Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 19, No. 1 (2022)

JUST LOOK AT THESE SCARED FUCKING DWEEBS

Randall Monty
University of Texas – Rio Grande Valley
randall.monty@utrgv.edu

“Where we are” in writing center research and as a disciplinary community is directly related to where we are as advocates for a just society and inclusive institutions more broadly: facing shit odds. This is because the work of writing centers can’t be separated from their political, economic, and cultural contexts, which Rachel Azima, Writing Center Director at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, crystalizes as a disciplinary obligation: “for those of us who work in U.S. writing centers, given our current political climate, it is imperative to put any commitments we have to social justice into action.” (74).

In an update for Carter’s writing center paradox, contemporary writing center scholarship operates within contentious space, promoting bravery and justice within a system that values neither, facilitating empirical research while still having our expertise overlooked by other programs and upper administration. Externally, our work is under attack by anti-democratic efforts propagated by a bunch of scared fucking dweebs, a group consisting of right-wing politicians, media outlets, quasi-academic departments, and private “think tanks”—as well as centrist and ostensibly left-leaning enablers—all connected through insidious donor networks. Evidence how ideas circulate through these networks can be found in proposed legislations in Republican-controlled states like Texas and in commissioned reports like “Social justice ideology in Idaho higher education” (Yenor and Miller), the latter of which directly attacks writing centers at public institutions of higher education. So, while writing centered folks have promoted praxis and scholarship that are more inclusive and equitable, the broader conditions we’re working in have gotten worse.

This is because, in the United States, writing centers and institutions of higher education function within what Bromley et al identified as “the ideology of white supremacy,” that, “demands that we interrogate writing centers’ participation in systems of racism” (13). That ideology is entangled with a brand of neoliberal capitalism bent on preserving hegemonic institutional power in service of identities that are largely conservative, white, male, heterosexual, Evangelical, and non-disabled, and that intentionally targets for eradication the theories, practices, and most importantly, the people, whose mere existences are deemed a threat to that hegemony (Butler; McNamee and Miley).

But these conditions can also provide opportunities for writing centers to enact positive, sustainable change (Giaimo). I am emboldened by the work of disciplinary colleagues on matters of social and restorative justice (Mitchell and Randolph, Robinson et al), antiracist and equitable tutoring praxes (Faison et al), and research methodologies centered on “communities of practice, activity theory, discourse analysis, reflective practice, and inquiry-based learning” (Hall, 4). The current state of writing centers is equipped to challenge bad faith attacks on our work. But in order to do that, we should make plain the systemic, intentional power structures that we’re dealing with.

In the late spring of 2021, likely to distract from the state’s mishandling of the COVID pandemic and the state-wide power grid failures during the previous winter’s storms, the popular education news story for the far-right in Texas was the recent efforts of the state legislature to ban what they called “woke philosophies” (Coenen, et al). Reminiscent of the Southern strategy, these bans weaponized and euphemized the language of social justice to clandestinely interject white supremacist ideology into everyday discourse (Butler). Notoriously, the term “Critical Race Theory”, was disingenuously appropriated as a catch-all term for anything that promoted equity among racial, gendered, or religious differences, or that was otherwise critical of white supremacy, systemic privilege, or any other idea or perspective that didn’t cater to a contemporary conservative worldview (Goldberg).

The Texas bills (Senate bill 2202, House bill 3979, both proposed by Republicans) included restrictions on public schools teaching that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex,” or that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.” The wording of these bills is intentionally opaque in order to deflect critique. Writing centered folks intuitively see how these bills should be viewed as part of a larger, synchronized effort to eradicate from public discourse anything that criticizes hegemonic power or that challenges its preferred worldview (Zhang et al). The same legislative session forwarded bills that sought to completely reshape what it means to participate in society and exist in public space by:

• restricting voting among Black and Hispanic communities while enabling partisan “poll watchers” to harass voters

• criminalizing public protest while making it legal to run over people who are protesting in public spaces

• disincentivizing green energy initiatives while further entrenching the state’s reliance on non-renewable energy

• effectively criminalizing abortion while empowering vigilantes to harass anyone supporting a woman’s individual health decisions

• prohibiting transgender kids from playing school sports while forcing public displays of patriotism at those same sporting events

• banning public homeless encampments while damn-near mandating that everyone walk around with a gun (less you be the only one without a gun in a place where these ghouls think you should need a gun, like a grocery store or elementary school).

