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)

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!

To CCW Cyphers and Our Charge to Radically Imagine!

Click here for our FULL playlist— a soundtrack to close the 2023 conference!

To my CCW cyphers,

I just arrived to Denver today and so I want to situate myself on this Land.  I begin this letter to you by acknowledging that the land on which we are meeting is the territory of the Cheyenne and Arapaho peoples and all of their ancestors, past, present, and future.  Here on this Land, I am committed to undoing white settler colonialism in the ways in which I work, speak, and act as part of my acknowledgement.  As a descendant of enslaved Africans on stolen lands, I am among those whose lived realities sit at the intersection of what I call an INTERTWINED ABOMINATION — kidnapped from one land and forced to labor on stolen land… as such I am called to work towards a sisterhood of abolition and decolonization against apartheid, settler colonialism, genocide, and settler occupation everywhere.

For a visual description: I am a light-skinned Black woman wearing three afro-puffs down her head in an afro-puff/mohawk fashion. The puffs are in the color of brown and gold in T27 Marley Hair. It’s giving the lowwww-key version of a HIGH-key Lady Charlotte of Bridgerton. I am wearing a black cowl neck shirt and black pants with a very long jewel green bib necklace and very large silver hoops. Thank you to disability justice activists/theorists who have charged us with making such visual descriptions so that we might all see our bodies and our multiple selves in deeper ways.

We have come together on this day of the conference to move towards radical imaginings.  For something like that, I always turn to Black feminisms and go way back for inspiration, examples, and ways forward.  This time I found myself sitting with Combahee River Collective Statement as I have so many times in my life. What I am sitting with today is how current this statement feels for me, especially these words:

We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses… We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation…

A political contribution which we feel we have already made is the expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political… Even our Black women’s style of talking/testifying in Black language about what we have experienced has a resonance that is both cultural and political…

We exist as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle—because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world.

When I return to the Combahee River Collective Statement today, I do so as a writing teacher, as a community literacies practitioner, as a literacies/composition educator.   Almost 50 years later, the Collective’s words still galvanize, the ideas still ring true, the impact still remains the same for me.  50 years later! So I ask us here, as part of our radical imagining, as part of how we do our philosophies of writing and literacy in communities: what are your words/ collective manifesto/ call to political action that will embolden the most marginalized amongst us, not just today, but 50 years from now?  This means something very different from what schools and school literacies present to us: a way out through bourgeois middle class consumptions and assimilations.  That’s not a future— that’s just more of the same of what we already have.  Radical imaginations change the very purpose of literacies and writing— because you don’t look to the here and now; you charge yourself for wide-away and far-far-away futures with the conviction that the future is moldable.

This is especially critical for me right now because this moment asks us to shrink back and make smaller demands.  We see DEI programs being banned and cut.  And while we must fight these bans and cuts for what they represent, we have to remember we were always asking for more anyway.  Many of us were deeply enmeshed in challenging the neoliberalist, for-profit, white comfort work of DEI projects, quoting decades of criticism by Sara Ahmed practically from memory.  Now we are asking and fighting for the thing that never went far enough.  

After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, countless people saw that it was lucrative to present themselves as anti-racist” from schools to professional journals to Target advertisements to university think tanks.  White racist, heteropatriarchal backlash came soon and swift, like it always does, and those same folx hightailed it out, all after claiming abolition and the Black Radical Tradition, but won’t even say and think FREE PALESTINE right now or challenge their publishers who are honoring racist school districts’ book bans.

That’s not the future. That’s not our radical imagining.  And that’s not the kind of writing the Combahee River Collective did 50 years ago.  I’ll end here with the Collective’s words: “As Black feminists and Lesbians we know that we have a very definite revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of work and struggle before us.”  Let’s radically imagine 50 years from today, 50 years at least, of future-making against the world we have now.  Understanding the Combahee River Collective demands no less than that.

In solidarity,

Carmen

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 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.

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…