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!

The Specter of White Mob Violence and the Spectacle of Black Suffering (My Thoughts on Capitol Violence, Delivered at Texas Woman’s University)

Thank you, Dr. Fehler, for inviting me here and thank you, Dean Tilton, and Dr. van Erve, for your introductions.  I also thank all of the Texas Woman’s University community for being with us this evening.

I acknowledge and honor the Wichita and the very land where I now reside as a newcomer to Fort Worth, Texas. The Wichita call on us to be better stewards of the land; I also hear that call as one that compels me to recognize my unique role as a descendant of enslaved Africans to disentangle white settler colonization from my imaginations and life-purposes.

I start by letting you know that I’m going to read my comments this evening. I have posted these comments on my blog for better accessibility. Parts of this text are also weblinked here if you want a closer look at the sources and events I discuss.

While there is much for us to think through and problematize about the white supremacy that we witnessed in the violence at the Capitol this past January, I want to focus here on the ways that white mob violence is a LONG-STANDING central praxis of white supremacy and is always anti-Black and anti-Semitic.  These are always co-functioning this way so it should “make sense” to us that the Capitol rioters costumed themselves in things like Camp Auschwitz garb and nooses, both of which are the most iconic symbols of the mass murder and violence against Black and Jewish peoples.

And while there was considerable conversation about the differences in the responses to white mob violence and Black peaceful protest, that is just part of the story. White mob violence is specter— and I say specter in the sense that it is truly a kind of reoccurring haunting.  It is often represented as a kind of merely unfortunate, albeit awful, historical event, so that overall white innocence can be maintained.  If you were shocked by what you saw at the Capitol, it means that you have ignored the historical record or have been lulled into thinking these were bygone days by dogma that presents whiteness as innocent.  Meanwhile, Black suffering is spectacle— the thing we are used to seeing as if it is just another segment on the nightly news (which most times, it is). [These circulations of white supremacy are so much more than merely a set of hypocrisies in relation to the over-policing, surveillance, and militaristic responses to Black protest.] 

To get at some of what I mean, I want to look at Bruno Cua today and then step back and look at one specific historical incident of mass violence and voting, namely the 1920 Ocoee Massacre in Florida.  

Though it is just one of many examples, I want to highlight the current case of the 18-year-old Capitol rioter Bruno Cua from Metro Atlanta Georgia. His parents are still pleading with a judge to release him from custody while he awaits trial; they are simply embarrassed that they believed what Trump was telling them about voter fraud.  That is literally the defense—that they are deserving of mercy and forgiveness because Bruno was naïve and they are all now embarrassed.  I’ll come back to this point about shame and embarrassment so just keep that part in mind.

The stories seem to all point to these events: Bruno’s parents took him to D.C. for the rally where Bruno stormed his way inside and shoved a police officer out of his way to get into the Senate chamber.  Bruno described clearly in social media posts what would happen on January 6.  After leaving the capitol, he posted again the next day on January 7, even boasting that the tree of liberty was thirsty for the “blood of tyrants,” namely those people he had singled out at the Capitol, and that he would not give a warning shot the next time around. The next day, on January 8, he was still posting, this time proclaiming that everyone in Congress deserved a public execution.

Bruno is amongst the youngest to have charges brought against him, if not the youngest.  It should go without saying here that every young Black man in America is profiled, harassed, imprisoned, and murdered with impunity for so much less than Bruno’s offenses. And while I don’t believe that the cage and shackle system of our criminal justice system is helpful in the service of justice, it will remain interesting to see just how innocent, forgivable, and deserving of mercy Bruno becomes. 

It is particularly interesting to see how Bruno is depicted as an isolated, naïve white teenager when the fact of the matter is that Bruno is from the Metro Atlanta area, a central Black, critical hub that overturned the white Republican face of Georgia’s politics with record Black voter turn-out in favor of a Democrat president and vice-president, a woman of color to boot, and the first Black and Jewish senators, all organized by Black women activists.  Bruno was not naïve and simple; he was deliberately acting from a place of whiteness that insisted did not need to believe or accept Black agency.  

