It seems that for many corners of the American university, antiracist decolonial teaching and writing were merely a trend, especially in 2020 during the protests against the murder of George Floyd during the pandemic. That moment’s commitment to racial justice was tragically short-lived, leaving especially the white American political consciousness faster than it arrived. We have now witnessed so much backtracking on supposed anti-racist commitments that overall comfort, speed, and ease towards a default of whiteness should seem suspicious at this point, especially in light of the multiple historical moments where a severe and regressive Post-Reconstruction backlash immediately followed Black Freedom Movements. For some of us, the fight against white settler colonization and anti-black racism was never about trend-chasing or public performance and we have a long line of ancestors that we draw from to situate ourselves culturally, intellectually, and politically in that kind of elsewhere. That’s what makes this issue of the journal, especially right now, all the more special. So thank you for not stepping back or piping down.

My piece is called “In Honor of the Earthworm: Pockets of Air for ‘Decolonial Riders’ and Activist Literacies in White Settler Writing Programs and English Departments.” I begin this piece with an embarrassing confession: once upon a time, I often referred to compositionists, writing teachers, and rhetoric scholars as WORMS. Yes, worms. I probably even said it right to people’s faces. Just spineless, no backbone, just a buncha folx who stand for nothing and stand up for even less… just worms squirming along. I am still as disgusted with the lack of political courage, structural analysis, activist organizing skill, and ideological awareness in the discipline, but I no longer complement such folx by calling them earthworms. That language represented an ableist standpoint framed by a total lack of eco-consciousness. As I explain in my piece, I am a gardener and I take great care of the earthworms who cross my path now because they redistribute all kinds of organic matter as they open pockets of air for everything. They decompose and aerate everything in their pursuits of original pathways that, in turn, help everything that they touch. We would be blessed to be rhetoric-compositionists like that. Our discipline would be transformed and our universities seriously challenged if we all behaved like earthworms. Instead, I turn to students, “decolonial riders,” and the “pockets of air” that they create. So my JBW is all about a young Black woman who I call Haven.

A center of gravity in my thinking these days involves really taking stock of the enormous lifting that Black students do to design a deep Black intellectual life on campuses and in departments and writing programs that block and/or criminalize that kind of emotional and scholarly labor. I don’t offer the usual thick description of students, writing, pedagogy, and classrooms that academic research asks of us though. That feels more and more like an anthropological and exploitative othering at a time when American universities have spent the last years shutting out even more Brown and Black students than before, whether it’s PWI or MSI.  If your praxis isn’t blazing open critical spaces for Brown and Black students, you shouldn’t be gazing scholarship on them either. So I turn my thick description onto the whiteness of university spaces where I meet students and place my gaze there and let me tell you, when it comes to anti-blackness and racism, the data is plentiful!  When you juxtapose the intense Black sociality that Black students pursue in the context of the violence surrounding their education and every institution they must navigate, you really see the enormity of their literate, rhetorical, and political imaginations. That a student like Haven could graduate from an American university that critical, that consciousness-devoted, that-feminist/womanist-confident, and that aesthetically-emboldened, all rooted in Blackness, is, as my grandmother would say, mo’ than just a notion. That is the story that helps me think beyond the discipline’s suffocating political inertia and whiteness. Those students are the “pockets of air”… and the like-minded colleagues (like in this journal issue) who move in different pathways.

Editors’ Column, Chy Sprauve, Anna Zeemont, Conor Tomás Reed, and Sean Molloy

In Honor of the Earthworm: Pockets of Air for “Decolonial Riders” and Activist Literacies in White Settler Writing Programs and English Departments, Carmen Kynard

Antiracist Rhetorical Praxis in the 1960s-70s Tech News/The Paper at the City College of New York, Conor Tomás Reed, Anna Zeemont, and Sean Molloy

Oil/School: Land and Affiliation in the Age of Fossil Ed, Daisy Atterbury

Community Notes, CUNY & the Bronx County Historical Society Archives, Vani Kannan and Steven Payne

Activating Legacies of Freedom to Transform Economies of Prestige in Academia and Ourselves, Javiela Evangelista