This piece continues the work of scholars in the field who look to uncover the ideological and textual practices of our dependence on the construct of “race” through racialized metaphors. Analyzing the rhetoric of race in College Composition and Communication and College English since 1990, I assert that our categorization of what “race” is has grown increasingly vague, despite its use as a commonplace from which to begin scholarly discussions. I argue that we must rearticulate our own racial ideologies in order to become more aware of how we use “race” persuasively for our own purposes.

This article argues that mid-1970s discourses of literacy crisis prompted a problematic shift toward color-blind ideologies of language and literacy within both disciplinary and institutional discussions of writing instruction for “high-risk” minority students. It further argues that this shift has continuing import for contemporary antiracist writing instruction.

This article examines how the South African Committee for Higher Education used the resources of print culture to design forms of writing and delivery systems that provided students and post-literate adults in the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s with the means to recognize and represent themselves as rhetorical agents, for whom reading and writing were tools of deliberation and social action to participate in building a non-racial political future.

If college writing faculty wish to prepare students to engage in civic forums, then how might we prepare students to write and speak amid racial politics on our campuses? This article explores the college student discourse that shaped an interracial conflict at a public California university in 2002 and questions the “rhetoric of injury” informing racial accountability in the post-civil rights era.

This essay offers an earlier chapter in the history of African American literacy by examining colonial literacy campaigns within the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The discussion focuses on one such transatlantic effort spanning from London to Barbados, South Carolina, and West Africa, which used enslaved teachers as agents of literacy.

This article examines how the South African Committee for Higher Education used the resources of print culture to design forms of writing and delivery systems that provided students and post-literate adults in the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s with the means to recognize and represent themselves as rhetorical agents, for whom reading and writing were tools of deliberation and social action to participate in building a non-racial political future.

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This article explores the emotioned dimensions of racist discourses at an all-white public high school. I argue that students’ racist assertions do not always or even often originate in students’ racist attitudes or belief. Instead, racist language functions metaphorically, connecting common racist ideas to nonracist feelings, values, beliefs, and associations that are learned in the routine practices and culture of school.

This essay analyzes the ways in which subtly but powerfully racist ideologies of language and literacy shaped the institutional development of one writing program for “high-risk” African American college students during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It further theorizes the value of such institutional analysis for counteracting racism within present-day writing programs.

Review Essays: Defining Dialect David Johnson American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast Ed. Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward Do You Speak American? Robert MacNeil and William Cran A Teachers’ Introduction to African American English: What a Writing Teacher Should Know Teresa M. Redd and Karen Schuster Webb.

Review Essays: The Literacies of Hip-Hop Nancy Effinger Wilson Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture H. Samy Alim “Gettin’ Our Groove On”: Rhetoric, Language, and Literacy for the Hip Hop Generation Kermit E. Campbell Hiphop Literacies Elaine Richardson Word from the Mother: Language and African Americans Geneva Smitherman.

This article offers a critical perspective on the default mode of freshman composition instruction, that is, its traditionally middle-class and white racial orientation. Although middle-classness and whiteness have been topics of critical interest among compositionists in recent years, perhaps the most effective challenge to this hegemony in the classroom is not in our textbooks or critical discourse but in what many of our students already consume, the ghettocentricity expressed in the music of rappers like Kanye West, Jay-Z, and Eminem.

Margaret Himley and Christine Farris respond to Phillip Marzluf ’s article, “Diversity Writing: Natural Languages, Authentic Voices,” in the February 2006 issue of CCC. Phillip Marzluf responds to them, with his original article readily available through the CCC Online Archive (formerly CCC Online): http://inventio.us/ccc.

“Freedom Schooling” looks at a Freedom School class taught by Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). Specifically, this article explores the philosophies of language and education that informed this class and the organic relationship fostered between the classroom and the political goals of African American communities during the civil rights era.

This essay examines the history of a massive literacy campaign called the Citizenship School Program that began as a response to the racist literacy tests that disenfranchised countless African American voters throughout the Southern United States between 1945 and 1965. The Citizenship Schools prepared thousands of African Americans to pass the literacy test by using materials that critiqued white supremacism and emphasized the twentieth-century struggle for civil rights.

This essay examines a Brooklyn College–based research collective that placed African American languages and cultures at the center of the composition curriculum. Recovering such pedagogies challenges the perception of the CCCC’s 1974 “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” resolution as a progressive theory divorced from the everyday practices and politics of the composition classroom.