Nothing was done to address the state’s flailsome electrical grid and crumbling transportation infrastructure, prevent felony fraud by elected officials, or compress inequities in the state’s racist sentencing guidelines.

The Texas anti-CRT bill is now law, and it is part of larger, coordinated efforts to control who is allowed to participate in society and what is germane to civic debate. Instances documented by Brian Lopez of the Texas Tribune include: Dr. James Whitfield, the first black principal at Colleyville Heritage High School in the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District, was forced to resign after he was accused by members of the public of “encouraging the disruption and destruction of our district” after he wrote a public letter expressing his personal feelings over the publicized murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery (“North Texas principal...”). The Carroll Independent School District in Southlake reinforced the white supremacist roots of the laws, recommended that teachers offer opposing perspectives on the Holocaust and reprimanded a fourth-grade teacher who had an anti-racist book in their classroom (“The law...”). Republican law makers across the state are threatening public-school teachers and librarians who assign or even have books address issues of racial, gender, and economic difference and injustice (or that just have Black or queer authors) (“Texas House committee...). Meanwhile, there are coordinated, state-wide efforts to replace non-partisan school boards with far-right wing ideologues promoting a propagandized version of American history (Cruz). These efforts are often cagey to not outright proclaim their nefarious intentions, but careful and critical reading of their public statements and publications counters their attempts to obfuscate.

Texas is not alone. Similar laws have been proposed and passed in conservative state legislatures across the United States. In Wisconsin, the Republican-controlled assembly proposed banning curriculum about anti-racism, critical pedagogy, equity, institutional bias, intersectionality, restorative/social justice, systemic racism, and white privilege (Holmes). The fact that none of these terms are accurately or substantially defined by their critics is beside the point, as the purpose of these laws is to limit what is considered acceptable discourse to a predictable set of self-serving ideas. These laws are also fundamentally anti-democracy, which is why far right-wing media has spent so much energy over recent years pushing into the mainstream propagandistic, thought-terminating clichés like, “the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy.”

Although contested and incomplete, the assumption that writing centers should aim to uphold democratic ideals of collaboration and equitable access is about as close to a disciplinary consensus as we can currently claim (Grimm; Mack & Hupp). Contemporary writing center scholarship knowingly responds to a historical narrative that positions writing centers as supporting diverse people and groups that have been intentionally underserved and underrepresented within institutions of higher education. However, there is constant debate as to how writing centers should go about should be doing this work as well as who should be leading it (Bell et al).

I advocate following Arterburn and Leibman, who argue that we need to “engage with difference” and “become comfortable with discomfort.” This requires a disciplinary community that encourages dissent, welcomes challenges to received knowledge, and promotes equitable access to resources, scholarship, and membership. This puts our field in a contentious and precarious position relative to the current political climate of the U. S.. It puts us at odds with the individual culpability expected to participate in a neoliberal society. It actively rejects political polarization and grouping. And it positions those working for progressive change against a small but loud portion of the electorate that rejects the idea of a free, liberal education and the prospects of living in a multicultural and multiracial democracy.

In Texas, the current effort is to control what is taught in public secondary and elementary schools, but the situation in Idaho shows how this kind of ideological influence will play out for higher education. There, the Republican legislature cut funding for “social justice” programs and threatened to withhold further funding for public postsecondary schools that “indoctrinate” students or teach “critical race theory” (Dutton). Again, none of those terms were accurately defined in the proposed legislation because there is little political incentive to accurately represent what they’re complaining about. What they do care about is preserving structural power. Misrepresenting ideas through tidy ideographs is an efficient way to do that.

The proposed legislation in Idaho was aided by the reports “Social justice ideology in Idaho higher education,” which was commissioned by far-right-wing, so-called “think tanks,” the Idaho Freedom Foundation and the Claremont Institute. The document itself employs recognizable genre expectations to boost its own credibility, “a well-designed and consistent visual identity, striking and attractive layout and typography, and skilled and dramatic use of color and original and stock photography,” a rhetorical move that is common in conservative media (Edwards, 74).

