Writing Centers and the New Racism

A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change

Laura Greenfield,Karen Rowan

• Éditeur: Utah State University Press
• Année: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780874218626
• Sujet: Languages & Linguistics
• Sous-sujet: Linguistics

Noting a lack of sustained and productive dialogue about race in university writing center scholarship, the editors of this volume have created a rich resource for writing center tutors, administrators, and scholars. Motivated by a scholarly interest in race and whiteness studies, and by an ethical commitment to anti-racism work, contributors address a series of related questions: How does institutionalized racism in American education shape the culture of literacy and language education in the writing center? How does racism operate in the discourses of writing center scholarship/lore, and how may writing centers be unwittingly complicit in racist practices? How can they meaningfully operationalize anti-racist work? How do they persevere through the difficulty and messiness of negotiating race and racism in their daily practice? The conscientious, nuanced attention to race in this volume is meant to model what it means to be bold in engagement with these hard questions and to spur the kind of sustained, productive, multi-vocal, and challenging dialogue that, with a few significant exceptions, has been absent from the field.

ONE

Foundational Theories on Racism, Rhetoric, Language, and Pedagogy

1

THE RHETORICS OF RACISM

A Historical Sketch

Victor Villanueva

I want to make a convoluted claim. The claim is that though there has always been a distinction that contemporary eyes might view as racism, racism is relatively new. There have always been ways of distinguishing the usses from the thems and of ranking the usses as superior to the thems, but racism in the ways we tend to think of the concept hasn’t always been the means whereby that discrimination has been made. A claim I don’t wish to make is that there has been some evolution or devolution that has led to racism. Whereas George Frederickson sees something of a circle—a bigotry that begins as theological, develops into the biological, and returns to the theological in contemporary times—I will argue that the matter is more like Antonio Gramsci’s sedimentations, that elements from prior historic blocs are never quite lost. I argue that the first distinctions were rhetorical, even prior to the theological, and that today’s racism, though very clearly having material, economic effects, is again more steeped in the rhetorical, though now containing the sedimentations of the theological, geographical, biological, and the like. This, in effect, is an argument laid out as sketch of racism of the West.

NOMOS AND THE BARBARIAN

A standard gambit in the classroom is to assert that it’s no coincidence that racism, the Enlightenment, capitalism, and trans-hemispheric expansion all coincide. Some student will invariably say something like, “Wait a minute! Are you saying racism is two hundred years old?” To which I’ll say something about maybe 500 years but formalized about two hundred years ago, yeah. And then, some really smart student will bring up classical Athens.

The argument is that the Athenians had their own brand of bigotry. And that’s true. That’s what gave rise to imperialism and to slavery, but Athens’s form of bigotry wasn’t tied to more contemporary notions of “race.” Though the “Greeks” did distinguish by means of something like phenotype, those visual, physical markers are not what distinguished superior from inferior, civilized from barbarian. There might not have been a unified Greek state (giving rise to my use of scare quotes), but there was a unified distinction, likely reified by way of the Delian League, so that those holding allegiance to the central political power of Athens—by way of language—would be separated from the barbarian. It will take the Romans to convert the word barbarian to a physical reference—the wearers of beards, hairy ones. But the Greeks coined the word from the Chinese, according to Edith Hall (1989, 4), a term originally onomatopoetic for nonsense speech, a Chinese version of blah-blah-blah. And Frank Snowden (1970), in Blacks in Antiquity, pointed out some time ago that though Athenians recognized the physical characteristics of sub-Saharan Africans as those with burnt faces—Ethiopians—that was only an identifier of place: the burnt-faced ones were the people from that place down there. In Before Color Prejudice, Snowden (1983) notes that though there were all kinds of associations between blackness and evil, none of those references carried over to people. For the Athenians, the measure of superiority was language, the language to rise above physis, the language of nomos, the language of arête, terms we have come to associate solely with the Elder Sophists, thanks to John Poulakos (1983), Harold Barrett (1987), and others, but which applied to the whole of Greek culture as centered in the Athenian city-state. We can infer as much from George Kennedy’s (1991) choice of a subtitle to his version of Aristotle’s rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. No one would claim Aristotle was a sophist. It was in these terms, physis, nomos, arête—the uses of language to create and to maintain a political order that would rise above our natures—that Athenian culture saw its superiority to those who could only speak as by nature, not by gift of reason. The barbarian was barbarian by nature of discourse, of rhetoric, of politics, not by what we have come to see as “race.”

The closest the Romans come to a notion of race is the gens: a community bound by a common ancestry. But here again, the distinction is not based on physiognomy or by some base nature. The distinction remains rhetorical and political—civitas as gifted-in-speech. Cicero (1918) might write to Atticus that he “not obtain [his] slaves from Britain because they are so stupid and so utterly incapable of being taught that they are not fit to form a part of the household of Athens” (4.15), but in so saying, there is no overtly racialized distinction; it is a political one: unlearned, not given to the rational in that Aristotelian sense. Barbarians couldn’t enter into the rhetoric of rising above nature by the creation of the city or even by the cutting of hair. They displayed a poor politic. Unkempt and unlearned though they might have been, they weren’t colored.

