About Carmen Kynard

I am an associate professor of English at St. John’s University. I am a former high school teacher with the New York City public schools/Coalition of Essential Schools and college writing instructor at the City University of New York (CUNY). I have led numerous projects focusing on issues of language, literacy, and learning: consultant for the Community Learning Centers Grant Project in Harlem, educational consultant and curriculum developer for the African Diaspora Institute/Caribbean Cultural Center of New York, instructional coordinator for the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, seminar leader for the New York City Writing Project, seminar leader for Looking Both Ways. If the conversation is truly about multiple literacies, political access/action, justice for racially subordinated communities, and critical pedagogy, I am all in! My first book with SUNY Press (2013), _Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies_, makes Black Freedom a 21st century literacy movement.

Not New To This/True To This: Black Language, the Internet, Southern Roots, and the Failed Entrenchments of Whiteness

I wish somebody had told me that teaching about Black Language in The South would be this smoove. I’m almost scared to say this out loud, because some of yall will bring your sorry butts down here and mess this up. I remember when I told folx I was moving to Texas and they swore they would never move here or anywhere South. There is no such thing as a space free from white supremacy in the USA, so suggesting otherwise is just stupid… especially given all of what you must ignore to equate the Midwest, NorthEast, Westcoast, and all points on the compass with racial/political progress.

I grew up in the Midwest, my family is from Alabama, I went to college in California, and I spent my adulthood in the Northeast. Today I teach college in the South. I started teaching in 1993 in the Bronx, NY which marks my very first experience of teaching about Black Language as a classroom teacher when I introduced my high school students to Geneva Smitherman, including her foreword to the book, Double Snaps (where she contextualizes what we then called snappin inside of the Black Language tradition of signifyin). It was the Golden Age of Hip Hop and my BIPOC students were “South South Bronx” all the way through… and they were as anti-Black in their ideas about Black Language as any white supremacist out here. I had to go to WORRRRRRKKKK to get them to think through their internalized anti-Blackness. As dope as those students wore, it took even more work to get them off the side of white supremacy during the Ebonics “Controversy” in 1996. They came around… eventually.

Centering Black Language in the college classroom– where I have taught courses spanning gender studies, composition, Black studies, rhetoric, and education— ain’t been easy either. Not in Queens. Not in the Bronx. Not in Harlem. Not in Brooklyn. Not in Newark. Not in my 26 years of teaching in those places. These are spaces steeped in Blackity-Black Black Language and yet far too many Black folx don’t want to claim it. At a Black college in Brooklyn, many of those students complained about my focus on U.S. Ebonics, Hip Hop Nation Language, and Caribbean Nation Language. I actually scared many students right out of my classes. For some students, it would take something drastic to get them to come to the light. In one instance, one woman was insulted that a college class and a college professor like me would even mention Ebonics and she let everybody know it (usually using Black Language herself)…. that is, until her son’s elementary school tried to put him in special education because of language issues. I went to bat for her and that little boy and kept him out of special education, but that was what it took for her to change her tune. I’ve written about these moments extensively, so I’ll just chalk it up here: I could tell dozens of stories like this. Granted, it wasn’t everybody, but it was always enough to make me almost lose a professional disposition.

2019 was my last year teaching and living in the Northeast. I vividly remember my last undergraduate class— a small capstone that I treated as a writing seminar. Those students’ final projects were fabulous (see here for their collections), but a few were very vocal that they did not want to hear anything about writing and language that intersected with narrative, translingualism, Black Language, or non-essayist literacy. That got shut down pretty quickly when they realized that all that white school language that they had mastered for the majority-white and very traditionalist faculty at that CUNY college (City University of New York) was not something that would get them a multiracial audience who would listen to them. It was 2019. And they was still working my nerves. I do miss those students dearly— their vibe, their rhythm, their flow, their language, their loudness, their daily aesthetic… and even the way they made me get in they asses about their negative attitudes on Black Language. That said, the South is dope. I had to re-learn how to teach about Black Language. Cuz it’s a whole other world here.

Because there is no dissent.

Not even a little.

No hesitation.

No questioning.

It’s just full steam forward… like, yeah, let’s get this. All of the time.

By my fourth semester of centering Black Language in my undergraduate courses here in Texas, I really got it. After years of resistance, I’ve learned how to teach about Black Language on the offensive. But I ain’t really learn how to teach it on the offense and WIN! At first I thought it was a fluke, but by the fourth time, I was like, naw, they open AF. They write notes on the evaluations, to my email, and in my DMs thanking me for lessons on Black Language. Like, what? I done died and gone to Black Language Heaven?

I’m tellin you right here: It’s the South.

