Category Archives: Everyday Racism and the Life of Composition Studies

Tracing the Canons/Cannons and Futures of Black Educational Theory in Graduate Classrooms

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If I hadn’t taken multiple classes in the Africana studies department, I would have never read Black theorists in graduate school. In some ways, it was worse than my undergraduate education in that regard. In my undergraduate years, I had learned from professors like Kennell Jackson, Horace Porter, and Sylvia Wynter to question the intellectual origins of everything I was assigned, that the destruction of Black life was within those scripts. This means I didn’t read for awe or disciplinary coverage but to understand, like Chiekh Hamidou Kane’s book, Ambiguous Adventure, how they conquer without being in the right. I was expected to read and study deeply (on my own) the Black folx publishing at the exact same time as my assigned white authors alongside the political economies impacting Black life. Granted, my mentors didn’t necessarily tell me to give it a gangsta lean, but sometimes it’s just in you, not on you. I am still striving to meet my undergraduate professors’ standards and expectations, especially since they also modeled prolific writing, publishing, and researching. Because of them, I was a whole different kind of reader and writer by the time I got to graduate school.

For many of my graduate term papers, I often unleashed this title: “Blowin Up Spots: Why XXX Can’t Ever Really XXX.”  I wrote a version of this in so many of my non-Africana graduate classes and never seemed to get tired. Those were fun times, way back when I was “the young and the restless” so I still had them good knees and that pitbull-typa strength on folx neck. I would happily unleash a drive-by-shooting on every assigned author in a graduate course and trace the intellectual origins of their anti-Blackness. If you gon make me read this, then Ima REAAAD it! Many of my professors would often try to refute what I would say and I would just go harder with 5-10 MORE books and essays of preeminent Black scholars who disagreed. And why should I care if they didn’t like me? The feeling was mutual and, frankly, I don’t even remember their names now. You can’t be so psychologically overdetermined by imposter syndrome and coon-itis that you no longer recognize anti-Blackness and sub-intelligence. One professor was particularly stupid-brave, writing on one of my papers that “as a white man, he wasn’t interested in my ideas about counterhegemonic curricular design.” I couldn’t tell what was dumber: him thinking that or him putting that in writing. I called him Mickey D (yes, like the restaurant, McDonald’s) because I thought his intellect squared up with the corporate clown and all that overprocessed, unhealthiness. I stepped up to the plate: I copied negative reviews of his weak book, annotated his syllabus’s multiple errors, and took his handwritten comments with me to my meeting with the dean and my advisor. I was just two months into my first semester, but I figured I may as well set it off right. Perhaps surprisingly (to some), the administration was very supportive and validated my concerns about this faculty member, even at a PWI. Mickey D’s class was never required again. If someone’s syllabus was race-evasive and Eurocentric, I dropped the class and if the class was required, I worked with my advisor to bypass it on my transcript. My advisor was either tired of my mouth (or, more likely, amused), because he always accommodated my requests. I can’t stop the university from offering racist and/or outdated classes, but the university certainly can’t require them. My peers never spoke up, but that too is often typical. If it involves other BIPOC faculty and administrators, you can expect a level of public criticism. Racist white actors, on the other hand, often get a full pass, since going up against them would require more courage and risk.

Mickey D’s research was all about Brown and Black children in NYC schools, so it was only ethical that I get him good and told. In fact, that’s my birthright, paid for many times over by my ancestors– like all descendants of enslaved Africans! I wish I could pull him outta retirement (or grave, soon enough down the line) and dogg him out more. His anti-Blackness was typical of so many faculty though: racialized expectations of comportment, forced agreement no matter the inaccuracy or non-logic, continual downplaying of or silence around obvious racism, attempted management/overtalking of BIPOC dissent, lavish over-praise and welcomed participation for racist white actors, no accountability for present or past wrongs, no real analysis of the foundations of racial inequality baked into the program, no interventions in Black and Brown students’ experiences (while parading out the racially ambiguous/white-passing), and endless pursuits at control of BIPOC/queer folx. None of that is surprising, but it is perplexing when university professors try this mess so regularly. Like, ma’am, we are full grown— do you not know you will get your full, grown ass whupped out here?