The stated goal of this report is to “implement innovative ideas to deplete the power of special interests and free people from government dependency,” which ironically (or unironically, because it’s so blatantly insipid), is exactly what the report aimed to do (32). A problem with offering serious critiques of these efforts is that accurately describing how these political donor networks impact policy can make you sound like a conspiracy theorist (Rice).

With that warning in mind, here goes: Right-wing efforts to control education are generously funded by private, monied interest groups headed by beneficiaries of generational affluence, largely from the Midwestern U.S., who have maintained grudges against the expansions of a universal, publicly-funded education system and a multiracial democracy since at least the passage of the New Deal in the 1930s (especially the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set restrictions on child labor, hours in a work week, and minimum hourly wage). These benefactors are many of the same who have also provided financial support for racist reactions to Civil Rights movements in the 1960s (such as the erection of cheaply made statues depicting Confederate slavers), neoliberal economic and neoconservative social policies in the mid-1970s, on-campus conservative groups in the 1980s, astroturfed populist movements in the 2000s, and wide-scale antivaxx and anti-CRT protests today (Bartels; Schneider and Berkshire; Towns).

Each step of the way, these private interest groups have used the dismantling of a free, liberal education system as a means for achieving their goals. Ever since formally segregating public schools according to race and religion was no longer a politically viable policy position, a direct line can be traced from the money these groups spend to marketized concepts such as school/consumer choice, return on investment, human capital, outcomes-based design, research priority areas, and student-support-as-customer-service all creeping their way to the forefront of the discourse of education (Holmwood and Servós).

The Idaho report is a manifestation of a research report genre whose primary function is to provide cover for ideologically biased (and often unjust) laws. Even cursory discursive analyses of these kinds of reports and the proposed legislations show textual traces of basal source material. For example, Idaho House Bill 377 (Appendix B) uses recognizably similar wording to Texas Senate Bill 2202 (Appendix A).

Revealing the authors’ and think tanks’ stunted conception of who counts as a citizen and who should be allowed to participate in society, the Idaho report began by whining that, “Social justice education poses a threat to education in America and to the American way of life” (1). Later, it divided the courses in Boise State University’s general education degree plan into three categories: “Indoctrination Majors,” “Social Justice in Training,” and “Professional Development.” From there, the report dedicated an entire section to the Writing Center, noting, “Even the Writing Center is infused with social justice education” (22). (I suppose the report meant that as a scare tactic; I think it just makes the folks at the BSU Writing Center sound rad.)

As evidence of their claims, the “Idaho” report alluded to a presentation that BSU Writing Center tutors gave at a previous National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing. The NCPTW is an organization that promotes the scholarly contributions of tutors and other emergent scholars and making conference resources available online is part of the organization’s accessibility efforts. I chaired the 2018 NCPTW in Texas, with the conference theme “Migration,” and a program that included numerous critical presentations with descriptions that included easily searchable keywords like: multi/translingual tutoring, queer and Black identity in writing centers, antiracism in tutor training and assessment, power and privilege, social justice, and “toxic capitalism.” I should probably prepare for a similar attack from conservatives in my own state.

Reports like Idaho’s get so much wrong about what they seek to criticize that they almost inoculate themselves from any kind of critical or honest response. They exist in a space in between grey literature and “pseudo-profound bullshit” (Pennycook et al), designed to provide a superficial glean of intellectualism while the legislators pass the law they already wanted to pass (Bader). This trajectory has a cognate in higher education, as administrators and coordinating boards leveraged the precarious financial conditions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic to again invoke a sort of force majeure to “turbocharge the corporate model,” and enact changes to programmatic funding and structures that they had already wanted to make (AAUP). These changes included:

• enacting austerity measures (furlough and firings of faculty and staff, ceasing matching contributions to retirement plans, cutting travel support, and eliminating unprofitable programs)

• subverting collectively bargained policies and reducing shared governance

• suspending elected faculty senates and replacing them with appointed advisory committees of indeterminate authority, reducing academic freedom

• delaying tenure and promotion, and

• ignoring faculty handbook policies and previously established plans for emergency response.