From September 1993 all the way up to May of 2019 in New York and New Jersey, I faced some kind of resistance in the classroom to Black Language. Three months later, I landed in Texas and the tide shifted. It ain’t me. I ain’t change THAT MUCH in three months. And it ain’t cuz a new Black liberation cultural movement emerged in three months either.

This is the South.

And we winnin.

I decided that we would rock out a little different this semester and create our own Black Language Workbook that future semesters will build on. This semester seemed like I had the perfect course to do this work: DIGITAL BLACKNESS.

Like always with real Black learning and intellectual work, when you ain’t fighting and pleading and explaining the legitimacy of a Black thing, you can get down to the actual nitty gritty of the thing and do and think some new fire into it. That’s what teaching now is like. We hit the Black Language theme unit somewhere in week six but by week five, one student, Josulyn, had already presented, telling us that what many call internet slang is really Black Language that racism won’t let be fully credited as such. By the time we started creating the Black Language Workbook, we understood that there is no such thing as Black Digital/Black Internet Language. The digital makes its meaning through, with, and because of Black Language. It’s like the technology today is only now catching up with 100s of years of Black Language and that’s only because Black folx are training social media to do so!

Black Language is future-oriented in the way it does Language; it’s like it was able to predict the needs of current digital communication long before it was even available to us. The hallmark discursive features of Black Language are the foundation of such digital communication today, all of which my Texas students defined in the workbook below (hit the arrows to go forward):

Black Language is alllll about…. the creative play on words, image-makings that make the text come alive, metaphors everydamnwhere all the time, quick wit on even the seemingly mundane, lightning fast comebacks, exaggerated language that drives home a point, call-and-response to get audiences involved, signifyin on any-and-everythang, semantic inversions that can flip the meanings of any word, tonal semantics that make the words sound the way you mean them, mimicry that will clapback by just imitating you, narrative sequencing so that multiple stories can tell a main story, directness AND indirectness, proverbial statements that make everyday feel like a Sunday school lesson….. and just willlllld creativity all the time with morphology and syntax.

That’s like the WHOLE ASS internet.

Yup, it took coming South to learn and understand all this (I am arguably in the Southwest though, not the Deep South, but still South). It makes sense though, since The South is the home of Black Language in the United States as we know it. I remember way back when I would share with my students something one of my graduate school professors, Robin D.G. Kelley, talked to us about in class. He talked about the “accent” of the Deep South as Black Language as that “accent” developed in the parts of the United States that held the most enslaved Africans. This goes against the “commonsense” suggestions that Black Language was developed from the accents of Southern whites (as if white Southerners are homegrown vs. new settlers and as if slavery didn’t last for 100s of years for Black folx who imprinted the South everywhere). Kelley flipped all that to say, naww naww, the accents of Southern whites developed based on a proximity to Black folx that Northern white folx didn’t have. White supremacist relationships to slavery simply re-center whiteness in linguistic politics and so suggest otherwise. Granted, Kelley did not talk like my crude paraphrasing, but the message is still there. When I told students in the North all this, they disagreed and I had to check them real quick in their anti-Black assumptions that they knew more than a brilliant Black historian like Robin D.G. Kelley based on something their majority-white high school teachers told them. Fast forward to 2019 when I share the same thing here and you know what the students say? I remember it like yesterday, cuz a student from Augusta, GA (and Augusta stay tearing it up) raised his hand and said something like this: Oh, yeah. That makes so much sense. I knew white people like me talked different for a good reason. Ain’t heard a dissenting voice yet. Good reason, indeed!

Other times, well, they just say what’s on their minds.

While I’m having the time of my life, I think most of my students are actually just pretty chill, like it’s just another day for them, or, like maybe I shoulda been teaching in the South all along.

I am so glad I am a rhetoric-compositionist because this is the work I get to do in classrooms every week, every month, every theme unit, every semester. And as a researcher and scholar, I write about these things, examine language/writing politics closely, and situate classroom learning in the historical and current contexts of racism, education, language, and literacy. We have decades of research on Black liberatory /anti-racist/anti-colonial/ intersectional teaching and learning that connects me as a writer-teacher-scholar to an entirely different community of thought and action. This allows us to move in ways that go against the opposing whiteness of the school, department, district, and/or campus which is often hell-bent on re-centering whiteness no matter that even white students are asking for something different. Like now.