Though diversity serves as a valuable source for rhetorical inquiry, expressivist instructors who privilege diversity writing may also overemphasize the essential authenticity of their students’ vernaculars. This romantic and salvationist impulse reveals the troubling implications of eighteenth-century Natural Language Theory and may, consequently, lead to exoticizing and stereotyping students’ linguistic performances.

Review Essay: Language, Identity, and Citizenship Keith Gilyard Black Identity: Rhetoric, Ideology and Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalism Dexter B. Gordon, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003 Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education. Catherine Prendergast, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003 Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity and Literacy Education, Michelle Hall Kells, Valerie Balester, and Victor Villanueva, eds., Portsmouth, NH: Boynton, 2004.

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It s no secret that, in most American classrooms, students are expected to master standardized American English and the conventions of Edited American English if they wish to succeed. Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice works to realign these conceptions through a series of provocative yet evenhanded essays that explore the ways we have enacted and continue to enact our beliefs in the integrity of the many languages and Englishes that arise both in the classroom and in professional communities.Edited by Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva, the collection was motivated by a survey project on language awareness commissioned by the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication.All actively involved in supporting diversity in education, the contributors address the major issues inherent in linguistically diverse classrooms: language and racism, language and nationalism, and the challenges in teaching writing while respecting and celebrating students own languages. Offering historical and pedagogical perspectives on language awareness and language diversity, the essays reveal the nationalism implicit in the concept of a standard English, advocate alternative training and teaching practices for instructors at all levels, and promote the respect and importance of the country s diverse dialects, languages, and literatures. Contributors include Geneva Smitherman, Victor Villanueva, Elaine Richardson, Victoria Cliett, Arnetha F. Ball, Rashidah Jammi Muhammad, Kim Brian Lovejoy, Gail Y. Okawa, Jan Swearingen, and Dave Pruett.The volume also includes a foreword by Suresh Canagarajah and a substantial bibliography of resources about bilingualism and language diversity.

Using Burkean theory, I claim that Malcolm X brilliantly exposed the rhetoric and epistemology of whiteness as he rejected the African American jeremiad—a dominant form of African American oratory for more than 150 years. Whiteness theory served as the basis for Malcolm X’s alternative literacy, which raises important questions that literacy theorists have yet to consider.

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From the early 1990s to the present, Ruth Frankenberg, David Roediger, coauthors Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, and other academics have focused on race by uncovering, interrogating, and theorizing as a largely unacknowledged but vastly important rhetorical and epistemological system. Nakayama and Krizek consider relatively unchartered territory that remained invisible as it continues to influence the identity of those both within and without domain (291). Whiteness, they claim, wields power yet endures as a largely unarticulated (291). Further, they argue, whiteness has assumed the position of an uninterrogated space (293). Many whites, they argue, refuse to acknowledge their ethnicity, claiming simply to be human, thereby erasing from its history and social

“Should we make our tape about police brutality and youth crime or about how to become a hip-hop star?” (23). For Steven Goodman, founder of New York’s Educational Video Center (EVC), this question reveals a conflict that low-income minority students face when representing their experiences in collaborative, inquiry-based video projects.

In this article, I argue that critical discourse analysis (CDA) can complement and extend existing critical and radical writing pedagogies; CDA provides the theoretical and methodological context that can articulate explicitly the relationship between language practices and politics. I use CDA to analyze texts that circulated on the campus of Miami University, Ohio, surrounding a conflict that exacerbated ongoing disputes about diversity, access, and standards, and I discuss how CDA might inform composition pedagogy.

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This essay examines the pedagogical practices of the poet, civil rights activist, andteacher Melvin B. Tolson who taught at Wiley College from 1923 to 1947. Tolson’s complex classroom style, which mixed elements of classical, African American, and current-traditional rhetoric, produced a pedagogy that was at once conservative, progressive, and radical, inspiring his students to academic achievement and social action. Tolson demonstrates that it is possible to instruct students in the norms of the academy without sacrificing their home voices or identities.

The following article focuses on Latino students’ difficulties with higher education because of dual constructions of identity from and toward the Anglo mainstream. First, the article addresses Other perception: the potential problems Latino students (Mexican Americans) encounter in higher education based on how others perceive their individual and group identity. Second, it addresses self-perception: the contradictory expectations that Mexican Americans have of the mainstream in higher education. The discussion of these issues is presented in a letter format that primarily speaks to audiences outside the mainstream.

