This essay reports on an effective approach to teaching both rhetorical skills and white racial awareness by using historical moments when racial definitions were asserted and defended, allowing students to see their constructed racial identities through a nonthreatening rhetorical lens.

Studying the communicative role models of my freshman composition students at a historically black school, I learned which rhetorical approaches my students already appreciate and possibly bring with them to college. My analysis of their essays on their role models illuminates a distinction between what they have learned and what they are expected to practice as college writers, suggesting that their communicative role models are significant indicators for how comfortably they will adjust to writing in college. I discovered that those students who admire personas who project with a forceful, “true,” inner confidence, frequently learned from hip-hop culture, could be deflated in an academic setting if they are not taught the necessity of adjusting oneself to the rhetorical situation.