My current context (yes, where my first-year and second-year college students do work on Black Language so brilliantly) recently decided that one of the categories of specialty for a new hire for composition classrooms would be: “Argumentation and Propaganda Analysis.” Foolish on so many levels!! Those of us who are “PhD-trained” as rhetoric-compositionists know that this is not even how speciality and expertise in the field are named in 2023. The wording comes instead from the title of a course that looks like it has been on the books for a while. A year ago, the then-administration asked me if I would teach this class. I declined explaining that the course is not something that I would ever put on my CV. I also questioned why the course is still in the curriculum given that every organization, conference, and journal in my field is facing a serious reckoning for the kind of white indoctrination that such a curricular choice represents. It goes in the opposite direction of what I communicate to my students as 21st century rhetorical study and is too deeply rooted in an exclusionary traditionalism that has worked as its own white “propaganda” (ironic that whiteness sees propaganda everywhere but in itself). Now fast forward to a year later and they wanna hire someone in this defunct category— and name it as such on a public-facing, national ad. It’s not even even giving a contemporary white supremacy tea— it’s just some old 1950s Cold War retrograde stuff designed from the perspective of a white male bourgeoisie (it ain’t, after all, W.E.B. DuBois’s or Aime Cesaire’s perspectives). Meanwhile, folx act surprised at the racist backlash that we see from someone like Ron DeSantis when white retrenchment like that is clearly present everywhere. The professors who center their work in rhetoric-composition studies did not propose this category; the literature faculty did. There was even an almost-unanimous vote on this white racist construct— I was the SOLE ONLY vote of NO— but it passes anyway because white curriculum is considered democratic and faculty-governed when voting this way. In the end, the professors in rhetoric-composition studies will be blamed and thrown under the bus when graduate students and folx on the national scale call out this white supremacy for exactly what it is ….and the perpetrators will, like always, gaslight their way out of it. It’s as colonial of an enterprise as you can get.

And it’s easy to see and decipher.

But then again: I belong to a Black Language Legacy that sits at the intersection of the Black Radical Tradition. Like my students can even show you, we do and think real differently over here. White retrenchment never wins. Listen to Black Language and you hear all the evidence of that. We ain’t goin nowhere and neither is the Black Language that will always deconstruct you.

The Specter of White Mob Violence and the Spectacle of Black Suffering (My Thoughts on Capitol Violence, Delivered at Texas Woman’s University)

Thank you, Dr. Fehler, for inviting me here and thank you, Dean Tilton, and Dr. van Erve, for your introductions.  I also thank all of the Texas Woman’s University community for being with us this evening.

I acknowledge and honor the Wichita and the very land where I now reside as a newcomer to Fort Worth, Texas. The Wichita call on us to be better stewards of the land; I also hear that call as one that compels me to recognize my unique role as a descendant of enslaved Africans to disentangle white settler colonization from my imaginations and life-purposes.

I start by letting you know that I’m going to read my comments this evening. I have posted these comments on my blog for better accessibility. Parts of this text are also weblinked here if you want a closer look at the sources and events I discuss.

While there is much for us to think through and problematize about the white supremacy that we witnessed in the violence at the Capitol this past January, I want to focus here on the ways that white mob violence is a LONG-STANDING central praxis of white supremacy and is always anti-Black and anti-Semitic.  These are always co-functioning this way so it should “make sense” to us that the Capitol rioters costumed themselves in things like Camp Auschwitz garb and nooses, both of which are the most iconic symbols of the mass murder and violence against Black and Jewish peoples.

And while there was considerable conversation about the differences in the responses to white mob violence and Black peaceful protest, that is just part of the story. White mob violence is specter— and I say specter in the sense that it is truly a kind of reoccurring haunting.  It is often represented as a kind of merely unfortunate, albeit awful, historical event, so that overall white innocence can be maintained.  If you were shocked by what you saw at the Capitol, it means that you have ignored the historical record or have been lulled into thinking these were bygone days by dogma that presents whiteness as innocent.  Meanwhile, Black suffering is spectacle— the thing we are used to seeing as if it is just another segment on the nightly news (which most times, it is). [These circulations of white supremacy are so much more than merely a set of hypocrisies in relation to the over-policing, surveillance, and militaristic responses to Black protest.] 

To get at some of what I mean, I want to look at Bruno Cua today and then step back and look at one specific historical incident of mass violence and voting, namely the 1920 Ocoee Massacre in Florida.  

Though it is just one of many examples, I want to highlight the current case of the 18-year-old Capitol rioter Bruno Cua from Metro Atlanta Georgia. His parents are still pleading with a judge to release him from custody while he awaits trial; they are simply embarrassed that they believed what Trump was telling them about voter fraud.  That is literally the defense—that they are deserving of mercy and forgiveness because Bruno was naïve and they are all now embarrassed.  I’ll come back to this point about shame and embarrassment so just keep that part in mind.

