your clothes, your face, and your shoes. Wear that word, whether it is “jealous,” “greedy,” “gossip,” “liar,” “vengeful,” or “procrastinator,” every day, all day, and watch the reactions of others. The punishments are far greater than the crime. Speaking much more specifically about body difference, instead of continuing to ignore the topic, is crucial in moving beyond these harmful claims based on visible factors.
Despite my recognitions, I still could not see how such marginalization fit the definition of violence. What was it about violence that was so off-putting to me? Why was my reaction so visceral? I needed to ask myself how I connect violence with education, and that was when I found my answer. When I think of violence and education as connected, I think of myself at 12 years-old learning that two students across the country murdered their classmates and a teacher at Columbine—the day when school became a place in which you could die suddenly and violently. When I think of violence and education as connected, I think of myself at 15 years-old seeing smoke come out of the Twin Towers from an upper floor of my high school 25 miles away from Manhattan.
Notice the past tense here as I describe myself grappling with the use of the word violence. I needed the disruption to confront my own obstacles on the path to understanding; I needed to reflect. I needed to absorb what Lorde means when she writes: “My fear of anger taught me nothing. Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also” (7). What I see now is that any act or word of aggression, marginalization, or oppression invites violence. It is not that I didn’t understand violence when I began my own examination of the issues: it is that I forgot. I forgot just like society does after every major event: after we stop posting on social media and go back to our daily lives, forgetting that our private and public lives need to match if we want to make real change, forgetting that something seemingly so simple as where we choose to live shapes our perceptions of what the world looks like and how we contribute to segregation, oppression, and marginalization.
I have promised myself not to forget again.
The In/Visibility of Mental Illness
Joseph Chilman
As evidenced in the previous sections, violence often results from identity markers that are visible on the body. And while our identities are, in so many ways, perceived by how we physically present and move through our institutional spaces, those of us with mental illness endure oppression in our writing centers differently: not only do some superficially attribute various markers as indicators of mental illness, but they also then marginalize both those with perceived and actual mental illness.
The ambiguity of distinguishable mental illness symptoms can and does lead to the complexity of what constitutes violence in our writing centers. Such uncertainty led me to recall one September morning as I read previous client reports in our online scheduling system to prepare for my afternoon appointment. Another tutor came up behind me and noticed the name of the client on my computer screen. Without much hesitation, and maybe a hint of concern for my well-being, she simply said, “Oh, you have an appointment with him. All’s I’m gonna say is ‘school shooter.’” My initial reaction was to try to shrug it off as just another label thrown around these days. Yet, after my session with the student, my nonchalance shifted to disturbance, and my perspective drastically changed.
Throughout the fifty-minute appointment, it became clear to me that the person I was sitting across from was suffering with some form of mental illness. In various ways, his symptoms halted his writing process; it was also difficult for him to hold a conversation with me because of his illness. There were times where he would come to a full stop in the middle of a sentence, fail to make eye contact, and then start on a new tangent. Other times, he was obsessively quiet, never truly displaying what he was thinking. Yet, despite all of this behavior, not once did I feel in danger or threatened by the client during our session. In fact, the student was overall rather pleasant to work with, many times saying “thank you,” and appearing eager, when he was able, to receive any writing advice I could offer him.
It was only after the client left the writing center that I remembered the comment made by the other tutor earlier in the day. I felt obliged to say something back to her. I should tell her how such phrases and labels cannot be used lightly. I needed to inform her that the student I just worked with was one of the marginalized, not a threat, and deserving of proper language to describe him. However, I ultimately said nothing.
In many ways, I related to the student suffering from mental illness. I have been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and major depression. Often, my symptoms get in the way of how I want to present myself to others and conduct my work. I have been where that student is in his life. Therefore, if that client is a school shooter, then so am I. Facing such labels and language—perhaps violent language—as “school shooter,” I said nothing. Lorde theorizes the pain of so many marginalized people who “remain silent because they are afraid” (8). Another tutor’s narrative of one student’s mental illness silenced me that day. It paralyzed me. I know I should not have remained silent, but calling out —or simply speaking up —is difficult when the language of others inflicts wounds.
Silence as Oppressing Others: Failures of a Writing Center Director
Andrea Rosso Efthymiou
As evidenced by my co-author’s consideration of silence in the previous section, calling out problematic language, language that indeed may enact a kind of violence, is fraught with feelings of risk, shame, and, quite simply, not always knowing the words to offer in response to feeling discomfort. Loretta Ross has problematized call-out culture, showing how it can involve the mentorship of elders but also the viciousness of bullying and hatred. In short, calling someone out is uncomfortable, and the balance between a productive call-out and an unproductive one is difficult to strike.
In an effort to make my ideological commitments to racial justice actionable, I claim to embrace Diab et al.’s “willingness to be disturbed” (20), believing (on most days) that I am open to disruption and devoted to speaking out against oppression. I preach this willingness, encouraging my writing center colleagues—undergraduate, graduate, and faculty alike—likewise to view disturbance and disruption as a path towards growth.
But, I must also come to terms with the reality that I regularly do not practice what I preach.
Echoing the reflections of some of my co-authors here, I am coming to terms with the problematic reality of my whiteness. My whiteness—and my womenness and my age—means that I move through the world with relative ease; not only is my body not viewed as threatening in our society, but I have the option to disregard the everyday racism around me with little consequence. In our writing center, as the center’s director—and as a white, cis-gendered, tenure-track faculty member—I am possibly the most privileged person in our space, yet I struggle to leverage my privilege productively. Being merely aware of how my privilege operates, at best, means that I tacitly participate in systems of institutional oppression, rather than act to dismantle these systems in any way. An example of such tacit participation on my part happened at a previous writing center staff meeting.
