Mapping Racial Literacies

College Students Write about Race and Segregation

Sophie R. Bell

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781646421091
• eBook ISBN: 9781646421107
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Istruzione superiore

Early college classrooms provide essential opportunities for students to grapple and contend with the racial geographies that shape their lives. Based on a mixed methods study of students' writing in a first-year-writing course themed around racial identities and language varieties at St. John's University, Mapping Racial Literacies shows college student writing that directly confronts lived experiences of segregation—and, overwhelmingly, of resegregation.
 
This textual ethnography embeds early college students' writing in deep historical and theoretical contexts and looks for new ways that their writing contributes to and reshapes contemporary understandings of how US and global citizens are thinking about race. The book is a teaching narrative, tracing a teaching journey that considers student writing not only in the moments it is assigned but also in continual revisions of the course, making it a useful tool in helping college-age students see, explore, and articulate the role of race in determining their life experiences and opportunities.
 
Sophie Bell's work narrates the experiences of a white teacher making mistakes in teaching about race and moving forward through those mistakes, considering that process valuable and, in fact, necessary. Providing a model for future scholars on how to carve out a pedagogically responsive identity as a teacher, Mapping Racial Literacies contributes to the scholarship on race and writing pedagogy and encourages teachers of early college classes to bring these issues front and center on the page, in the classroom, and on campus.
 

Section 1

Mapping Racial Geographies

1

Mapping Whiteness

Hypersegregation, Colorblindness, and Counterstory from Brown v. Board to Michael Brown

DOI: 10.7330/9781646421107.c001

It is certainly ironic that while race relations in America have changed significantly since 1954, . . . our public schools increasingly reflect enrollment patterns reminiscent of the 1950s. In order for us to avoid further societal regression, the social implications of this enrollment pattern require our attention—for White students who are racially isolated in predominantly White schools; and for students of color who are trapped in segregated schools with limited resources.

Beverly Daniel Tatum, Can We Talk About Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation 15–16

This essay is an exercise in SEEING race. That can be very uncomfortable, especially since many of us were taught that NOT to see race was a way of “not being racist.” This essay asks you to take a different approach. Look at a space you know well, and look for race within that space. See what you notice. See what questions you have about what you see. See what you think. See how uncomfortable you are, but keep looking. The goal is the same as that of not seeing race—you are trying not to be racist! But the approach is different—instead of being colorBLIND and kinda hoping racism goes away because we refuse to see it, you are trying here to be colorAWARE and to name what is out there in an effort to understand it.

“Race and Space Essay” assignment, First Year Writing 1000c: Writing across Difference: Language, Race and Digital Composition

Coming from a predominantly white neighborhood and a very sheltered home, race was not a significant part of my everyday life. To me, people are people, and I never cared much about the color of somebody’s skin.

Kaitlin

The population is 99.9% white, then there’s us. Yup, you read that right. We are the only black family in the neighborhood. When I tell people that they say “Damn, you must live in a nice neighborhood.” Microaggression much?

Ashley

This chapter interrogates the potential of interracial writing exchanges to decrease racial isolation and increase students’ capacity to observe the personal and systemic impact of racism in their own and each other’s lives. The first half of the chapter introduces the historical, pedagogical, and rhetorical orientations that led me to ask students to write about race in their neighborhoods in late 2014. I lay out these orientations at length in order to share my process with other teachers who have embarked, or are considering embarking, on pedagogical projects such as mine. The second half of this chapter takes up student writing from my classes, first by surveying student responses, next by analyzing students’ rhetorical depictions of majority-white neighborhoods, and finally by unpacking a particular interracial writing exchange between two students who grew up in majority-white communities. Chapter 2 dives even deeper into another writing exchange among three students on the same subject, exploring the questions I raise in this chapter. Together, chapters 1 and 2 trace the ways students navigate within and against colorblindness—a racial ideology that erases and explains away the evidence of their lived experiences in hypersegregated white spaces. In doing so, I offer racial geography as a critical model for moving toward antiracist composition pedagogy.

At the heart of both chapters are textual ethnographies of student writing exchanges as they attempt to map their own racial geographies, particularly in white spaces. In this chapter, I situate these writing exchanges in three different ways: historically, in the larger context of housing and school resegregation since the Civil Rights Era and in the more immediate context of Michael Brown’s death; ideologically, in the context of colorblind racism, the salient racial ideology of the post–Civil Rights Era; and rhetorically, through readings of their work for elements of counterstory, a term adapted by compositionists—most notably Aja Martinez—from Critical Race Theory. While these historical and critical lenses lay the groundwork for and deeply inform my close readings of student writing exchanges, ultimately I do not use these readings to either fully critique or fully celebrate my students’ writing and thinking about race. Instead, these perspectives provide me with a framework for investigating what happens in their work.