This article represents stories of eight former composition students, Appalachian working class women, who move from silence in the academy to voice in their communities to a more self–confident identity without destroying the community from which they came. The author argues that compositionists need to consider the two–edged nature of literacy; how literacy serves first generation, nontraditional learners; the intergenerational effects of literacy; the importance of expressivist writing as a transition into academic literacy; and the importance of region and class in multicultural conversations.

In a departure from traditional paradigms, in this work Latinos examine their own experiences in US schools and offer theories born from positions of expertise and first-hand knowledge as researchers and educators.

Foregrounding issues of race, ethnicity, and education, this article ties together two important issues in teaching (so-called) basic writing: how social and pedagogical issues in higher education shape possibilities for bicultural students’ writings and how these students can use their developing sense of literacy and their texts to explore identity.

Foregrounding issues of race, ethnicity, and education, this article ties together two important issues in teaching (so-called) basic writing: how social and pedagogical issues in higher education shape possibilities for bicultural students' writings and how these students can use their developing sense of literacy and their texts to explore

In this study of the history of rhetoric education, Susan Kates focuses on the writing and speaking instruction developed at three academic institutions founded to serve three groups of students most often excluded from traditional institutions of higher education in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century America: white middle-class women, African Americans, and members of the working class. Kates provides a detailed look at the work of those students and teachers ostracized from rhetorical study at traditional colleges and universities. She explores the pedagogies of educators Mary Augusta Jordan of Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts; Hallie Quinn Brown of Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio; and Josephine Colby, Helen Norton, and Louise Budenz of Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York. These teachers sought to enact forms of writing and speaking instruction incorporating social and political concerns in the very essence of their pedagogies. They designed rhetoric courses characterized by three important pedagogical features: a profound respect for and awareness of the relationship between language and identity and a desire to integrate this awareness into the curriculum; politicized writing and speaking assignments designed to help students interrogate their marginalized standing within the larger culture in terms of their gender, race, or social class; and an emphasis on service and social responsibility.

This chapter seeks to add to our understanding of literacy as it relates to African Americans, with a focus on African American female literacies. Primarily, I argue that mother tongue literacy is central to literacy education.

... No matter how backward and negative the mainstream view and image of Black people, Ifeel compelled to reshape the image and to explore our manypositive angles because I love my own people. Perhaps this is because I have been blessed with spiritual African eyes at a time when most Africans have had their eyes poked out.... So, like most ghetto girls who haven't yet been turned into money-hungry heartless bitches by a godless money centered world, I have a problem: I love hard. Maybe too hard. Or maybe its too hard for a people without structure-structure in the sense of knowing what African womanhood is. What does it mean? What is it supposed to do to you andfor you? -Sister Souljah

This article examines the contradictory representations of whiteness in the literature on critical pedagogy and argues that a deeper engagement with these contradictions can help critical educators in their work with white students. The essay explores a number of sites-the rhetoric of critical pedagogy, the literature on whiteness that has surfaced in the past five years-and concludes by analyzing portraits of white students as they read texts that challenge them to think about race and racial identity in new ways.

This article examines the contradictory representations of whiteness in the literature on critical pedagogy and argues that a deeper engagement with these contradictions can help critical educators in their work with white students. The essay explores a number of sites--the rhetoric of critical pedagogy, the literature on whiteness that has surfaced in the past five years--and concludes by analyzing portraits of white students as they read texts that challenge them to think about race and racial identity in new ways.

Classroom assignments, especially papers, often serve as the catalyst for many of the interactions that take place between Black male students and white faculty. This essay identifies some of the pitfalls that contribute to the breakdown of communication between white faculty and Black male students during interactions over student writing; it points out the behaviors that both constrain and facilitate these interactions, and it offers suggestions for how faculty can improve their interactions with this population of students. The essay concludes with suggestions for improving faculty awareness of how racial dynamics impact student/faculty interactions over student writing.