In fact, this entire election was decided, in large part, by Black voters and Black women organizers in major cities like Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta.  The white rallying cry that depicted Black voters and Black cities and towns as thieves who had stolen American Democracy has been the same rallying cry for white supremacists since Reconstruction, including in these very same cities.[ I remind us here of the Black activist, Octavius Catto, who was killed on his way to vote in 1871 in Philadelphia; his murderer was never charged and the violent rampage against the Black vote and voice there were, in fact, aided by police.]  If you were shocked by what you saw at the Capitol, it might mean that you have ignored the historical record or have been lulled into thinking it was all just an unfortunate historical accident within the terms of a master narrative that presents whiteness, as a whole, as innocent. 

I also want us to remember the Ocoee Massacre in Florida in November 1920 which remains the largest election-related massacre. [There are, of course, multiple examples of this in relation to voting but sometimes just for living like this and this.]

The entire Black community of Ocoee was forced to flee the town when a prosperous Black farmer, Mose Norman, organized Black people to vote and went to vote himself in the national election in January of 1920.  When civil rights organizations called on Congress to investigate the massacre, they refused. The FBI also refused to act.  The leader of the white mob became the mayor.  After forcing all of the Black residents to leave town, these white insurrectionists stole the properties from this Black community which are collectively evaluated at ten million dollars today. There have been no reparations to these families.

In this 1920 white mob violence, white supremacists massacred what we think might be at least 50 Black people for voting, just 35 miles south of where Trayvon Martin was murdered making white men’s unpunished behavior merely the specter of Zimmerman’s (also judiciously-sanctioned) murder of Trayvon Martin.

I point out here that the insurrectionists at Ocoee celebrated their victory as has steadily been the culture of white mob violence, especially in relation to lynch law.  My connection to lynching if both literal and historical here since the insurrectionists erected a gallows to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence; lynchings were also a prime tool to block the Black vote and white people who deliberately intervened were threatened with death too.

We need to remember that lynching of Black Americans functioned as more than mere execution.  These were forms of entertainment, like the circus had just come to town. These were often large, festive events where white mobs often even erected stages with theater-styled seating. There were exciting advertisements beforehand; photos and postcards were sent to family and friends.  You’d be hard-pressed to find images of white lynch mob members looking ashamed or embarrassed about what they were doing: they are posing for the camera, often in special pre-planned attire, as whole family units.  They took trophies to commemorate what they stole on these “great days” and “wonderful evenings” (these could include chopped off body parts like breasts and phalluses).  These were, in sum, open and very public celebrations and were called acts of JUSTICE. We have to ask ourselves here: why was it so easy, almost automated, for the rioters at the capitol to look, sound, and act so much like a typical lynch mob from a century past?  It is telling here that for Bruno’s parents, and maybe even for much of America and the criminal justice system, their expression of regret and embarrassment, even when inauthentic, is treated as an extraordinary feat since it would be the one cultural practice different from the lynch mobs of 100 years ago. 

If we go back to the massacre at Ocoee in 1920, we see that these were white folx who had lived next to Black folx as neighbors for 30 years, but that didn’t stop them from brutalizing and stealing Black folx’s votes and homes.  So, as a way to wrap up here, I want to return to the fact that Bruno grew up in Atlanta and yet his defense, the commentary from seemingly everyone around him, and much of the public rhetoric right now, is that he had just never known anyone or anything else. BUT…..He. Lives. In. Atlanta…..  Metro Atlanta.  That’s a little over 6 million people and yet the salience of the deeply depressed, easily manipulated, rural white male loner is such a chronic trope of white supremacy that it can be called up anytime and anywhere to convey white innocence. If you listen to these accounts about Bruno’s isolation, you would think I am just acting like the little boy in that 1999 movie, The 6th Sense, that stars Bruce Willis as a child psychologist to a child patient (Haley Joel Osment) who can talk to the dead.  The child is absolutely bewildered by his ghostly talents and so whispers to the psychologist: I SEE DEAD PEOPLE. In my new 2021 version of the movie, I am the main child character who sees Black people in a sixth sense, like a great secret, where I have to walk around whispering “I see Black people”** because no one can see us, like Metro Atlanta ain’t even right there.  Though I might be making arguably an inappropriate joke here, it really is this absurd to me to act like Bruno didn’t understand the world around him and wasn’t acting within the terms of a white racist response to the political successes of a VERY Black Atlanta!  If we center Bruno as a misguided loner, we are in fact merely re-committing what we saw in 1920 Ocoee: no serious investigation, no commitment to act against white violence, an outpouring of forgiveness and understanding, open pathways to future success for leading agitators, and no acknowledgement of Black suffering. 

