Beyond the Known: Writing Centers and the Work of Anti-Racism

Abstract

During his 2005 International Writing Centers Association keynote address, "Blind: Talking About the New Racism," Victor Villanueva issued an invitation and a challenge to writing center directors, scholars, and tutors. Villanueva urged us to examine and to address the ways in which race and racism shape writing center identity and practices; enable and constrain knowledge and knowledge production, teaching and learning; and are reproduced not only through the thought and action of individuals, but also and especially through systems and institutions. Those of us who planned the 2005 IWCA Conference felt our dreams coming true on the day of Villanueva 's keynote. We wanted a keynote address that would take up the matter of race, racism, and writing centers in rigorous, challenging, and compelling ways. We wanted a person of color to speak to our overwhelmingly white discipline in ways that could not easily be turned aside or dismissed. We wanted a sea change in the conversation about writing center theory and practice such that the matters of race and racism would no longer seem strange or tangential to conversations about our writing centers, but central and pressing. While it is true that over the years many writing center scholars have addressed social justice issues generally and racism in particular, none of us, so far as I can tell, has ever been able to produce the kind of electricity that flowed through the audience that attended Villanueva 's words.2 Following the conference a flurry of discussion about the keynote address ensued on WCenter. Exhausted and exhilarated, those of us who had planned the conference back-listed, thrilled that the dialogue