The stories seem to all point to these events: Bruno’s parents took him to D.C. for the rally where Bruno stormed his way inside and shoved a police officer out of his way to get into the Senate chamber.  Bruno described clearly in social media posts what would happen on January 6.  After leaving the capitol, he posted again the next day on January 7, even boasting that the tree of liberty was thirsty for the “blood of tyrants,” namely those people he had singled out at the Capitol, and that he would not give a warning shot the next time around. The next day, on January 8, he was still posting, this time proclaiming that everyone in Congress deserved a public execution.

Bruno is amongst the youngest to have charges brought against him, if not the youngest.  It should go without saying here that every young Black man in America is profiled, harassed, imprisoned, and murdered with impunity for so much less than Bruno’s offenses. And while I don’t believe that the cage and shackle system of our criminal justice system is helpful in the service of justice, it will remain interesting to see just how innocent, forgivable, and deserving of mercy Bruno becomes. 

It is particularly interesting to see how Bruno is depicted as an isolated, naïve white teenager when the fact of the matter is that Bruno is from the Metro Atlanta area, a central Black, critical hub that overturned the white Republican face of Georgia’s politics with record Black voter turn-out in favor of a Democrat president and vice-president, a woman of color to boot, and the first Black and Jewish senators, all organized by Black women activists.  Bruno was not naïve and simple; he was deliberately acting from a place of whiteness that insisted did not need to believe or accept Black agency.  

In fact, this entire election was decided, in large part, by Black voters and Black women organizers in major cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta.  The white rallying cry that depicted Black voters and Black cities and towns as thieves who had stolen American Democracy has been the same rallying cry for white supremacists since Reconstruction, including in these very same cities.[ I remind us here of the Black activist, Octavius Catto, who was killed on his way to vote in 1871 in Philadelphia; his murderer was never charged and the violent rampage against the Black vote and voice there were, in fact, aided by police.]  If you were shocked by what you saw at the Capitol, it might mean that you have ignored the historical record or have been lulled into thinking it was all just an unfortunate historical accident within the terms of a master narrative that presents whiteness, as a whole, as innocent. 

I also want us to remember the Ocoee Massacre in Florida in November 1920 which remains the largest election-related massacre. [There are, of course, multiple examples of this in relation to voting but sometimes just for living like this and this.]

The entire Black community of Ocoee was forced to flee the town when a prosperous Black farmer, Mose Norman, organized Black people to vote and went to vote himself in the national election in January of 1920.  When civil rights organizations called on Congress to investigate the massacre, they refused. The FBI also refused to act.  The leader of the white mob became the mayor.  After forcing all of the Black residents to leave town, these white insurrectionists stole the properties from this Black community which are collectively evaluated at ten million dollars today. There have been no reparations to these families.

In this 1920 white mob violence, white supremacists massacred what we think might be at least 50 Black people for voting, just 35 miles south of where Trayvon Martin was murdered making white men’s unpunished behavior merely the specter of Zimmerman’s (also judiciously-sanctioned) murder of Trayvon Martin.

I point out here that the insurrectionists at Ocoee celebrated their victory as has steadily been the culture of white mob violence, especially in relation to lynch law.  My connection to lynching if both literal and historical here since the insurrectionists erected a gallows to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence; lynchings were also a prime tool to block the Black vote and white people who deliberately intervened were threatened with death too.

We need to remember that lynching of Black Americans functioned as more than mere execution.  These were forms of entertainment, like the circus had just come to town. These were often large, festive events where white mobs often even erected stages with theater-styled seating. There were exciting advertisements beforehand; photos and postcards were sent to family and friends.  You’d be hard-pressed to find images of white lynch mob members looking ashamed or embarrassed about what they were doing: they are posing for the camera, often in special pre-planned attire, as whole family units.  They took trophies to commemorate what they stole on these “great days” and “wonderful evenings” (these could include chopped off body parts like breasts and phalluses).  These were, in sum, open and very public celebrations and were called acts of JUSTICE. We have to ask ourselves here: why was it so easy, almost automated, for the rioters at the capitol to look, sound, and act so much like a typical lynch mob from a century past?  It is telling here that for Bruno’s parents, and maybe even for much of America and the criminal justice system, their expression of regret and embarrassment, even when inauthentic, is treated as an extraordinary feat since it would be the one cultural practice different from the lynch mobs of 100 years ago. 