My students’ lives to date have coincided with abandonment of widespread integration programs, and they thus grapple with the particular ideology that accompanies the evisceration of Civil Rights legislation—colorblindness. As a result, my pedagogical goal is to promote a culture of writing that values racial vision. In doing so, I am responding to sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s call for new qualitative methodologies for researching—and combatting—colorblind racism. At its most ambitious, this chapter looks at my writing class as an example of how writing, reading, and revising together might offer college students a map away from colorblind racism.

From Brown v. Board to Michael Brown: Developing a Context for Reading Narratives of Resegregation

Before introducing their work itself, I offer a speculative parallel between the writing and responding that took place in my classes during the fall semester 2014 and what happened in the nation during the months our class met, that is, the murder of Michael Brown in August and the nonindictment of police officer Darren Wilson for his murder in November. While I am happy to admit the stretch necessary for the parallel I am making between my students’ writing exchanges and what happened, and continues to happen, in our national community through Michael Brown’s story, there are some incontrovertible connections.

My students that semester were Michael Brown’s peers. They were first-year college students in the fall of 2014, which was intended to be Brown’s first semester of college. Like Brown, my students are almost all products of intensely segregated schools. These schools—his high school and most of theirs—went through a period of legally mandated integration that was on the wane by the late 1980s, and they have all graduated from secondary school during an era in which those schools have been resegregating.

The further parallels I draw between my students’ stories and Michael Brown’s are more speculative, but strategically useful. In both cases, color-aware narratives by people of color disrupted colorblind racism’s ideological function and offered new narratives of stark, present-day racial injustice. I claim that students’ race-aware narratives in my class, and their reception, made institutional racism more visible to students in the course. As in the national reception of Michael Brown’s story, this process of increased visibility was fraught, uneven, and uncertain. It by no means led to consensus on the meanings of their stories, or on race, or on unified action by students. However, I argue that like in the national conversation, what happened in the writing relationships among these students created crises in their worldviews that had the potential to impact their racial identity development and their rhetorical practices around race.

In a final connection, the events in Ferguson during the summer and fall of 2014 caused a sea change in student activism on our campus. As far as I am aware, there was little to no student activism at the university until the end of this particular semester. The first event I am aware of on campus took place that December, when the NAACP chapter led a die-in in December. By the following spring semester, several students came into my class having attended Black Lives Matter marches over winter break, and this set the stage for a much more robust activist culture on campus than I had seen in my previous five years teaching there, including a student-led march through campus for Freddie Gray that spring. In my classroom that fall, however, these issues were largely latent, unfolding under our feet. The growing campus conversation about systemic racism was not an explicit part of these particular students’ conversations, or my teaching, but it framed our exchanges.

As activists, journalists, and scholars uncover more about systemic racism in the institutions and daily lives of Michael Brown’s community, the state of acute racial segregation and inequity that characterizes life in Ferguson and St. Louis County has come to stand for the racial divides that characterize the nation at large. According to Jelani Cobb, the Black Lives Matter movement “exposed Ferguson as a case study of structural racism in America and a metaphor for all that had gone wrong since the end of the civil-rights movement.” While there are many aspects of Cobb’s claim to explore, I will focus on how Michael Brown’s story—like my students’ stories—offers a sightline into resegregation. St. Louis’s history of residential and educational segregation shines a light on that of the nation at large.

According to New York Times magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Few places better reflect the rise and fall of attempts to integrate US schools than St. Louis and its suburbs, [. . . since d]ecades of public and private housing discrimination made St. Louis one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the country.” Hannah-Jones connects Michael Brown’s life and death directly to resegregation:

Since Aug. 9, the day Michael Brown’s lifeless body lay for hours under a hot summer sun, St. Louis County has become synonymous with the country’s racial fault lines when it comes to police conduct and the criminalization of black youth. But most black youth will not die at the hands of police. . . . They will face the future that Brown would have faced if he had lived. That is, to have the outcome of their lives deeply circumscribed by what they learn and experience in their segregated, inferior schools.

The extreme inequity and segregation that Michael Brown endured in Ferguson and its neighboring communities exist despite the fact that greater St. Louis pioneered one of the largest, most expensive, and most controversial school integration programs in the nation between 1983 and 1999. In uncovering this history and a contemporary struggle over integration in the high school from which Michael Brown graduated, Hannah-Jones points out that Michael Brown’s mother, Lezley McSpadden, was one of the children bussed out of a majority-Black school district to attend elementary and secondary school in a neighboring majority-white school district through this mandatory integration program. In fact, Hannah-Jones quotes McSpadden, in the first hours after her son’s death, describing her struggle against educational injustice in his life. “‘Do you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate?’ she implored. ‘Not many.’”

Hannah-Jones’s reporting reveals that St. Louis’s integration and resegregation really does show us an extreme version of the nation’s post-Brown history. In order to avoid implementing Brown in St. Louis, white families fled to suburbs to start their own “de facto” segregated schools. Families of color were excluded from this large-scale relocation by racist housing policies such as redlining and restrictive covenants. When the racial disparities between St. Louis’s schools and its suburbs became so pronounced that they faced lawsuits in the 1980s, a large-scale program to bus 15,000 St. Louis students to suburban schools took effect. This highly controversial, extremely effective program ended up costing $1.5 billion and was under constant fire from state officials such as John Ashcroft and Jay Nixon. In 1999, the plan was made voluntary, reducing the number of students it served by two-thirds, and enabling suburban districts to opt out. St. Louis’s story of desegregation and resegregation is a particularly stark example of Brown’s betrayal.