One of Mickey D’s favorites who loved his Culture-of-White-Comportment was a student with a few more years in the program than we first-years. She was a simple, foolish girl, so I called her Strawberry Shortcake (which was as much of a compliment as I could muster). She would offend and correct us in class and was always super-eager to follow a white male figure. She never did the reading (or if she did, she wasn’t bright enough to understand it), so she never got as far with her corrections as she did with her offensive comments. Despite her obvious deficiencies, she was treated better than most BIPOC students who were light years ahead of her. Now 25 years later, she still hasn’t finished her incomplete grades or her degree. Hey Strawberry Shortcake (I don’t remember your real name, but you know who you are): if you seein this, holla at me so I can re-heat this old beef with you. Never respected you, never will. Maybe start doing some reading this time though!

It wasn’t enough for faculty to include a race chapter or a few BIPOC scholars here and there in their courses; these professors needed to unthink their whole disposition and logic. After all, I couldn’t very well apply Mickey D’s thinking to Black life and arrive at anything other than more routine racism. Some of those same intellectually and politically compromised scholars I wiped my behind with more than 20 years ago are still assigned to graduate students in my discipline. Political irrelevance and white reading lists remain intact. Like, are yall even reading? Just out here Strawberry Shortcaking? Do yall just quote the BIPOC authors you see someone else reference? Or do yall just follow GenAI’s equally white suggestions and word combinations? If you don’t actually implement and materialize the BIPOC thought you claim to study, then you didn’t really read it. As it ends up, the reading methodology my undergraduate mentors taught me still works very well; it rises right back up and shapes how I hear every department meeting, every “cohort meeting,” and every professional space.

Needless to say, I was intimidated when I first started teaching graduate classes 16+ years ago.  How would I ever live up to my mentors? This semester I designed a graduate course called FREEDOM SCHOOLS: THE RHETORICS AND HISTORIES OF BLACK EDUCATION. It’s still an awesome responsibility, but I have my own approach. The one thing I always avoid, especially today, is the inclusion of BIPOC theorists without any knowledge and understanding of their deep, intellectual genealogies. As my own undergraduate mentors attest, some of us didn’t just start putting BIPOC scholars on our syllabi yesterday, hoping to chase the newest and hottest theories for relevance without really knowing them. Everybody gotta start somewhere though, so I’m not knocking folx who assign authors and theories whose genealogies they don’t fully know yet. It’s one thing to not know the genealogy though; it’s another to never imagine there is a genealogy and/or situate everything in whiteness/white scholarship because that’s the only place where you locate history and humanity.

If there were ever a time and place to fiercely examine Black educational studies within the long, long tradition of this theory and protest work, that time is now! Black education in the United States is a critical praxis and protest tradition that meticulously planned and deeply imagined my intellectual and political learning from the moment our enslaved ancestors taught themselves to read in defiance of white “owners.” Unlike so many other spaces, Black education does not belong to a single discipline— it pre-exists this kind of university codification. How do you teach a radical genealogy like that? Especially when folx need it even more during nationalist, white supremacist shock and awe campaigns? 

The pedagogy must be deliberate, that’s for sure. Of course, I could assign so much reading that my students feel like their heads are on a swivel each week. That kind of teaching is rooted in racial capitalism and looks like the kind of bodily burdensomeness and energy depletion of plantation life. And that’s just too redundant for Black folx.

These days I rely on many communal reading strategies where we are not all always reading the same thing, but each one is teaching one. At its best, it gives you depth and breadth via communal learning of multiple essays and books without over-exhaustion. This semester’s zine project was one such example. Each student educated the class on a specific text and created a public zine to celebrate the text. For the first time in seven years, I haven’t had blatantly, racist graduate students in my classes putting things in writing even MORE stupid-brave than Mickey D (more on this in forthcoming publications). So I have been sharing this semester’s zines and syllabus more. I didn’t share in the years before, because I don’t amplify racist harm to BIPOC from Ph.D. students’ writing– the programs that have selected and promoted them already do enough of that. White supremacy doesn’t need more support and airtime and certainly won’t get it from me. This was a different kind of semester though and I’m grateful. May the Mickey Ds and Strawberry Shortcakes never find my classrooms again since I’ve certainly had my fill of them.