If we go back to the massacre at Ocoee in 1920, we see that these were white folx who had lived next to Black folx as neighbors for 30 years, but that didn’t stop them from brutalizing and stealing Black folx’s votes and homes.  So, as a way to wrap up here, I want to return to the fact that Bruno grew up in Atlanta and yet his defense, the commentary from seemingly everyone around him, and much of the public rhetoric right now, is that he had just never known anyone or anything else. BUT…..He. Lives. In. Atlanta…..  Metro Atlanta.  That’s a little over 6 million people and yet the salience of the deeply depressed, easily manipulated, rural white male loner is such a chronic trope of white supremacy that it can be called up anytime and anywhere to convey white innocence. If you listen to these accounts about Bruno’s isolation, you would think I am just acting like the little boy in that 1999 movie, The 6th Sense, that stars Bruce Willis as a child psychologist to a child patient (Haley Joel Osment) who can talk to the dead.  The child is absolutely bewildered by his ghostly talents and so whispers to the psychologist: I SEE DEAD PEOPLE. In my new 2021 version of the movie, I am the main child character who sees Black people in a sixth sense, like a great secret, where I have to walk around whispering “I see Black people”** because no one can see us, like Metro Atlanta ain’t even right there.  Though I might be making arguably an inappropriate joke here, it really is this absurd to me to act like Bruno didn’t understand the world around him and wasn’t acting within the terms of a white racist response to the political successes of a VERY Black Atlanta!  If we center Bruno as a misguided loner, we are in fact merely re-committing what we saw in 1920 Ocoee: no serious investigation, no commitment to act against white violence, an outpouring of forgiveness and understanding, open pathways to future success for leading agitators, and no acknowledgement of Black suffering. 

These new circulations of white supremacy at the Capitol this January will set off new legacies.  Our responses to this moment will put cultural practices in place that activists fifty years and one hundred years from now will have to agitate to undo, like we are doing now… about the 100 years before us… unless we seriously address AND REDRESS the spectacle of Black suffering that is so commonplace to us now as the specter of white supremacist mob violences continually haunts.

**PLEASE NOTE: Secretive whispers of “I see Black people” are something that I learned from Todd Craig in places like 4Cs, the writing center where we once worked, and all other kinds of academic spaces. This is his line, not mine, and so I give FULL CREDIT.

Towards a Black Composition Studies: BLACK AS GRAVITAS (PART II)

This is a year where I am listening and looking closely at those who really step up to the plate or miss the moment as has happened at every past Black Protest moment in my field. I am especially working towards framing composition studies as a place that does dynamic, on-the-ground work to transform the what, how, and why of university curriculum and instruction towards radical, anti-racist, intersected, Black feminist, fugitive goals.

I began the first part of this post arguing that my entry into university spaces has happened on the backs of young Black people.  It would be an erasure of and betrayal to them to act as if my arrival was predicated on my own talent or the goodwill of my colleagues.  I work hard to make sure that I don’t erase or betray and when I do worry, it’s only about whether I have gone far enough in truly rupturing white practices.

Many non-Black faculty at each of these tenure-track positions that I described in my previous post insist that it was their own consciousness and strategies for change that brought me to their campus.   The truth though is that these folk were at their wit’s end on what to do with their angry Black students and the larger public reminders from Black communities that they are as stunningly racist today as they were in the past.  No one will ever credit Black resistance this way because whiteness always attempts to take credit for moral convictions it has not achieved.  Today, the special journal issues on racism, Blackness, and anti-blackness will try to cover for their racist, exclusionary histories for which there is still no reckoning. New criticism and outrage will simply receive the same, canned response: this is just how the organization works (as if this justifies unfairness on the part of the people who choose the organization). White scholars will include a BIPOC author here and there in their publication or reference an example of Black suffering in the media (cuz there are, after all, so many to choose from), but still offer a racist and/or white-racialized framework; reviewers won’t notice and editors won’t intervene. White schools will cherry-pick the least resistant BIPOC students (who are also least attuned to Black radical practices and the intellectual works from the Black Radical Tradition) as their spokespeople. I say these things, not as prediction or sign of hopelessness, but as real-life examples of what I am noticing everywhere right now.

I am clear, however, that I am here because of a sustained Black Challenge by Black college students and communities.  It hit real different too when you locate your Black presence and pedagogies in young Black people’s and Black community revolts. 

You more loose with the tongue in your discipline’s ongoing silences,

you get more irreverently confident, even in the departments that never really wanted you,

you are less prone to low self-esteem despite the systems that always doubt you,

and a whole lot less likely to want to be centered/recognized in white supremacist/academic values. 

More folk should try it because I swear it’s good for the mind, body, and soul.  

Black Studies— Blackness, Black youth protest, and the Black Challenge to the western academy and knowledge—- is the most fundamental intellectual project in western thought as we know it. I learned this quite literally sitting at the feet of Sylvia Wynter who reminded us that we are unravelling an entire episteme, not simply a policy or institution.  If I spend the rest of my academic career achieving her realizations in and with Black studies, I will have done my work here.  I was an undergraduate student when I met her and so this is what I have understood from her since then:

Black changes everything.  

