Racial Literacy Is Literacy: Locating Racial Literacy in the College Composition Classroom

Abstract

In order to develop pedagogies around racial literacy, we must first define the goals and bounds of racial literacy as praxis. In this paper, I synthesize the findings of a year-long teacher research project to explore the significance of racial literacy in the college composition classroom. Drawing from existing scholarship and my own research into racial literacy instruction, I offer four visions of racial literacy in the English classroom, the last of which is Racial Literacy as Literacy. I conclude by arguing that a racial literacy curriculum can teach students foundational concepts of textual analysis, audience awareness, authorial choice and positionality, and argumentation. In short, racial literacy is a culturally relevant, critical framework for literacy instruction. R ace, class, ethnicity, gender, geography: these strands of subjectivity are woven into our educational infrastructure, simultaneously shaping our understanding of social, cultural, and intellectual concepts and being shaped by them. To attempt to extricate and explain the significance of one such factor in the sphere of American education and classroom interaction would be to simplify the complex dynamics at play within the network. However, because race is visible, both literally and as part of American discourse, it is both the easiest strand to locate, and also the one that, try as we might pull at it, never seems to come unraveled. More than a decade ago, Allan Luke sought to reinvent the field of English education by drawing on linguistics, cultural studies, media studies, sociology, and other fields, to better respond to the "multilingual and multicultural, heteroglossic and multimedi-ated world" of the twenty-first century (85). Literacy is not merely an academic skill, no matter how many standardized tests or other measurable assessments are applied to it; literacy is integral to understanding the ways in which language and texts (printed, media, or experiential) maintain or challenge social hierarchies and cultural hegemony. "English teaching and schooling," Luke argues, are "political interventions, struggles over the formation of ideologies and beliefs, identities and capital" (86). While some might believe-erroneously-that composition has nothing to do with race, it is hard to deny that the teaching of composition (like the broader field of English education) is concerned with questions of race, racism, antiracism, and social justice. Racial literacy, a framework that in 2004 emerged simultaneously from the fields of sociology and legal studies and quickly made its way into English education, figuring into matters from policy to pedagogy, does not attempt simplicity. Racial literacy is a collection of skills that "probe the existence of racism and examine the effects of race and institutionalized systems on their experiences and representation in US society" (Sealey-Ruiz 386). Researchers have studied racial literacy pedagogy in English and composition classrooms at all levels from early childhood education (Husband; Rogers and Mosley, "Racial Literacy") and secondary English Language Arts (Vetter and Hungerford-Kres