Since the early dawn (and, maybe, well before then), I have been revising an article about assessment that focuses on racially subordinated students of color.  My original version was only partially received (if that) and so I was offered pages of suggestions for revision and re-submission of the piece.  Though many of the suggestions were problematic, the revisions that really moved me rested on me going back to reread what I had learned from Baba Asa as a high school teacher and, for that, I am grateful and newly inspired.  That inspiration was probably what prompted me to write the letter that I did to the editor.

I took the suggestions offered to me by one reviewer and incorporated those that matched my politics and, well, discarded all of the rest, offering the editor an explanation for why.  I am indebted to Jaime Mejía for challenging me to articulate to editors how and why my political perspectives diverge before I simply write white folk off and then go and submit my work to journals that have an anti-racism platform.   Jaime seems to believe in my voice and ideas and wants me to inject that everywhere.  Regardless of what happens with this journal, I do feel good about following Jaime’s advice and stating my piece/peace.  As stank as this might be, I am going to share that letter to the editor openly here (without, of course, naming the journal— I ain’t that stank) and list the Hilliard texts that have carried me through the morning and afternoon today.

So here is my letter….hopefully, this letter will make sense though the article that it references is not part of this post.  In writing this letter, like I said, I really see what it means to have behind the-scenes conversations that force in our perspectives.  Here is my first attempt at doing so (I removed the list at the end of the revision letter that details the line changes I made):

Dear _____ (name removed),

Thank you for this thoughtful review.  It was very helpful in re-framing my thinking.  Some of the points I agreed with, some of them I found quite divergent of my own politics and experiences with race, education and language (and most radical educators of color, for that matter).  I thought I would re-submit my revised text, though it may not be what you are looking for, before I submitted the piece elsewhere.  Here are my responses:

I certainly believe the issues of Black English and code-meshing are absolutely critical and central to my own work.  However, those issues are not the focus of this text.  I removed many sentences from my text that deploy Black English such as: …they ain’t kids no more; …the principal and her cronies were not down; I removed the words fool-ass and fool-ass mess (though this is arguably not a central feature of Black English; instead, I refer to the individual in question as a white woman to make my claims of racism sharper and less politically polite than simply calling her a fool since she was more than just that).  I left a few Black English phrases in my text like: “those ain’t my people or my allies.”  I want the weight of belonging to an alternative teaching tradition than what white, bourgeois culture offers to carry the moment and so I allow my language to do that in the hopes that there will be readers outside of the white bourgeoisie who will also connect to me and that tradition.  I include this point in a footnote.

More to the point maybe is that a few sentences that minimally deploy Black English can’t really qualify this as a text that fully deploys the code-meshing that Young and Canagarajah are theorizing or the practices of translingualism or cross-language relations that Horner and Lu advocate.  While these theories as they relate to assessment are vital, my essay certainly cannot be the standard for that kind of writing— it’s just not good enough to be that kind of writing.  I am concerned here because if my writing seems to enact code-meshing, then we have so far to go in dismantling Anglo-English linguistic imperialism that the horizon is nowhere in sight.  I am also really clear here that a real understanding of what “Black English” is (terminology which no one hardly even uses anymore) is critically missing from this reviewer’s discussion.  I also find it a bit colonial to ask for a rationale for using my “code-meshing” as if any one register can carry the narratives of people of color— THAT’S MY POINT. If I have to say it, this is not the audience who should be teaching people of color in the 21^st century! PERIOD!  This seems to privilege white readers— who do we assume needs this meta-overview of one’s language use? Are your white or standard authors required to offer a meta-narrative of their language use?  I certainly haven’t noticed this in your journal.

It is only a few instances of mainly vocabulary that can be called “Black English” in my text. Because the few markers that I did use were so noticeable as to warrant such attention (a page-long discussion by the reviewer), I have removed those vocabulary words for the sake of clarity.   I, however, did not remove my subject-driven racial analyses as a person of color in a white university system that has had little success in retaining racially subjugated communities— students or teachers. This means that many readers might regard my narrative style as an African Americanized one but that is not an argument anyone should make since it could not possibly result in anything other than claims of essentialism: there is no one, quintessential African American style, quite obviously.   I also did not belabor the opening narrative more than a few, added paragraphs for clarity— readers will simply need to do some extra work here and not expect to be spoon-fed simply because I use narrative in spaces that do not value it as an academic form.

For my own part, in terms of research on code-meshing, I simply don’t have a dog in that race. Because I am referencing work that I did in the early 90s as part of a progressive school reform movement, it obviously wasn’t theories related to code-meshing that shaped what we did in those CES schools (this should be clear in the ways that I included discussions about Baba Asa Hilliard).  In terms of my “blended/bended” writing style, I root that in my work as a black feminist teacher and researcher— also work I have done since I first read Patricia Hill Collins in the 90s.  I think it is up to the scholars who focus on work in code-meshing to show how what they are doing is new in terms of critical literacy, anti-racist pedagogy, and culturally valid assessment.  Like I said, I don’t have a dog in that race (I haven’t needed to) and the work that I have been doing isn’t rooted in code-meshing paradigms.  All of this really points to my larger argument: namely that we have no real or progressive connection to educators of color who have offered dynamic classrooms to students of color for decades now without needing the rather esoteric conversations that mostly white compositionists imagine to be central. Frankly, I found the revision requests related to code-meshing to be incredibly reductive and wholly problematic in ways that will require me to write a whole other article.

I was inspired by the reviewer’s reminder that I see assessment as a practice that can maintain literacy as white property.  I think this is brilliant.  However, I did not explicitly examine that here because of space restraints (I never used those words).  To fully engage that concept means that I would have to go back to early canonical works in CRT (critical race theory), particularly Cheryl Harris’s work, otherwise I would run the risk of merely co-opting CRT tropes.  I didn’t want to do that and couldn’t find a way or space to incorporate whiteness as property here.  That kind of work merely makes CRT a commodity vs. the theoretical force and social justice foundation that it is. You simply cannot reference whiteness as property outside of or without CRT.  This should actually be standard policy for this journal and all others!

Based on the reviewers’ request to address literacy as a white property and issues of code-meshing, I did, however, insert what I think is critical information about Nateca’s expression “well, if you was listenin” to the white woman in the audience who questioned all of the students’ competence. I treat Nateca’s language as African American rhetoric, however, a crucial issue for what really interests me with writing assessment— the erasure of ethnic rhetorical competency.  Here is what I said about Nateca:

I offer this narrative about Nateca because it shows how this assessment landscape offered the possibility for African American rhetoric (signifyin, tonal semantics, directness, call-and-response, verbal markers of African American Language) to critique and shift the political discourse of that space while simultaneously garnering the very animated support of a large, working class community of color (this room was filled with at least 70 bodies).  In sum, Nateca shifted the gaze of assessment from white to black.

That should clarify my point as succinctly as I can make it.

And with that… I submitted the letter, uploaded the new, revised essay, and decided upon a next journal where I will submit this piece once the editor makes her final decision (I assume she will not budge from the reviewer’s suggestions and I will, indeed, look elsewhere for a publication venue)!