In entertainment/popular culture and sports, this has been obvious. I do not mean this in the bourgeois sense of Black exceptionalism but in the sense of the way that Black changes the whole game: from the style of the uniform, to the way audiences participate, to the range of new participants, to the new skills and uses that are deployed and centralized as the new practices, to the force of the critique of the theories presented as all-encompassing. Think about academia here.  Think Black Feminist Thought.  Think Black Queer Theory.  Think Black Trans Studies. Think Black Digital Humanities. Black Pain. Black Struggle. Black Diaspora. Black Love. Black Lives Matters. Black. Black. Black. Black.

Black is not an adjective or identity marker but a whole force field that shifts the gravitas.  

Today I align myself with another particular gravitas:  BLACK… COMPOSITION… STUDIES. 

As a compositionist, I should be in the perfect field to get at and rupture all these anti-Black compositions of the academy.  As it ends up, this discipline trades in pennies with a white academic marketplace so instead, I reach for a Black Composition Studies: 

  • a radical disposition and praxis that attends to racial processing and composing in, within, and against the academy and schooling as its very own kind of literacy and education project
  • a vision of Black studenting in the academy— undergraduate and graduate— that locates the histories of Black protest’s profound, radical interventions and future inventiveness
  •  a commitment to research and pedagogy that works in tandem with Black activism— in content, FORM, and style— and disrupts what education is for, who is at center, what it looks/sounds/feels like, and what it does   
  • a conviction and audacity in knowing that Black will turn this field all the way around until it sets itself right.

As a Black Studies Compositionist, directing my attentions and vision towards a radical, alternative and futuristic purpose of literacy and education is the only option.

Towards a Black Composition Studies: BLACK AS GRAVITAS (PART I)

Thank you to Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal for publishing the earliest version of this reflective essay in their Volume 2 dedicated to Black Studies edited by Sherri Craig & Karrieann Soto Vega. I will be building on this essay throughout this year as part of a new project. This year is a crossroads for composition-rhetoric so I am listening and looking closely at those who really step up to the plate or miss the moment as has happened at every past Black Protest moment for this field. In the coming weeks, I am especially working towards framing composition studies as a place that does dynamic, on-the-ground work to transform the what, how, and why of university curriculum and instruction towards radical, anti-racist, intersected, Black feminist, fugitive goals.

I am a professor in the academy today because young Black people burnt off all of somebody’s edges to get me here.  Once upon a time, I was out there edge-snatching as a Black college student too.  It’s a Black intellectual inheritance.

Black studies and an ongoing radical Black presence in the academy are not the result of a conscientious and interested hiring committee, a department’s desire to represent African American content, a university’s commitment to a multiracial university, or a profession’s/professional organization’s vision of radical democratic relevance.  None of that truly exists in the academy.  Only the adoption of a bourgeois, white, cishetero, masculinist individualism would cause a Black scholar to think that they are here because of the quality of their work or their uncanny skills at navigating white supremacist institutions.  We are here because young Black people and their radical allies demanded it in cities and hamlets everywhere, burning it down when they had to. I am certainly talking about current contexts but I am also historicizing this all way back to the activism related to new visions of schooling in post-emancipation, ongoing into the early 1900s with the New Negro Movement. The Black college student protesters of the 1970s are legendary in how they heralded the multiracial diversity that we see at places like the City University Of New York and other universities today with racially/ethnically diverse student bodies.  These student protesters were the political heirs to Black students at HBCUs who designed their own practices in the Civil Rights Movement decades before.  These 1950s HBCU students can trace themselves back to the major wave of Black student protests at the HBCUs in the 1920s when their colleges’ administration and faculty were mostly white. These historical lessons have been well documented now by many scholars across the K-16 education spectrum, including myself, so I won’t delve deeper.  The point is this: If any aspect of what we do is not in alignment with this foundation on Black youth, then it ain’t Black studies.

As I reflect on the role of Black students in the academy here, I interrupt my own alphabetic text with Black undergraduate students’ visual work in my most recent classroom, Introduction to African American Rhetoric.  The class was interrupted by the Spring 2020 school shutdown under the Coronavirus resulting in a revised syllabus that I called The Spring 2020 Corona Remix. Many mainstream white students across the college were complaining that they wanted more synchronous access to everything and everyone, despite the fact that their socially marginalized peers were self-proclaiming that they were having issues around income, health, housing, food security, wifi access, and disability and so needed alternative accommodations.  Meanwhile, my own Black students were mailing visual projects to my home (an option rather than just digital assignments) that marked the Blackness of an engagement with COVID-19 in ways that will always stay with me.  Their work is centered here visually so that I can see them as I reflect forwards.  Visual work is always critical for me because Black Visuality is more than multimodality; it is an affective and spiritually redemptive space that continually re-processes the dignity of Black Life in a world that insists upon Black Death.  Such student work in my classrooms guides my visions of a Black Composition Studies for an anti-racist university.