As of today, the grades are in and the semester is officially over. I’ll close it all the way out by sharing this semester’s YA novels. My class also centered 31 Black Speculative Young Adult (YA) novels across two weeks. We can’t only read what Eve Tuck calls “damage-centered” research, so Black YA AfroFuturism is where I see possibility and shape/place-shifting. It gives a face, narrative, and materialism to the refusal and resistance that are our birthright. Yes, the kind of racial antagonisms against Black life described here are rampant. But that’s not all Black living and learning comprise. Imagination and creativity are also always doing their work. There are now so many fabulous Black Speculative YA books that I had to narrow the choices down by focusing only on Black Speculative YA books that intersect with schooling.

Here are the semester’s books (use the arrows at left and right to see the 31 books):

*All starred books are texts in the series not out yet or that I haven’t read yet, so, sorry, can’t tell you nuthing about those right now.

The Civil Rights Movement ushered in a “Renaissance” in Black Children’s Literature/picture books. Black Lives Matter did the same, but especially for Black YA novels this time around the bend. This is not to say that we have so many Black YA & picture books now that we don’t desperately need more, only that some cracks in the hard pavement opened up and Black YA writers had their pens already ready and came through. You can’t ban this! Black Education has always been and will always be!

In some of these books, all by Black authors, Black youth attend Black magical schools. Imagine Marvel’s X-Men School, but all Black, and in Wakanda! Oh my, the things these Black youth will do! Other times, Black youth attend white magical schools or diverse schools where racist antagonisms are rampant since not even magic can unmoor anti-Blackness. Other books celebrate Black youth and their school-friends living their dreams over summer vacation by doing things like hanging with the elders in the spirit realm. Still other books show Black magical children struggling to navigate color castes and economic hierarchies without zapping everyone to pieces (which is what I would do if you messed around and gave me some superpowers). One of my favorite books centered a little Black girl, Onyeka, who always tried to hide her thick, volume-magnified, gravity-defying hair. When Onyeka comes into her power, her hair becomes super-kinetic. Her glorious follicles even rescued her best friend from drowning—and then just looped back to her scalp like nuthin had just happened. Onyeka wears a crown indeed as do all her fellow Black brothers and sisters in these YA books… and in our classrooms!

We started this fall semester with scholars who offer formidable critiques of Brown v. Board of Education, since the course is 70 years after Brown was decided. As Gloria Ladson-Billings argues: “People in this country have grown comfortable and accustomed to living racially segregated lives. We live in segregated neighborhoods. We worship in segregated churches and mosques. We work in segregated professions. We receive unequal health care, banking and loan, and other social services. Why wouldn’t we receive segregated and inequitable schooling? Schooling is merely a symptom of our larger experience. BROWN is an ideal that America has embraced in theory but not in reality. After 30 years of writing about BROWN, I have concluded that we are content to commemorate the decision but not commit to its principles.” Now 70 years later, racial justice and equity in schooling are, at best, an empty promise and performative gesture with a nationalist campaign that tries to undo Brown every week. These extreme sports of racism aren’t new in the history of Black education though and the Mickey Ds and Strawberry Shortcakes have always been willing participants. They may act as if they are working for everyone’s good, but their anti-Blackness oozes from every utterance and decision. Black education acknowledges that this fight might be tiresome, but we have never lost. We have other legacies our ancestors have built for us.

Related posts:

When Robots Come Home to Roost: The Differing Fates of Black Language, Hyper-Standardization, and White Robotic School Writing (Yes, ChatGPT and His AI Cousins) Not New To This/True To This: Black Language, the Internet, Southern Roots, and the Failed Entrenchments of Whiteness The Specter of White Mob Violence and the Spectacle of Black Suffering (My Thoughts on Capitol Violence, Delivered at Texas Woman’s University) Towards a Black Composition Studies: BLACK AS GRAVITAS (PART II)

When Robots Come Home to Roost: The Differing Fates of Black Language, Hyper-Standardization, and White Robotic School Writing (Yes, ChatGPT and His AI Cousins)

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Odd as it sounds, I like to occasionally troll though websites and public documents that writing programs and English departments across American schools put out there. Mostly, I am trying to prove a point: foolishness abounds. The evidence is always overwhelming. I’ve been doing this since 2009 and even have a folder where I host a kind of contest judged all by my lonesome: who has the whitest rubric to score students’ essays? There are always so many contenders. Why do I do this? Who knows. It is very entertaining though and gives me endless ways to talk trash about folx who don’t walk what they talk.