This article examines Black student responses to Black Panther Party documents and how those documents moved the students toward change. I maintain that by allowing the classroom to function as a public space in which students can discuss the issues that matter to them, teachers can help to foster and encourage student activism and ultimately their empowerment.

early Methodism John Wesley created an extracurricular site of literacy and rhetoric that empowered women and the working classes to read, write, and speak in public. Wesley's method of literacy in community not only transformed religious life in Britain but also redefined the intersections of education, class, and gender. an article based on her 1993 CCCC Chair's address, Anne Ruggles Gere critiqued the field of composition: In concentrating upon establishing our position within the academy, we have neglected to recount the history of composition in other contexts; we have neglected composition's extracurriculum (79). Influenced by Shirley Brice Heath's study of community literacy practices, Glenda Hull's work on workplace literacy, Patricia Bizzell's concept of multiple discourse communities, and others, Gere examined the cultural work and literacy practices of writing groups outside the academy, focusing particularly on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American clubwomen, both white and African American. Gere urged us not only to expand our field's history to

Traces of a offers a unique scholarly perspective that merges interests in rhetorical and literacy studies, United States social and political theory, and African American women writers. Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women. With a shift in educational opportunity after the Civil War, African American women gained access to higher education and received formal training in rhetoric and writing. By the end of the nineteenth-century, significant numbers of African American women operated actively in many public arenas.In her study, Royster acknowledges the persistence of disempowering forces in the lives of African American women and their equal perseverance against these forces. Amid these conditions, Royster views the acquisition of literacy as a dynamic moment for African American women, not only in terms of their use of written language to satisfy their general needs for agency and authority, but also to fulfill socio-political purposes as well.Traces of a Stream is a showcase for nineteenth-century African American women, and particularly elite women, as a group of writers who are currently underrepresented in rhetorical scholarship. Royster has formulated both an analytical theory and an ideological perspective that are useful in gaining a more generative understanding of literate practices as a whole and the practices of African American women in particular. Royster tells a tale of rhetorical prowess, calling for alternative ways of seeing, reading, and rendering scholarship as she seeks to establish a more suitable place for the contributions and achievements of African American women writers.

Margaret A. Syverson discusses the ways in which a theory of composing situations as ecological systems might productively be applied in composition studies. She demonstrates not only how new research in cognitive science and complex systems can inform composition studies but also how composing situations can provide fruitful ground for research in cognitive science.Syverson first introduces theories of complex systems currently studied in diverse disciplines. She describes complex systems as adaptive, self-organizing, and dynamic; neither utterly chaotic nor entirely ordered, these systems exist on the boundary between order and chaos. Ecological systems are metasystems composed of interrelated complex systems. Writers, readers, and texts, together with their environments, constitute one kind of ecological system.Four attributes of complex systems provide a theoretical framework for this study: distribution, embodiment, emergence, and enaction. Three case studies provide evidence for the application of these concepts: an analysis of a passage from an autobiographical poem by Charles Reznikoff, a study of first-year college students writing collaboratively, and a conflict in a computer forum of social scientists during the Gulf War. The diversity of these cases tests the robustness of theories of distributed cognition and complex systems and suggests possibilities for wider application.

The authors attempt to confront the construction of “whiteness” as a silent but potent epistemology that pervades writing instruction and contributes to racism within academic institutions. Pedagogical practices as well as university policies are discussed, focusing particularly on the subject positions of “black” and “white” for both students and instructors.

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Most traditional works of rhetorical history have excluded the activities of women, but Listening to Their Voices retrieves the voices of women who contributed to the rhetorical realm. The nineteen essays in the collection extend existing definitions of rhetoric and enrich conventional knowledge of rhetorical history. In her introduction Molly Meijer Wertheimer traces the patriarchal nature of traditional rhetorical histories as well as the continuing debate about how best to write women into rhetoric's historical record. The volume's essays advance rhetorical theory by examining exceptional women rhetoricians and their unusual rhetorical practices and strategies. Covering a diverse range of rhetorical pursuits and historical eras, the selections look closely at such fascinating topics as the bold speech of ancient Egyptian women, the rhetorical genres of mother's manuals and women's commercial writings in the Middle Ages, the sexual stereotyping of prose style in rhetorical theory of the Enlightenment, and exhortations for racial uplift by nineteenth-century African American women.

Introduction Multicultural Education: Definitions, Development, Variants, and Controversies Multiculturalism: Egalitarian Social Reconstruction through Educational Reform Multiculturalism: An Assessment of Variations, Basic Arguments, and Concepts The Multicultural Agenda and Critical Thinking Compared Bibliography Index