Every university assignment that I have ever had is the direct result of these students’ Black insurgency which is always visible for me on the paper, canvas, and screen. Each of my tenure track jobs has given me a valuable lesson about the role of this Black insurrection and white colonization, lessons that form not only my intellectual and political relation to Black Studies and Black youth but also my daily reality. I relay these lessons here as a foundation to realizing a Black Composition Studies. Composition studies in the university today is fraught with a colonial history on so many levels. We are most often housed in English departments that overshadow our labor and intellectual work. We still most often function as the illegitimate stepchildren of literary theory which often imagines itself as the only critical space that only rethinks the world and as the only frontrunner of English studies. With literary studies lost in its own elitist self-delusions of bourgeois grandeur, composition studies inherits the daily legacy of what English departments actually do: maintain the colonial legacy of the English language. I could write books on the white settler colonial logic that I hear daily in English department to describe teaching (or rather, lecturing), students’ abilities, language variation, writing assignments, etc. Put most simply, composition studies is the space that focuses on language, particularly the teaching of writing while our cousins in communication studies (who left English departments long ago) focus in on speaking— in its most simplistic point of origins (we all do more than that). Together, we and our cousins confront the dailyness of communication systems in the western world that have annihilated non-white languages and therefore ways of being that do not conform to whiteness. We and our cousins therefore always sit at the crossroads: automate colonization as an institutional pedagogy and rhetorical apparatus… or overthrow it. Black composition studies goes for the latter and, as such, our close proximity to the non-compliant racial protests of Black students has to always stay central.

These are notecards that I received in the mail last spring as a reading response to the course assignment.

When I first began writing about insurgent Black students, I distinctly remember essay reviewers, especially men, arguing that my ideas of Black college students were romantic and essentialist.  In their minds (and ostensibly pedagogies), only they seemed to possess the answers to and practices of a radical protest and scholarly vision in the university.  This ongoing imagination of a university without Black students’ presence (or where they are merely the passive receptacles of the “expert” scholars of Black Studies and/or Composition-Rhetoric Studies) is an egregious form of white supremacist education.  Black students stay at the center of my presence in the academy and in the theoretical work that I do here, not as metaphor or cross to bear, but as the purveyor of a radical, literate/language alternative to who and what count here.

Here’s my first story that gets at more of what I mean. My first, tenure track job was at a Colonized State University in 2005.  They needed someone who could bridge what they called “developmental” writing, urban schools, the distrust of the surrounding Black community, low enrollments of students of color in the major, and attitudinal Black graduate students who were, at best, bored.  Them white folk at that college had been dragged so bad that they had to do something and so they hired me. I learned there that white racist resistance in universities takes the form of really slow or non-moving processes.  White faculty were always: scheduling meetings for discussions on how they feel, scheduling meetings to gauge their collective “temperature,” scheduling meetings to read the agenda out loud, reading the bylaws (most often out loud in meetings), revising the bylaws (read out loud all over again), thinking things over, looking into things, talking to you about your ideas and concerns, and planning to get back to you about your questions (which usually resulted in apologies for non-information and/or more unforeseen delays).  Every process took forever and ultimately went nowhere because white supremacy always takes up a whole lot of time, effort, and policy to stand still and stay the same.  These are not processes that are driven by Black folx or a vision for hiring them; it is Black protest that speeds up time and resets the energy in the academy. None of them meetings and discussions produced change and worked to stall Black freedom more than anything else. All of them folk at the Colonized State University are out here somewhere today, still meeting, revising them same bylaws (and probably still reading them out loud), discussing, thinking, looking into stuff, talking— yup, still doing all of that, and still accomplishing nothing of value for Black lives.  It’s not an accident. Black composition studies always recognizes the micro and yet overdetermined white supremacist processing of our schools and programs and imagines time, space, and possibility differently.