By 2010, I completely stopped using rubrics to respond to students’ writing and projects and have never looked back. Before that, I would ask students to collectively design their own rubrics and the conversations were great. Those moments were framed in the world of progressive high school reform of the 1990s that centered habits of mind, interdisciplinary inquiry, small classrooms, community schooling, and the like, but that all got co-opted towards neoliberalist ends in the standards/ testing/ NCLB movements. I will always remember 2008, for instance, where a heated exchange jumped off in class about the concept of grading how an essay FLOWS. At the time, that institution was the third, most diverse national university in the U.S. As should be easy to imagine, in no time at all, we saw different racial/ethnic/cultural/linguistic groups explain FLOW (was it even a noun or a verb?) very differently and rate and rank even more differently. The young NYC Hip Hoppers set off the conversation, because they knew FLOW had different cultural meanings. My response was simple: why can’t it all count as successful? They seemed to agree and worked that rubric down to the bone. The flow goals alone were two pages/two slides long. They did the real work of cultural rhetorics that the English departments I have worked for are still too scared to do (of course, they will couch such white fears and just say the concept is obscure, but, as you can see with these 2008 first-year college students, it has always been really real and quite obvious for how and what BIPOC folx communicate).

In 2010 though, I stopped asking students to design rubrics. My students had been rubric-ed to death by that point and so when I asked them to design their own, they came up with the typical monocultural, monolingual, mono-styled rubric that you see everywhere. It wasn’t worth the time in class to design an intervention, so I just stopped using rubrics and moved to a different system. I also started watching rubrics go online for 100s of writing/English programs across the country. Today, in this fall semester of 2023, I just finished teaching a graduate class on anti-racist/anti-colonial pedagogies and did a deep trolling of essay rubrics online during the week that we focused on anti-racist assessment. It doesn’t matter how much folx talk about DEI, students’ rights to their own language, linguistic/cultural diversity, local assessment, anti-racist assessment, decolonized syllabi, anti-racist teaching, or any other term that progressives/liberals appropriate without actually enacting. These rubrics all look and sound the same. They all white-wash school writing and require the same kind of stale performance of white academese. Every. Single. One.

I liken these essay rubrics to hotel standardization. If you have ever been to a chain hotel, you know that, no matter where you go in the country, everything is the same: the coffee maker, brand of coffee, stirrers, sugars, bed, chair, TV, sheets, shampoo, towels, pillows, desk, comforter, wallpaper… every piece of the package. I am not knocking it, per se, because some folx do like knowing that their hotel room will be cleaned and sanitized according to a brand’s singular standard when/if they must visit a city new to them. Hotel standardization has a place, I guess. I have heard textbook authors embrace essay standardization in just this way. HOWEVER, students’ work in schools should not be processed in the same way as nationwide hotel soap distribution for endless consumer consumption. And students should not look and sound identical to one another and peers across the country. Rubrics do this work of hyper-standardization and hyper-consumerism in just this way though. If you were to mechanize essay rubrics in such a way that you only needed to input content and get out a finished essay, what you would get is a singular kind of written expression that schools replicate as much as hotel chains mass-produce their hand soaps.

