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The fiftieth anniversary of the Strunk and White edition of The Elements of Style is an appropriate occasion for considering its enormous popularity. Especially interesting is the esteem for the book held by Theodore Kaczynszki, convicted as the Unabomber. His embrace of Strunk and White’s values points to a kind of violence and primitivist nostalgia in their ideology of style

“Crash” strives to show that just as culpability belongs equally to all racial groups, so, too, is redemption equally available. But that promissory note goes unpaid when it comes to the film’s Asian characters.

This essay discusses the emergence of whiteness studies in the study of English rhetoric and composition in the U.S. History of whiteness studies; Function and definition of whiteness in the U.S.; Role of race in different U.S. cultural logics; Relationship of whiteness studies with teaching composition.

Arguing that the immediate historical context of desegregation is vital to an understanding of Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words, this article reports on materials from the archives of Heath's research housed at the Dacus Library of Winthrop University. What emerges from reading Heath's letters and other materials at the time she was researching Ways with Words is a portrait of an ethnographer trying to negotiate existing stereotypes and raw tensions in the scholarly and public discourse on race while attempting to adhere to the tenets of the ethnographic approach of the 1970s. Taking a critical race theory approach, the article suggests that these materials indicate that Ways with Words could most fruitfully be read at this point as a story of the persistence of prejudice—a story that suggests the failure of the arguments in favor of desegregation to broker lasting reforms toward equity, and one that reveals the different and racialized meanings literacy acquires in response to historical shifts.

What composition studies can take from critical race theory is an awareness that if we are to understand the mechanisms (like racism) that prevent some students from being heard, we need to recognize that our rhetoric is one which continually inscribes our students as foreigners. (Prendergast 51).