When I first tried to publish “ ‘This the ConscienceRebel’: Class Solidarity, Congregational Capital, and Discourse as Activism in the Writing of Black Female College Students,” I must admit that I was taken aback by white resistance in composition studies— the field to which I am most closely aligned by nature of the work that I do but certainly not by the nature of my politics , aesthetics, or pedagogies. I was not surprised that the white editors saw the work— a text that focuses on working class Black female college students— as irrelevant to the wider field. But, I must admit: I was surprised that it was Black female scholars in the field who gave the white editors rhetorical ammunition.
It was Black female reviewers who brought up the point that most professors reading the article would be white and have mostly white students and so would not be able to relate to the content. Yes, you heard that right. It was Black female professors who made that claim. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that the white editors went to town on that right there. Besides the fact that it undermines all Black women when Black women see themselves as tangential to educational research, the idea that the majority of college writing classrooms today mostly enroll white, middle class students IS FALSE! That’s not historically accurate and it certainly does not apply to an era where higher education gets browner and browner every year. Whiteness in this field gets maintained by scholars of color as much as it gets maintained by white scholars and it’s time we start talking about it.
For a few years now, many, many black women have recommended the ID (Investigation Discovery) channel to me. I always promised to check it out simply because I trust sistas’ judgements about this kind of thing, but I honestly never got around to it. Quiet as it’s kept, black women talk about the ID channel more than they talk about Scandal; at least to me, they do. What holds constant across these black women’s recommendations is the promise of a representation of bone-chilling criminality and death without the overdetermination of mass media’s (local and national news; shows like CSI, Law and Order; all of the NYPD; etc) equation of violence with blackness. This is not the goal of the channel and race is never admitted or discussed, but it is all right there for the taking. This winter break I started watching ID channel and let me just tell you, I ain’t never seen so many murder-hungry white folk in my life…. outside of history books, that is. Like I said, I trust sistas’ judgements on these kinds of recommendations and they did NOT disappoint. I can’t even watch this channel late at night because Freddie Krueger and Elm Street ain’t got NUTHIN on the kind of nightmares and fears that this channel induces.