NOMOS V. ECCLESIA

I tell the students that we are still Rome, that we still deal in Roman time. That we have conflated the Emperor and the Praetor even as we did away with the King, that we still deal in Senators and a Republic that was intentionally modeled after Cicero but which became the Empire. But like the empire of Rome, it gives way to religion: The Left Behind novels about the rapture and an overtly Christian (in that American, non-Catholic sense) president coins an educational program “No Child Left Behind.” I’m not denigrating religion and religious beliefs. That’s not mine to do. I’m attempting to demonstrate historical parallels and San Juan’s (2002) assertion that the theology of the times is nationalism. I’m not sure I accept that, but it’s good for classroom talk.

The canon of rhetoric and of empire sees the time of Cicero as the time of change, from a city-state dominated by a res-publica to a greater attention to imperial accumulation. The greater the geographic expansion, the greater the suggestion that there might not be a common beginning to all, so that all might not be able to attend to speech-dominated politics. And with the change in the political system and its political economy comes a change in ideology. Vergil becomes the poet of the Republic, but he’s cast in greater and greater Christian terms, the Good of Rome vs. the Evil of the Other. Eventually, the shift becomes paradigmatic: from politics/philosophy/rhetoric to religion. There are those who accept the faith (Judeo and Christian both as “the faith” at this point), and there are those who do not. Those who do not accept the faith are called ethnics by Paul (Hannaford 1996, 88). The complete rejection of the political comes from the Jewish general Flavius Josephus (around the first century CE). Augustine (1987), however, tries not to discard his learning of rhetoric and its political, civic implications, providing for the priority in faith, the recognition of an institution of the Church, and the possibility for politics, a kind of philosophical/theological agreement between Church and State that he lays out in The City of God.

Then things start to change, as Islam rises, and Jews travel Europe, particularly Spain and southern France. In 711, Tarik ibn Ziyad travels from Morocco into Spain, the great rock taking his name—Jabal Tariq (Tariq’s Mountain), corrupted into Gibralter. A hierarchy of religions—and thereby their followers—takes hold. Superiority belongs to the Christians, followed by the Jews, followed by Muslims. Although the intellectual world embraces the scholars of the three faiths as they study mathematics, logic, and the works of Aristotle, the rising power of the Papacy begins the denigration of a people for reasons that are no longer as clear as the use of language to create and maintain a politic.

People begin to be described as beyond the rational, as not human. According to Heinrich Graetz (2005), the beginning of the end for Jews and Muslims in Europe is tied to Pope Innocent III—particularly two events (one of which takes place on 9/11—September of the year 1211). Prior to 1209 and 1211, Innocent had given some dispensation to Jews, ordering that they not be subject to arbitrary punishment. But he becomes upset that kings of Spain (Pedro of Aragon and Alfonso of Castile, in particular) are a little too kind to the Jews. Having had Jews among them for nearly a thousand years and recognizing the intellectual and economic contributions of the Jews, these kings provided no special treatment to the Jews; they were Aragonians and Castilians, Spaniards. That lack of special treatment came to be seen by Innocent as very special treatment, however. Not to recognize their lack of Christian faith is for Innocent a heresy. Accordingly he issues an order that no one is to mix with the Jew—in every sense of “mix”—under threat of excommunication. In 1208, he declares that “the Jews, like the fratricide Cain, are doomed to wander about the earth as fugitives and vagabonds, and their faces must be covered in insult” (Graetz 2005, 516). Herein begins the Othering with a Biblical precedent. Jews become associated with Cain. Later, others will be associated with Ham.

According to Graetz (2005) this order from Innocent led to two events that would change how Jews are regarded. The first takes place in July 1209. News had come to Innocent that there was a community in southern France (Albingenses) that was accepting readings of the Bible influenced by Jewish exegesis rather than Papal interpretations. Such heresy gives rise to slaughter, with the Pope ordering his military to kill all the people of Béziers, all, leaving it to God to do the rewarding and condemning of the souls that would be freed from their bodies.

Then in September 1211, Abu Yusuf Ya’qub al-Mansur invades southern Spain from his base in Algiers. King Alfonso seeks the assistance of Innocent, who sends the leader of the massacre at Béziers, the cleric Arnold, to help, along with the largest military force gathered in Western history to that time. The Castilian and Papal forces are nevertheless defeated. But during that battle at Salvatierra, Arnold is offended by the kind of special treatment he witnesses Jews continuing to receive in Castile. He thereby takes it upon himself to slaughter Jews as part of his attack on the Moors, not unlike the lateral war that took place in response to the contemporary attacks of 9/11.

