Composition and Rhetoric discussion

August 1st. Time to start our conversation about Vershawn Ashanti Young's book. Feel free to post quotations that are interesting, questions that strike you, or maybe even notes from your reading; main point: your post doesn't have to be a long critical essay.

My book hasn't arrived through inter-library loan yet, but it should be here any day. Happy reading!

From the introduction:

"Literacy habits, like reading novels of a certain kind and speaking what might appear to be standard English, have always made me seem more queer, more white identified, and more middle class than I am. When I fail to meet the class, gender, and racial notions that others ascribe to me, I'm punished. In some ways, living in a mostly white town and being an assistant professor at a Big Ten school heightens--not lessens, as I had hoped--the conflict that stems from the sometimes converging, but oftentimes diverging, racial and gender expectations that are held out for black men and that we hold for each other" (xv).

Mike wrote: "This is a helpful passage for me thinking about my own experience with literacy and serves as a reminder of how my own positions of privilege have continuously aligned with my literacy habits.

I have found just the opposite. There are expectations of privilege of me that I just have never had. That is often a struggle against the prevailing notion of what a professor/instructor is and how it creates my ethos in a classroom.

Right now I'm really, really digging this book (yeah....that's about as profound as I'm going to get at 10:32pm on a Friday night when the Pirates are losing).

I'm reminded of my privilege(s) in the first chapter where Young takes his niece and nephew to a swank restaurant and sees "the white girl with hair dyed a color none of us can name, with piercings through her eyelids, ears, and lips" (20). Young had just been "encouraging [his niece and nephew] not to tattoo their bodies and to stop wearing those hip-hop pants that hang halfway down the ass and those skin-tight dresses" (20), but they see her at the restaurant and Young hopes that they don't ask him "Why must we change?"

I also identify with Young's dual, conflicted, social class consciousness. When he goes home, he's "careful to wear jeans and a sweatshirt. That's when I'm the see-I'm-not-better-than-you cousin and nephew coming to some party that my cousin is throwing" (20). I fall into this trap often. Just this summer, I went back to my small hometown to visit old friends and caught myself trying very hard to not dress up, trying hard to dress in a way that communicated that I was still the same old John.

In the classroom I find myself playing with this idea a lot, fluctuating wildly between suit&tie and jeans &Iron Maiden t-shirt then khakis & polo. I guess it helps me talk with them about ethos, but that's not why I do it. Maybe I'm worried about authenticity so I'm trying to show multiple sides of my teacherly self to them. That might be looking too much into it. Feeling comfortable to move between these different looks is, of course, a very privileged position (to come full circle back to my first paragraph).

In the opening of Chapter 2, Young offers a smart critique of Chris Rock's popular stand up routine. See it here:

Chris Rock (note: link doesn't automatically open in a new tab)

"Rock thus reproduces for himself what I call the burden of racial performance, the demand to prove what type of black person you are. It's a burden all blacks bear, and it is the core of the problem of black racial authenticity. It is the modern variant, I argue, of racial passing" (37).

Not really code-meshing...but I found it to be interesting. It at least speaks against conservative critics who suggest meshing will somehow take away from learning SAE or WVE.


http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/de...

In a different light, I guess the fact that the above story is so "unbelievable" that it's considered newsworthy tells us a lot about where we're at.

"Since BEV ain't goin' nowhere, it only makes sense that we should allow students to combine it with the discourse we're required to teach, a strategy that I call code meshing. Accepting code meshing would mean abandoning the Ebonics approach or, rahter, what should be called the Ebonics concession, where students are either instructed in BEV and then required to translate it into standard English or are given a choice of using vernacular in creative assignments but not in formal papers. I promote a thorough, seamless mixture of BEV and WEV that leads to more natural, less artificial, well-expressed prose. The benefits of code meshing extend beyond producing better papers. I believe it will help teachers avoid imposing the harmful effects of American racialization on students, which happens when we view their linguistic habits as subliterate, fundamentally incompatible with what's considered standard" (105-106).

From Chapter 5 "Casualties of Literacy" (when I've used this chapter in a basic writing classroom, students overwhelmingly agreed with Diane, and I continued to bring them back to Young's response)

"I denounce Diane's belief [code-switching; teaching WEV only in schools] because it surrenders to prejudice. She doesn't deny that prejudice exists, but she wants students to dodge its consequences by not using BEV. Further, she is satisfied with a financial solution. As I see it, the problem of language prejudice is primarily an ethical issue. Economic consequences are certainly at stake. But our current class structure is established on a set of racist beliefs that need to be exposed and changed. This is why I don't believe that the black masses should do what a few so-called success have been able to do. I believe the few are exceptions, which doesn't necessarily mean they're exceptional. How the masses are treated, their fate, paints the real picture. Dealing with the circumstances that prevent their success, rather than trying to package mine, is the real task we should take up" (108-109).

I was reading this article today - thought it helped to complicate our earlier discussions of privilege:

http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/0...

"These rituals [stating one's privilege] often substituted confession for political movement-building. And despite the cultural capital that was, at least temporarily, bestowed to those who seemed to be the most oppressed, these rituals ultimately reinstantiated the white majority subject as the subject capable of self-reflexivity and the colonized/racialized subject as the occasion for self-reflexivity"

A few questions:

Does anyone have any experience encouraging "code-meshing" (as opposed to code-switching) in their writing classrooms? What was your experience like? Do you call code-meshing something else --like, for instance, a "translingual approach"? (see Horner, Lu, Royster, and Trimbur's "Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach)

I'm glad you pointed that out. In that section Young challenged me to rethink my previous readings of Bloom's essay. That quotation he pulls from Bloom reminds me of a class I was in as a young college student called Alternative Traditions in American Literature -- where "alternative" was code for not white. As awful as the title sounds, I'm actually grateful for the class; I read some really amazing stuff--perhaps its a moment where the course material was able to transcend, even if only by a little, the awkward label. I bet the professor didn't like the course title either, but it was probably listed that way in the books forever and oftentimes changing something like that is a bureaucratic nightmare. Of course this highlights how these distinctions we've been discussing are deeply institutional and, well, traditional, but that they go unchallenged for little, seemingly insignificant reasons. It makes me think that the little things, the everyday work of even altering a problematic title in the university catalogue, can have powerful effects. But I digress...

....which, I should add, doesn't mean that these so-called "everyday" moments are a substitute for activist work either.