These new circulations of white supremacy at the Capitol this January will set off new legacies.  Our responses to this moment will put cultural practices in place that activists fifty years and one hundred years from now will have to agitate to undo, like we are doing now… about the 100 years before us… unless we seriously address AND REDRESS the spectacle of Black suffering that is so commonplace to us now as the specter of white supremacist mob violences continually haunts.

**PLEASE NOTE: Secretive whispers of “I see Black people” are something that I learned from Todd Craig in places like 4Cs, the writing center where we once worked, and all other kinds of academic spaces. This is his line, not mine, and so I give FULL CREDIT.

How Institutional Racism Trained Me to Be a Doomsday Prepper

I have never watched a full episode of one of those reality shows featuring doomsday preppers, the over-the-top survivalists who prepare for the end of civilization, nuclear invasion, or natural catastrophe.  I am however very familiar with preparing for the inevitable racial targeting that comes with being a woman of color working in educational institutions.

Many people at universities today are thinking critically about the safety of racially marginalized groups on campus and the threats to teaching politically-charged content in this post-election moment.  I don’t mean to suggest here that this critical care and thought are widespread though.  There are just as many places that move forward— business as usual— with their love affairs with classic Europe, administrivia, departmental parties, and neoliberalist regimes of outcomes assessment.  Academics doing the work of questioning and thinking through where we are today, those who commit to pedagogy as something more rigorous than an anemic list of suggestions about teaching tolerance, are a rare gem. It seems to me though that institutional racism has long prepared us for the coming doomsdays on university campuses.  The very campus protests related to #BlackLivesMatter showed us students who challenged their administrations to deal with the racism they were facing and not simply dismiss campus-wide white supremacy under the auspices of (for-whites-only) “free speech”?  The very history of Black college student protest, dating back to the 1920s, connected off-campus racism with the treatment Black students face on campus.   As an undergraduate in 1989, I never walked alone on campus, especially at night, not simply because I was a woman, but a Black woman.  As women, we know we are always the potential victims of sexual assault, but as a Black woman, you also know that no one will care or notice when that happens.  Black men on campus certainly weren’t any safer; Black masculinity does not offer that.  They didn’t travel alone either for fear of the campus police who had no ability to see their bodies as part of the student population.  Doomsday was always here.

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When White Violence Is “The Canon”

Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta Lacks

In preparation for a group discussion about critical research methodologies in gender studies, I went back and looked at hours of footage from Rebecca Skloots, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as well as other research about race, Black women, and medicine/science.  I had been particularly inspired by Karla Holloway’s ability to relentlessly give Skloots DA BIZ’NESS for constructing a research study for mainstream audiences that, in fact, re-enacts violence against the Lacks family, a Black family who for the most part still live in abject poverty.  Henrietta Lacks, known by the medical/science industry as HeLa, was a poor Black tobacco farmer whose cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951 for developing what we now know to be the vaccine for polio and the central tools for cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more.  Her cells have made billions of dollars but her family, then and now, do not even have health insurance.  Meanwhile Skloots enjoys the big dollars from Olympic-styled endorsements, media showings, and a New York Times bestseller.  Despite her economic wealth, I wouldn’t ever want to be Skloots given the criticism, rightly deserved, that she has endured by formidable critics who link the central fetishization, exoticism, violence, and exploitation of her research/methodology to the kind of minstrel show we get on Bravo television when Black women’s bodies are the subject.  Whew, so glad I ain’t Skloots! I wouldn’t even be able to wake up in the morning with a morsel of self-respect.

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