Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 1 (2022)
CORNERSTONE
Neisha Anne Green
American University
ngreen@american.edu
Frankie Condon
University of Waterloo
fcondon@waterloo.ca
The call for papers offered by Romeo Garcia and Anna Sicari for this special issue of Praxis invited scholars in the field of writing center studies to acknowledge the ways our field’s history accretes in the present despite our collective inclinations to move on. We are haunted, the editors argue, by the persistent presence in the writing center of those peoples we have historically surveilled, policed, and controlled: Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color who may well enter the writing center but are never permitted to arrive. As a field, we are called by Garcia and Sicari to reckon with our history.
To do the work Garcia and Sicari demand of writing center studies will be hard for, as James Baldwin once wrote, “[P]eople who imagine that history flatters them (as it does, indeed, since they wrote it) are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin and become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world” (175). If we read Baldwin’s words carefully, allow our good opinions of ourselves to be pierced by them, we may notice that they, too, include a call - for those who have been so well served by the histories we have written to listen, learn, and yield to the vision and leadership of those who would change the course of history and have the means and will to change the world. Writing center folks do good work. Writing centers are good places. To say a history of injustice of systemic and institutional racism accretes in them is not an act of disloyalty nor a dismissal of their importance in the writing lives of the students with whom we work. It is, however, to speak with courage and forthrightness the truth that writing centers have served as shibboleths of white supremacy and will continue to do so for as long as our principles and practices are built upon white and whitely needs and interests and serve as sites for the reproduction of white privilege. To speak and write well about the ways and degrees to which writing centers are haunted by our histories (and by well we mean to speak in ways that enable meaningful anti-racist change), will require us to take a big dose of racial realism.
Recently, Frankie was a guest on the podcast, Let’s Be Clear, hosted by New York State Senator James Sanders Jr. with fellow guest Rashad Shabazz. The question they were discussing is why critical race theory is currently under attack. At one point, Frankie was talking about calling a nation to live up to the principles it espouses. Dr. Shabazz responded by reminding listeners of the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol Building. Referencing Afro-Pessimism and the work of critical race theorist, Frank Wilderson, Dr. Shabazz argued that the Capital attack raises the question of whether white Americans would rather burn the nation to the ground than live in a racially just and equitable republic.
This question haunts us. As we talk together, we think of states that are systematically defunding public higher education even as the student populations of their colleges and universities become increasingly diverse. We think of the chronic underfunding of writing centers that so often serve students who are marginalized within predominantly white institutions including first generation college attenders, poor and working-class students, multilingual students, and Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color. But we note that direct assaults are not the only means by which equity, access, and opportunity may be obstructed or prevented, whether in the nation’s capital or in our colleges and universities.
We are reminded of WEB Dubois’ prescient observation that ““we have the somewhat inchoate idea that we are not destined to be harassed with great social questions, and that even if we are, and fail to answer them, the fault is with the question and not with us. Consequently, we often congratulate ourselves more on getting rid of a problem than on solving it” (157). In a similar vein, James Baldwin writes, “reassuring white Americans that they do not see what they see” is “utterly futile, of course, since they do see what they see. And what they see is an appallingly oppressive and bloody history, known all over the world. What they see is a disastrous, continuing, present, condition which menaces them, and for which they bear an inescapable responsibility. But since, in the main, they appear to lack the energy to change this condition, they would rather not be reminded of it” (173). We are also reminded of Cornel West’s incisive distinction between optimism and hope. Dr. West argues that optimism is the mindless assertion that “things will get better” despite all evidence to the contrary, while hope lies in determined and deliberate engagement with that evidence (Prisoner of Hope). With Garcia and Sicari, we worry that when writing center scholars, directors, and tutors focus too early and too hard on making the case that we have arrived someplace worth being, we fail to think carefully and critically about the anti-racist journey we should and, indeed, could be on.
The term, anti-racism, turns on a particular understanding of racism and white supremacy as ubiquitous: baked into western political philosophy, capitalism, and social and cultural life. Quite deliberately, we think, the term “anti-racism” suggests that if you ain’t with us you against us or that if you aren’t doing anti-racism then you are - by dint, at least, of the accretion of history in the present and by the degree to which we are all steeped in the ideological commitments of a white supremacist racial order - doing racism. The term is purposefully provocative, designed to agitate, to discombobulate, to disconcert. This provocation is necessary, we think, because of the degree to which the existing racial order is normalized as “commonsense” and so natural as to be, for many of us, nearly or utterly invisible. Discomfort, we believe, is an enabling condition for learning when and if we can choose what Garcia terms “transformative listening” over and against refusal.
Thanks to Craig Steven Wilder’s exceptional book, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, we now have a better understanding of the intertwined history of slavery and the emergence of the American university and college system. There is no secret now in the fact that no college could or would have survived the colonial world without attaching itself to the Atlantic slave trade in some way. The foundations of higher education as we know it in the United States were established at the pinnacle of the slave trade. Churches that sought to expand into the new colonies invested in colleges by capitalizing on the new wealth being produced by their slave owning members. The boards of these schools were largely comprised of slave traders and owners who often went south to fundraise from wealthy Christians, who, in turn, sought education for their sons in these institutions. The young men of the slaveholding South would arrive at university with their slaves and pay extra for the “luxury” of possessing a slave at school. Universities also owned slaves who were charged with maintaining the grounds, farming to produce the food the men and tutors ate, and yes, maintaining the cafeteria as well. Not much has changed has it? It is important to note that without the financial backing of those happy to profit from the slave trade the schools we now associate with the Ivy League wouldn’t have survived. Slavery buttressed the University system. Built with profits garnered from the most extreme forms of racist oppression and exploitation, with racist ideas and ideologies in the very mortar and stones of American colleges, it is little wonder that, despite some folks’ best efforts, we are still writing and talking about racism in our writing centers even as the political right within and beyond the academy attempts to dismiss and discredit critical race theory by distorting, diminishing, and misrepresenting what it is and does.