At this staff meeting, tutors had prepared for a discussion about better supporting multilingual students by reading Bobbi Olson’s “Rethinking Our Work with Multilingual Writers: The Ethics and Responsibility of Language Teaching in the Writing Center.” With our discussion underway, one tutor described their own time learning a foreign language and mimicked a south Asian accent when trying to describe their own language-learning. This moment was awkward to be sure; I felt a twinge of discomfort upon hearing a white person perform an accent intended to represent the students we are charged to support, but I also defaulted to a position of neutrality, thinking to myself, “That’s ok. They didn’t mean anything by it.” Then it happened again; as the tutor continued to describe their own challenges learning a language that was new to them, they performed the accent a second time. I perceived a palpable tension in the room and viscerally felt the discomfort grow, my own face getting hot with confusion and anger. Possibilities flashed through my head during what was perhaps five minutes that felt like thirty.: I could call the tutor out as racist and insensitive—an accusation that would surely heighten the discomfort in the room—or I could gather the wherewithal and words to say, “Hey, I’m uncomfortable by the way you’re describing language-learning and by hearing you perform an accent. What exactly are you trying to say because I’m not getting the point?”
Instead, I did nothing, remaining silent as this discomfort grew to the point of staring me—and most importantly my undergraduate staff—straight in the face. In a moment when I, the most privileged person in the writing center, could have modeled invitational rhetoric, I stayed silent.
As we move daily through an American culture bent on the high stakes of persuasion, invitational rhetoric can help us create more reasonable expectations of ourselves and others. “Invitational rhetoric constitutes an invitation to the audience to enter the rhetor’s world and to see it as the rhetor does” (Foss and Griffin 5). Practicing invitational rhetoric, then, de-emphasizes persuasion as a goal, thus moving towards mutual understanding. The writing center is a space where the subjectivity of the rhetor is in constant flux, moving among tutor, writer, administrator, and various other identities represented by the bodies that move through our spaces. At this staff meeting where my silence felt deafening to me, I know now that I could have harnessed my own agency as rhetor in the service of equity and antiracism. The shame I felt in the immediate wake of my silence intensified my commitment to “engage in self-work” (Condon and Young 8), and also illuminates why empathy, as my colleague noted earlier, is not enough. The feeling of empathy—my anger that arose at the possibility that words were devaluing another human—paralyzed me. The theory of invitational rhetoric reframes that paralysis I felt under pressure to call-out, to persuade the tutor that their words were racist. I know now that I should have moved forward by asking the tutor to understand my perception of their words, offering the tutor a space to (hopefully) clarify their intent. Modeling invitational rhetoric in our centers may be one step towards antiracist writing center practice.
Conclusion: Enacting Productive Disruption
For us to be antiracist—or to work against oppression and marginalization in any form—we must first be open to discomfort and disruption. Again, our conversations are actions. A dialogue, like the one represented here, in which we acknowledge the necessity of taking a position and avoiding political neutrality, is critical. We, administrators and faculty tutors, provide snapshots of positions we asserted in our own writing center and of growth we made in our dialogue. The glimpses we offer here are partial. We are but six people who work in a center with twenty-five writing center colleagues, two-thirds of whom are undergraduate student tutors. It is incumbent upon our director to extend this reflective practice, inviting undergraduate tutors into sustainable conversations about institutional oppression and writing center work.
This article offers a model for faculty, graduate, and undergraduate tutors to have honest discussions in the face of disturbing structural biases across our institutions. To adapt this model in other centers, we encourage our colleagues to bring in texts—perhaps this text—that make them uncomfortable, to share experiences of when writing center practitioners have felt marginalized or marginalized someone else, either intentionally or not. These conversations should invite questioning and sharing, regardless of rank, race, gender, ableism, and body differences. Collaboratively acknowledging privilege and oppression allows us to begin enacting Garcia’s call for transformative listening. Our conversations represented here helped us conceptualize violence, privilege, and oppression through different lenses, and opened up space in our center to model a way to move past empathy towards action.
Works Cited
Condon, Frankie, and Vershawn Ashanti Young, editors. Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication. WAC Clearinghouse, 2017.
Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. Critical America. 2nd ed., New York UP, 2012.
Diangelo, Robin. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon Press, 2018.
Diab, Rasha et al., “Making Commitments to Racial Justice Actionable.” Condon and Young, pp. 19-40.
Foss, Sonja K. and Cindy L. Griffin. “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric.” Communication Monographs, vol. 62, 1995.
Garcia, Romeo. “Unmaking Gringo Centers.” Writing Center Journal, vol. 36, no. 1, 2017, pp. 29-60.
Geller, Anne Ellen et al. The Everyday Writing Center: A Community of Practice. Utah State UP, 2007.
Greenfield, Laura. Radical Writing Center Praxis: A Paradigm for Ethical Political Engagement. Utah State UP, 2019.
Kendi, Ibram X. How to be an Antiracist. Penguin Random House, 2019.
Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 3, 1981.
Olson, Bobbi. “Rethinking Our Work with Multilingual Writers.” Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 2013.
Ross, Loretta. “I’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture is Toxic.” The New York Times. 17 Aug. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/opinion/sunday/cancel-culture-call-out.html. Accessed 9 June 2021