The hegemony of English, or at least a particular form of English, has been robustly critiqued, yet is far from having been abandoned in teaching.[1] In addition, dominant discourse deems Native American languages “extinct” or otherwise incapable of speaking to academic topics. However, Indigenous peoples develop language for various subject areas, and languages are used in ways that represent the cultural perspectives of their users.[2] Such perspectives are part of the heart of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty, and the right to use Indigenous languages supports, quite simply, Indigenous peoples’ right to speak and think.[3] Declining to accept assignments in an Indigenous or any heritage language (or requiring translations) conveys the message that English is needed in academic contexts, and is therefore communicatively superior. I argue that writing courses should support student refusals of translation, creating a situation where an instructor may not know what the content of a student submission even is, and that this inability “to know” serves the aims of decolonization.   [1] Alim & Smitherman 2012 [2] See: Kimura & Counceller 2009, McCarty & Nicholas 2014, Wilson & Kamanā 2011, Reyhner 2010, McIvor & McCarty 2017 [3] These rights are a main tenet of how Leonard (2008, 2011, 2021) theorizes language reclamation

How can it be possible for disempowerment to be mistaken for empowerment?Isn't the dichotomy between the two abundantly clear?Erec Smith thinks not.Smith's ethos as a Black professor of rhetoric and composition places him in a unique position to critique anti-racist pedagogy.It is not his perspective that racism is not present in the academy: far from it.He has been the recipient of prejudice and discrimination from his graduate work all the way to his teaching.In his book, Smith includes personal experiences and anecdotes that help to illustrate his perspective.As a Black rhetoric and composition instructor in the majority White institution of York College of Pennsylvania, Smith has experienced these issues firsthand and has found that anti-racist pedagogy alone, which he argues can lead to a lack of academic rigor, is not necessarily the appropriate answer.Smith's main argument is that anti-racist pedagogy in rhetoric and composition often inadvertently disempowers students by ignoring important aspects of empowerment theory.This pedagogy instead encourages marginalized students to embrace their positionalities as the center of all arguments and to fall back into positions of victimhood.Smith explains that this "victim framing" creates "disempowered entities in need of enlightenment instead of empowered agents with selfefficacy and a desire to broaden the interactional and behavioral components of empowerment" (88).This victimhood allows students to escape from proper academic scrutiny which, in turn, reduces academic rigor.In his introduction, Smith begins his critique with a vignette in which W. E. B. Du Bois recounts an experience in a composition class at Harvard.In his first essay for that class, Du Bois had railed against racist issues present in society at the time and had let fly his own colloquial grammar and syntax.This first effort was met with a failing grade.From this experience, Du Bois noted, "[he] realized that while style is subordinate to content, and that no real literature can be composed simply of meticulous and fastidious phrases, nevertheless solid content with literary style carries a message further than poor grammar and muddled syntax" (Smith xix).Du Bois realized it was imperative to adapt to "standard English, " or what Smith prefers to call the "language of wider communication" (LWC) (5), rather than insist on communicating in the vernacular he grew up speaking.Using Du Bois as an example of code switching, Smith addresses the present climate of code meshing taught in many quarters of the rhetoric and composition field.According to scholars like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Asao Inoue, and others, rhetoric and composition instructors who require their students of color to adapt to the LWC engage in a form of racism because this adaptation automatically alienates students' home dialects.As such, they propose that students in rhetoric and composition should be encouraged to inject their writing with African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as well as other dialect forms.In writing and speaking this way, anti-racist scholars argue, students embrace

The bulk of literacy education historical narratives about Black Americans has been gentrified by mainstream Euro-American perspectives. This article considers the contributions of a Black-American-developed form of institutionalized community education to demonstrate the critical race theory voice-of-color thesis in college-level composition-literacies education. Through reviewing the curricular, pedagogical, and instructional practices of pre-college independent Black institutions, the author works to reclaim the unique rhetorical voice of this Afrocentric literacy education form and insert it into American literacy education histories. The article presents two established unique voice of color counter-stories grounded in truthfully representing and advancing Black American cultures to argue that central features of these Afrocentric literacy education programs can afford college composition programs race- and community-conscious writing education.