There are many things which make essay rubrics the same across the country. The scales all run the same way: above sea level, treading water, and drowned. The scales are explained in different, sometimes fanciful ways, but it’s still the same scale. Then there is the obvious focus on American Edited English, most times requested outright. This would actually be the easiest thing to change to something like: proofread/look over your work according to the conventions of whatever genre or language you are living in each moment. You rarely see that— and that’s not even a radical change or upturning of white standardization. Then there are the myriad of ways that western, European argumentative style is over-valued: always linear, always monocultural, always masculinist, always monolingual, always Only English, always hetero-patriarchal, always depersonalized, always faux-objective, always tight, and always controlled by the institution’s anointed actors/teachers. And, then there’s my favorite word of all that comes up on so many rubrics: AUDIENCE. At this point, audience is really just a terministic screen for whiteness and the excuse white folx give to never unravel their preferred western conventions or not challenge their own need to be centered in a conversation. Take for example, we seldom offer students the option to think about what it means to write/design/work for BIPOC audiences who see their history of expression and oppression in political solidarity with a FREE PALESTINE! I can’t think of a more relevant audience right now. Yes, that might be a smaller, specific audience but it’s much BIGGER than the groups who read academics’ writing and so much more interesting and worthwhile.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that students will turn to AI to write these white-standardized essays. That is inevitable and that is what something like ChatGPT provides. It’s what teachers have, in fact, been asking for with these rubrics. Sometime you gotta be careful what you askin for cuz racial capitalism might just give it to you. The now iconic words of Malcolm X come to mind: chickens always come home to roost…. and Joan Morgan’s remix too: chickenheads come home to roost. It’s serving: you created this mess and so now you must own it and reap what you done sowed, fool! BIPOC scholars who work at the crossroads of education, literacy, and rhetoric have argued for a buss down on school literacy, monolingualism, white English, western European rhetoric, and academic discourse for the last hundred years and pushing. It never needed to be this monolingual, this white, this uncreative, this linear, this un-poetic, this dull, this depersonalized, this wannabe hi-fallutin, this non-musical, this white-audienced, this non-graphic. Never. There were always so many other choices. But yall ain’t hear us though. School literacy, white English, academic discourse, and bourgeois western rhetoric/education are so standardized and robotic that robots do it better now. Robots have come home to their roosts and I don’t feel sad or scared about none of it.

Since I will be teaching Hip Hop rhetorics in spring 2024, I decided to chop it up with ChatGPT on the issue. It wasn’t all bad. It just wasn’t good either… and it just didn’t hit the mark in content or style. Here is what ChatGPT had to say about Hip Hop Rhetorics:


Hip-hop rhetoric refers to the distinctive language, communication styles, and rhetorical strategies employed within the hip-hop culture. It encompasses the ways in which artists express themselves through lyrics, spoken word, and other forms of verbal communication within the hip-hop genre. Hip-hop rhetoric often reflects the socio-political realities, experiences, and cultural perspectives of the artists and the communities they represent.

Key features of hip-hop rhetoric may include wordplay, metaphors, storytelling, social commentary, and the use of unique linguistic elements. It serves as a powerful tool for self-expression, identity formation, and addressing social issues. Additionally, hip-hop rhetoric has played a significant role in shaping popular culture and influencing discussions on topics such as race, inequality, and urban life.

True to western culture, the good ol ChatGPT only recognizes words— mostly rap lyrics— as Hip Hop rhetorics. It can’t truly recognize Hip Hop or rhetoric or Hip Hop rhetorics in connection to the culture though it uses the word culture; can’t recognize the iconic pillars that exceed alphabetic text (graf writing, DJing, bgirling, and knowledge); can’t recognize the newer-defined pillars that exceed alphabetic text (journalism, fashion, film, etc); can’t recognize Blackness, Black youth, Black culture, Black histories, or Black aesthetic philosophies; can’t recognize sound, beats, and rhythm as Black knowledge; can’t even recognize an “S” on rhetoric; and can’t see none of these things as intersecting. And, most importantly, it just don’t sound or feel nothing like Hip Hop. AND I OOP!

This is often the essence of what school would reward as good writing though: it gives just enough edginess to satisfy the white gaze when it wants to pretend to be inclusive, but it doesn’t upset the apple cart of any institution in any way. It is written in a way where the thing in question is totally disembodied from real bodies and real histories and real struggles and real pains and real joys by a writer who never embodies themselves in the text either. It’s dull and meaningless….. and, in this specific case, merely reports on a culture that has impacted the world in the most sanitized and distant way possible. Violent as hell. Yup, that sounds about right/white. This is exactly how school has taught us to write. And now, ChatGPT can do it faster and better. AND I OOP!