So while McSpadden was able to attend school herself in a wealthy suburb of St. Louis, her son attended multiple underresourced schools in the majority-Black communities where he was raised. In fact, he graduated from a high school that lost its state accreditation, triggering new integration efforts that led to as much resistance from white parents as St Louis’s 1970s integration efforts. The curious feature of these twenty-first-century white parents’ objections, as Hannah-Jones reports, is their insistence that the issue is not race and that anyone who says race is a factor is themselves racist. Such colorblind disavowals would not have occurred to a white parent in the 1970s.

This backsliding away from Civil Rights in which Michael Brown’s educational opportunities in 2014 were actually more constricted than his mother’s two decades earlier, combined with the attitudes of white parents who fought against having students from his high school bussed to their majority-white district in 2014, demonstrates the perilous state of racial inequality under resegregation, and the extent to which this injustice is invisible to most Americans.

According to Tatum, “As a culture, we celebrate the symbolic importance of the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, without fully acknowledging the reality of K-12 public school resegregation” (Can We Talk about Race 12). Born in 1954 along with court-ordered desegregation in Brown v. Board, Tatum calls herself “an integration baby,” one who came of age when formerly all-white institutions of secondary and higher education were opening their doors to Black students for the first time (1). Whereas the state of Florida paid for her father to leave the South to pursue a PhD, rather than admit him to a segregated state university, she was part of a wave of young people of color admitted to formerly all- or almost-all-white colleges and universities. She also points to the legal history that has immediately followed Brown’s passage and endured until today, in which integration has been delayed, diminished, and derailed in courts and communities around the country. In his 2004 book, After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of Desegregation, Charles Clotfelter cites four factors that “frustrated, and ultimately blunted . . . the execution of the policy of desegregation.” These were the “apparent white aversion to interracial contact, the multiplicity of means by which whites could sidestep the effects of the policy, the willingness of state and local governments to accommodate white resistance, and the faltering resolve of the prime movers of the policy” (8). This is a grim counternarrative to the racial progress narrative that relies on an invocation of Civil Rights victories of the 1960s to mute allegations of systemic racism in the present.

Tatum speculates about what it means to live in an era of resegregation, in which “our public schools increasingly reflect enrollment patterns reminiscent of the 1950s” (Can We Talk about Race 16). She writes, “One possible outcome [of continuing residential segregation and increasing school resegregation] is that while interracial contact and more-tolerant racial attitudes increased during the last half of the twentieth century, the same may not be true in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, particularly in our public schools” (13–14). Given this context, she warns that “the social implications of this enrollment pattern require our attention—for White students who are racially isolated in predominantly White schools; and for students of color who are trapped in segregated schools with limited resources” (16). Tatum promotes an agenda for helping students transcend these legacies by (1) supporting white teachers to build their capacity to educate and support students of color; (2) forming significant interracial connections; (3) developing positive, aware racial identities for people of all racial backgrounds; (4) building leadership opportunities and communities for young people of all races to fight against the increasing racial isolation and inequities of their lives.

This chapter charts my attempt to respond to these calls from Tatum. The historical context of resegregation that restricted and contorted Michael Brown’s educational chances is the same one that determines my students’ educational experiences and futures. The highly uneven amounts of access and resources that they bring to college themselves are in large part the result of their resegregated schools and communities. No matter how invisible the histories behind their schooling, that history is there, in their grandparents’ “integration baby” generation, in their parents’ generation at the tail end of integration, and their own era of resegregation. My students’ attitudes toward race—in particular, their abilities to counter colorblind ideology by analyzing the segregated realities of their daily lives—thus matter very deeply. Despite the apparent intransigence of colorblind legislation and ideology, my students are part of a generation being led by activists of color to take a systemic look at racism after years of “postracial” discourse. Of course, my students, like all young people in their generation, have the option to ignore systemic racism. There are certainly daily encouragements for them to do so. I try to use my time with them to stack the deck in the direction of a color-aware approach to the racial injustices that face their generation.

Resegregation and Rhetoric: Theorizing Colorblindness and Counterstory in Composition Studies

Engaging with my student’s attempts to use writing to make sense of this historical context in their daily lives means engaging with the ideology of colorblind racism—a salient means of denying the present-day acceleration of racial inequality and separation. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes colorblind racism as “a seemingly nonracial way of stating . . . racial views without appearin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Groundings: Racial Literacy and Racial Geographies
• Section 1: Mapping Racial Geographies
• Section 2: Mapping Linguistic Geographies
• Section 3: Mapping Futures
• Appendix
• Notes
• Works Cited
• About the Author
• Index