Teaching films like Crash gives teachers and researchers the opportunity to discuss films as social texts that engage students in critical thinking and self-reflection. This particular movie is especially effective in its use of a pulp-fiction visual rhetoric. Unfortunately, the film equates and replaces the term “race” with the term “prejudice” and then argues that everyone is a little prejudiced. The result is a missed opportunity to investigate whiteness as a powerful social construction.

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.

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Examining the relationship between language and literacy and the societal experiences that help shape it, this political and polemical book builds on the author's previous work in reader-response criticism and challenges the now dominant assumption that language is an individual transaction independent of any social context. Moving through a series of interrelated essays, David Bleich explores topics including the social psychology of men, which he maintains exerts undue influence on everyone's education; conceptions of knowledge now offered by feminist epistemologists; social conceptions of language and knowledge found in the work of G.H. Mead, L.S. Vygotsky, Ludwik Fleck, and Mikhail Bakhtin; the influence of gender on language use; the views of current thinkers on the social character of the classroom and academic communities; and the process of individual language development.