My next tenure track job was at a Colonized Religious University.  Before my arrival in 2008, the Black graduate students had showed all the way out, especially on online discussion boards I see you, Jessica Barros and Todd Craig, then and now Them white folk didn’t know what to do there either, except to hire me.  I learned about the racism of writing program administration there.  I also learned that I would walk alone in my field because I didn’t know a single professor in my profession who I would have truly called an ally or even friend back then.  It was a hard and lonely lesson, at first, but one that I am forever grateful for because it sharpened my lens on whiteness in my discipline.  The levels of anti-Blackness that I witnessed at the hands of my fellow writing program administrators (WPAs) were disgusting and no one— and I mean no one— was willing to even notice it, much less talk about it.  Anti-Black faculty were rewarded, awarded, buddied up, and promoted to next levels without hesitation. No one in my department—especially not the self-righteous, self-proclaimed-radical literature faculty, the dean’s office, or the provost’s quarters would address any of it.   And no one in the field was even acting like anti-Black racism was part of WPA.  It ain’t a coincidence that the WPA-Listserv remained so white and so racist for so long.  There is actually a whole stain of scholarship that suggests that WPAs are activists because they act in defiance against university systems that oppress student learning.  I read that stuff and can only ask: whatchu talmbout Willis? I have never witnessed such a WPA when it comes to anti-Black classrooms and the writers of those very same theories are as anti-Black as anyone else in the racist institutions that permeate the U.S.  Racist WPA work is not the kind of programming that is relevant to Black youth literacies or the work of Black education; this is not a space that prioritizes the hiring of folk like me either.  WPAs are only now getting called out and still today you simply need something labeled an anti-racist grading system or rubric and you too can continue to mete out anti-Blackness with your WPA work. It’s not like any of this is hidden from view or political dispositions, unless, of course, you refuse to see. Black composition studies is about a disruptive kind of vision and envisioning for schooling.

My next position was in 2013 at a Colonized City University with a student population that was 75% Black and Latinx.  It remains the whitest department I have ever worked in, with an incredibly self-righteously empty rhetoric of diversity and justice, often administered by a supra-white-wealthy elite.  They catch the heat, every once in a while, for all that whiteness given the history of Black and Latinx student protest in that system. And so they hired me.  I saw colonization most thoroughly there: a predominantly Black and Latinx student population with an abysmally low percentage of Black and Latinx tenure-track faculty.  It was a complete cocoon of whiteness.  Black presence was the pen-ultimate evidence of an awe-inspiring progress for which you were required to feel grateful, no matter how you were treated or marginalized.  When you were asked to do something by white administration, you were simply supposed to obey and sacrifice your own well-being because “these communities” needed you (never mind the fact that you and your family are “these communities”).  In my first year, the department even held an end-of-semester party to celebrate the retirement of two white women who study long-dead white people in Europe. The faculty came together in corresponding costumes and presented a well-rehearsed flashmob dance (that is what they called it).  There I was, in the middle of the city with the largest Black+Latinx population in the country, with the largest Latinx college student population in that area of the country (predominantly Dominican), with non-Black/non-Latinx folk dancing their hearts out in recognition of two white professors while dressed as Old English wenches, royalty, and fairies.  I’m not suggesting here that this event was evil.  Ridiculous?  Yes.  Harmful?  No.  The purpose of the event was certainly playfulness and jest, however, the spirit and politics of the mean-white-sorority-girl ethos from which this event was framed permeated the college. If nothing else, whiteness was quite steadfast.  These are not the bodies that centered my universe of being in the academy, not even for casual socializing or humorous encounters; it was the history of an alternative Black student universe that got me here.  At Colonized City University, whiteness remained centered (and often ludicrously so) no matter what else was going on around it. Black composition studies knows that white affect in schools is not neutral, safe, or accidental and so centers alternative embodiments and enfleshments.

And now?  As of 2019, I am at a Colonized Southern University where I see all of my previous colonial experiences cross-pollinating. Young Black women, both undergraduate and graduate, have been slicing and dicing white power everywhere they go on this campus. The penultimate expression is a lawsuit today that names all the names, insists on a trial, and will make history in ways the campus does not foresee.  The Black graduate women in the lawsuit are from my department and so, yup, they hired me (before the lawsuit, that is).  I don’t know exactly what is to come here, but I can certainly guess. I only know that I have learned the following rules about whiteness in the academy:

It will always put Black lives, urgency, and compensation on extended pause.

It will always be awarded, tenured, promoted, praised, compensated, elevated.

It will always present itself as right, just, and progressing forward (and sometimes even call itself critical and allied) for which Black folk are supposed to show gratefulness and awe.

It will always remain steadfast in how it centers itself everywhere all the time.

It will always ignore the deep damage and social deaths it causes.

It will always be contested.

It will always be unwritten.

It will never stop us.

I have yet to see anything different here. Black Composition Studies gives me this lens and critique but it also gives me the audacity to speak, fight back, and imagine an alternative way of thinking, being, and acting in the academy, in my classrooms, and especially in my field.

I am not suggesting that Black Composition Studies is only for Black folx. However, it ain’t for appropriation by folx in my field who continue to do stuff like write a Statement for Black Lives Matter in their departments and programs and not reference a single Black compositionist. Yall ain’t nowhere near ready and Black composition studies is here to let you know it. Black composition studies is not exclusive… but it is rigorous in the mechanisms and politics of its inclusions. 

Stay tuned for PART TWO…