Over the next two hundred years, Jews and Arabs continue to live in Spain, with the poorer elements living in Arab aljamas or Jewish burghettos. After mob attacks, many Jews and Muslims convert to Catholic Christianity (there was no other kind yet). The monarchies are okay with this, since they see the intellectual and economic gains to be had by the converts, but there is suspicion by many clerics and “intellectuals,” who believe that the converts are only pretending, that they are still following their prior religious teachings and conducting their prior religious rituals in secret. Eventually, Jews are forced to convert; children are taken from their parents to be baptized; parents convert to regain their children. But suspicions remain, so that by the beginning of the fifteenth century in Spain, the neo-Christians of Jewish ancestry are more hated than the unconverted Jews or Muslims.

And there remained the bad blood from the widely held belief (though not by the Papacy) that the Jews were responsible for the Black Death, that Jews had been poisoning the water throughout Europe (rather like the anthrax scare of 9/11), a belief that traveled as far north as Switzerland. Jews were captured, tortured (water boarding first explained as a method born at the trials of the Black Death and explained as a method of extracting confessions during the Inquisition), with many confessing to creating the Black Death (even as Jews died alongside Christians) and pointing to co-conspirators.

Even in times of peace among Christians and Jews throughout Europe, from the thirteenth century till their expulsion at the end of the fifteenth century, Jews were either mandated to wear certain clothes—the Muslims requiring the Jews to wear distinctly different turbans from those worn by Muslims or to wear yellow robes, not white; the Christians mandating that Jews wear a badge in the shape of a star. By 1492, Queen Isabela and King Fernando of Castile and Aragón demand the expulsion of all Jews and Muslims from their lands, effectively expelling Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. Political discourse had been supplanted by religious discourse, debate by the mandates of a Pope, a King, a Queen, and a tyrannical tribunal, the Inquisition. Nomos was no longer the rule. Physis had not yet become the physiognomy in the racialized sense, but the decision had been made that those who were made to wear badges of disgrace were disgraced not just by belief but by blood—the sons and daughters of Cain.

FROM FAITH TO THE FANTASTICAL AND PRESCIENCE

The hermeticists sought to duplicate the liquid referred to in the Bible that Moses had received by striking a rock—manna—the secret food that allowed the Ancients of the Bible to live many hundreds of years, like Abraham and Moses. Hermeticism believed all things sprung from a prima materia, a Philosopher’s Stone. It was also believed that one can begin with lead, turn it into gold, turn gold into potable gold, and that in turn would lead to the Elixer of the Sages—that food that would make for long life or else for the purer form of being which is spirit. The closest they came was booze—still called distilled spirits to this day. I tell students they must have thought they had changed into something invincible—at least for a couple of hours, after which they needed to invent aspirin.

Ivan Hannaford (1996) argues that in the time between the marking and expulsion of Jews and the creation of the term race in a relatively modern understanding, interest in Hermeticism and the Cabala of the European late middle ages and early Renaissance began the new divisions of humanity into types. Hermeticism provided that though all matter derives from a common matter that evolves into higher forms—a kind of early version of evolution and a source for the neoplatonic chain of being—the elements (earth, wind, fire, and water) and demons can corrupt certain forms. The Cabalists take the teachings of Hermeticism and add elements of ancient numerology to the system, an esoteric mix of magic, the zodiac, and alchemy to arrive at new readings of the Talmud and of the Bible that explain differences in psychology and physiognomy in humankind through differences in eyes, nostrils, and skin color—or even to explain the man-beast mixes described by travelers and by depictions and descriptions of the not quite human: dog-headed Jews and wolf-headed Muslims, for example. Through these mixes, Hannaford explains, through these precursors to science as we understand it (alchemy leading to physics and chemistry), there arises the right sons (and possibly daughters, but never directly said) of God and the Others, the outliers, the sons of Cain (Canaans with dog heads, etymologically the source for the word canine) and the sons of Ham.

In like manner, David Brion Davis (1997) refers to Jennifer Morgan’s “‘Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770” to describe how black women during the Renaissance, when removed from the African continent by being in the Cape Verde Islands, say, were thought objects of beauty to the European (with “object” a clear rhetorical choice here), but when on the African continent, the black woman was rendered a beast, with breasts hanging so low as to be confused with an additional pair of legs, the male European traveler describing her as naked, promiscuous, given to sleeping with apes, even giving childbirth without experiencing pain. The bestialization of “lower orders” (which included women of color, “sodomites,” and Jews) becomes a rhetorical trope—from Aristotle’s assertion that “the ox was the poor man’s slave” to the Christian depiction of Jews as “horned beasts, swine, and vermin” (Davis 1997, 12). Shakespeare describes the Moor Othello as black (with Laurence Fishburne taking the lead role in the 1995 film rendering), though Othello is a Turk, not a contemporary “black,” the moor by Shakespeare’s time suggesting a person of mixed racial heritage: the Spaniard mixed with Arab and North African Berber, the reason why Hegel will later construct a history that will place Spain with Africa rather ...