With Lerone Bennett Jr. we believe that “the problem of race in America...is a white problem. And to solve that problem we must seek its source, not in the Negro but in the white American (in the process by which he was educated, in the needs and complexes he expresses through racism) and in the structure of the white community (in the power arrangements and the illicit uses of racism in the scramble for scarce values: power, prestige, income) (Ebony 1). We note that, by and large, Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Color are doing the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) grunt work in our field and beyond while white folks manage the speed and degree of change - with the rather obvious result the work of BIPOC doing DEI hard labour is doomed to failure as white folks prohibit, obstruct, minimize and delay meaningful change. We got the wrong people doing the wrong kinds of work. BIPOC should be the visionaries and architects of anti-racist change while, at their direction, white folks do the hard labour for a while. And some of that hard labour has got to be demolishing what we have created, what has been created in our name, and what we have enjoyed without acknowledging the harm we do.
In a speech decrying the absence of women of color at a feminist conference, Audre Lorde writes that “those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (1984, p.2). With particular regard to writing centers, too often, we believe our work has been organized around teaching writers of color to play a game designed to ensure that the odds are not in their favor. Regardless of our field’s historical embrace of the axiom that we make better writers, not better writing, when we work with writers of color, we have ignored the ways and degrees to which language is bound up with identity: with culture, community, and with self-hood. And we have also ignored the reality that linguistic supremacism is neither an effect of Othered Englishes nor the presence of Othered bodies in historically white spaces, but of white supremacy and racism (Young, 2011). To begin from where we are, then - from the institutional site of the writing center will require that we study what racism and white supremacy are, their history, how they work and operate; learn to recognize, acknowledge, and honor the leadership of Peoples of Color in the work of dismantling them, drawing on that newfound knowledge and following that leadership to build a new house.
Among the convictions - and commitments - widely shared by anti-racist scholars, teachers and tutors, and activists whose work is deeply informed by critical race theory is this: we believe that for there to be change, walls buttressed by racism must crumble and the foundations set upon white supremacy must be torn down: renovation or retrofitting for racial justice will always be insufficient to the cause of racial justice. Further, we believe that the work of building anew is not merely the work of People of Colour, but the particular responsibility of the beneficiaries of the historical legacies conferred by white supremacy and racism. Dismantling the master’s house is the work of the master’s descendants. Because race is a white construct and racism and white supremacy the tools with which a white supremacist and racist social order was constructed, white folks need now to create the tools by which this old house may be demolished.
And yet, this will not be sufficient. For once the house is down, white folks need to get the hell out of the way. An anti-racist writing center - to the extent we can imagine such a space - will be one in which the stone we refused in the building of earlier writing centers becomes the cornerstone. That is, such a space will have to be designed by and, in the first instance, for Black, Indigenous, and Peoples of Colour. To be a part of this change, white and whitely writing center folks will need to take up Neisha Anne Green’s insistent call that we reject allyship, refuse to merely stand beside BIPOC folk as they do the hard work and instead learn to be anti-racist accomplices (2018).
We ask readers of this special issue, as we ask ourselves, to embrace being uncomfortable, for we believe that only from that condition can we forge the tools needed to disrupt, intervene, and begin to dismantle the legacy of white supremacy that haunts our field and our writing centers; only from the condition of discomfort can we hope to serve the cause of more fully realized racial justice and equality. We seek to learn and invite readers to join us in learning to share the responsibility for building a new house for our work. We see the collective labour of anti-racist activism within and beyond the academy as requiring raced-white peoples to yield, both to the architectural design and to the leadership of Peoples of Colour, and to take it in turns, with People of Colour, to be the tool or to act as builders. Racial justice, we believe is a shared responsibility.
(the beat drops and the now nostalgic double-skank of reggae builds a vibe)
The stone that the builder refuse
Will always be the head cornerstone—sing it brother!
The stone that the builder refuse
Will always be the head cornerstone
You’re a builder, baby
Here I am, a stone
Don’t you pick and refuse me
‘Cause the things people refuse
Are the things people should choose
Do you hear me?
Hear what I say? (Bob Marley)
Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “Unnamable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes.” The White Problem in America. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1966.
Bennett, Lerone. “The White Problem in America.” The White Problem in America. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 1966.
Green, Neisha Anne. “Moving Beyond Alright.” The Writing Center Journal, Vol. 37, No. 1, pp15-3.
Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Corner Stone.” Rainbow Country, 1998. https://www.allmusic.com/album/rainbow-country-orange-street-mw0000050630?1631624813788 (accessed 14 September, 2021).
Shabazz, Rashad. Interview. Let’s Be Clear. Senator James Sanders, Jr. 10 September, 2021, https://youtu.be/RJ9819RIowo
West, Cornel. “Prisoner of Hope.” https://www.alternet.org/2005/01/prisoners_of_hope/ (accessed 14 September, 2021).
Wilder, Craig Steven. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Trouble History of America’s University. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.