In this way, as García de Müeller et al have noted, institutions of higher education responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with a strategy of disaster capitalism that reflected the U.S.’s response writ large, compounding material conditions that disproportionately adversely affected Black, Indigenous, and Latinx communities, and that, “underline the urgency of social justice issues which is especially relevant for BIPOC and other marginalized communities.” Although not immune to these effects (or absolved of their consequences), writing centers have proactively used publications, conferences, and networks to share resources for working during the pandemic (Brooks-Gillies et al), including research on sustaining online writing centers (Worm) and supporting tutor wellbeing (Clements et al).

Taken together, these coordinated proposed legislations and supporting reports do not come from places of intellectual depth, moral strength, or for that matter, legal consistency. “The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover,” Sawchuk criticized, “It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.”

That is not the same thing as saying they aren’t consequential.

This is because they do come from a place of power, and because they do come with the historical threat of state violence in the defense of white supremacy, which is, not coincidentally, the exact sort of thing these bills seek to prevent students from learning about.

Based on their coordinated, astroturfed, coming-with-the-threat-of-state-violence responses, it’s clear that these right-wing funders, think tanks, and legislators share this interpretation. This is why those groups try so hard to undermine and prohibit the work of academics who are doing the work of anti-racism and social justice.

So, what are these fucking dweebs scared of?

After all, they continue to benefit from decades of misinformation campaigns, conspiracy spreading, voter suppression, and fear mongering from influential media outlets like talk radio, FOX News, and Facebook.

As best as I can surmise—because good luck getting an honest answer out of these grifters—what they’re afraid of is the temporal relevance of their own worldviews.

It’s related to why these same groups are adamant about revising history education to downplay the United States’ legacy of slavery, secession, segregation, the Southern strategy, and Shelby County vs. Holder and rehabilitating the legacies of villains of democracy like Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and Phyllis Schlafly. Superficially, they want to preserve—and this is a point they don’t refute—a version of U.S. history where white supremacist hegemonic power is unquestioned. Subconsciously, perhaps, they hope that by revising history their own duplicitous attempts to entrench their own privilege won’t get paved over by future generations who know better.

I’m willing to concede that my tone in this essay may not be the most productive if our goal is to change the minds of those who disagree with us politically. But everything I’ve critiqued in this essay is already happening. As disability scholars and activists have noted, appeals for civility in the face of inhumanity is both ablest (Cherney) and a threat to academic freedom (Cloud). I doubt that if I’m nicer to white supremacist fascists they will, in Asao Inoue’s words, “stop killing” the people they hate.

So, for the moment, I’m invested in responding to and giving voice to the frustration, fear, and anger that I’m hearing from my colleagues, tutors, and students. Writing center professionals welcome critique when it is presented with a sincere spirit of support. But what we’re seeing developing in far-right wing state legislatures across the country is not that. Compounding the harm is that these bad faith efforts are aided by reports posing as scholarship, from paid writers and organizations posing as academics and academic programs, sometimes from within our own institutions, that directly target writing centers, tutors, and faculty.

Where are we in Writing Center Research, in the context of anti-racism, decoloniality, and/or social justice? In a contentious spot. But we’re moving in important directions with regards to comprehensive research that has the potential to disrupt the status quo and challenge institutional power, and as important, to force our educational institutions and country to live up to the promises they’ve made. Wisniewski et al (2020) recently provided an exceptional model for how writing center scholarship can meet at the intersection of empirical research methods, equity and student-centered objectives, and emergent technology. Collectively, our field is providing a template for our own future scholars, but also for other fields and disciplines.

More important, we’re showing our students and tutors that we are committed to them, their safety, and their wellbeing.

Works Cited 

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Schendel, Ellen, and William J. Macauley, W. J. Building Writing Center Assessments That Matter. UP of Colorado, 2012.

Sharp, Travis, and Karen Rosenberg. “The Grammar of Social Justice: Gender Non-binary Pronouns and the Writing Centre.” Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Redactologie, vol. 28, 2018, pp. 212-226.

Spade, Dean. “Some Very Basic Tips for Making Higher Education More Accessible to Trans Students and Rethinking How We Talk About Gendered Bodies. Radical Teacher, vol. 92, 2011, pp. 57-62. 

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Suhr-Sytsma, Mandy, and Estelle Brown. Theory In/To practice: Addressing the Everyday Language of Oppression in the Writing Center. Writing Center Journal, vol. 31, no. 2, 2011, pp. 13-49.