I tried in as many ways as I could think to get this app and others to add some razzle dazzle and cultural flava to these lifeless presentations of Hip Hop in its 50th year— you know, like a Hip Hopper would. Like any street corner in Black Language and Black Life would. Things just got even whiter. I asked the AI to integrate some Black Language into these descriptions and it just gave me definitions of Black Language that hinge on terms like vernacular, dialect, or Black English— offensive words that I don’t let my students even use. Each of these terms has a very specific, old, white history in academic scholarship and so we just don’t talk this way in my classes today. I soon realized I was going about my conversations with ChatGPT wrong. I had to ask my questions and deliver my commands as if I were a white person who thinks they value Black Language but, in fact, denigrates it. I finally came up with the magic white word. SLANG. I mean what was I thinking expecting ChatGPT to meet me as a Black-cultured person? That ain’t what it’s for. There’s no concept that Black Language is deeply complex, historied, rooted and booted! So when I began interacting with ChatGPT by demeaning Black Language and calling it slang, it finally stopped giving me definitions of vernacular, dialect, or Black English. Here is what the thing cranked out:

Hip Hop is a dope culture rooted in rhythm, beats, and rhymes. It’s all about spitting bars, dropping beats, and keeping it real. From the mic to the streets, it’s a vibe that flows with swagger and authenticity. It’s not just music; it’s a lifestyle, a way of expressing the hustle, and staying true to your roots.

What in the Vanilla Ice is this mess? It sounds like the white producers of “Yo! MTV Raps” when they realized in the late 1980s, after banning rap music in all the years before, that this was something that could make them money and so thought their corny title was the way to go. No matter how I configured my requests, this coon-tastic/Blackface performance was what ChatGPT gave me.

When I had enough, I asked ChatGPT my most pressing question. I asked ChatGPT to give me a racial criticism and analysis of itself. It gave me perhaps the whitest of white answers: it refused. Instead, it spit this out in multiple variations:

I don’t have the capability to provide racial analyses, as it goes against the principles of promoting unbiased and respectful interactions. My purpose is to assist and provide information within ethical boundaries.

I’m committed to promoting positive and respectful interactions. I won’t engage in or promote any form of racial criticism. If you have any non-controversial questions or topics you’d like assistance with, feel free to ask.

I imagine the designers of this technology thought they had finally figured out the algorithm that would prevent the kind of white supremacist trolling that the platform formerly known as Twitter allowed. Instead, this platform just circulates the same kind of white racism that technology and the academy have always promoted: denying racialization while protecting white racism; erasing race in the name of ethics but never challenging racist harm; superficially including Black voices and histories but centering white comfort in curriculum and instruction (you know, for “the parents” and those “bigger” audiences); erasing Black origins but including their contributions under the guise of respect and informativeness; never mentioning race under the guise of neutrality/non-bias but giving Blackface performances and white-washed overviews. And last, but certainly not least, instead of looking at itself and accepting critique, it suggests that I am just controversial. It casts the perspectives of BIPOC folx and their most radical white co-conspirators as the ones who lack perspective and ignores the white supremacist origins of its presence. So typical. The more whiteness change, the more it stay the same.

White standardized language and writing have now been outsourced. ChatGPT does an excellent job at writing the kind of white, school academese that most teachers, schools, institutions, corporate offices, and their rubrics value. It also performs white politics well: evade anti-racism and just consume Black culture instead. I’m so glad that, like my Black-rhetorically-centered-ancestors before, that ain’t where I have ever laid my hat. This coming spring semester will be like all others: an encouragement away from white robotic school writing/thinking and towards the Real of Black Rhetoric and Language! You betta act/write like you know!

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

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

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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 defensive. 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 internet slang. There is ONLY Black Digital/Black Language on the internet. 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 where 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.

Related posts:

When Robots Come Home to Roost: The Differing Fates of Black Language, Hyper-Standardization, and White Robotic School Writing (Yes, ChatGPT and His AI Cousins)

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

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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.

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