CCCC Conversations on Diversity

The CCCC Conversations on Diversity will break for the holiday and resume with new blogging posts on January 6, 2011.

Our New Fall Series Will Begins on September 16

The "CCCC Conversations on Diversity" will begin a fall series with new, bi-weekly guest writers on diversity issues on Thursday, September 16. See you again soon. :)

What Are Some Suggestions from Your Summer Reading List on Diversity?

Editor’s Note from Joyce:

Please reply as often as you'd like over these weeks in the summer, to tell us about books or articles; prose or poetry; visual work, or simple hyperlinks that have informed your thinking about diversity, difference, “polyculturalism,” and writing by simply "replying" to this blog post at any time.

Your replies will be for "mostly" new and current work, this one is (see it below). Oldies but goodies are also welcome. Thanks, so much, to our many readers, especially those who share their comments with us. After the holiday weekend, readers can expect regular bi-weekly posts for the summer schedule.

This interim summer post actually started out as an email to Catherine Prendergast about her current post. But when I realized that my own rhetorical questions and comment about her post might become a short post for the weekend holiday break, her response to me was that, “the epistolary style is both direct and yet indirect,” and to go for it.

Our email conversation made me think about “who my audience is, and isn't” (Catherine's words), and then I remembered how Alice Walker’s book, The Color Purple. It also used the epistolary style as a way to write for a more inclusive rhetorical audience, especially on issues of visibility and invisibility.

What were Walker's own questions and enthymemic thinking at the time? Here, I offer an excerpt from my email to Catherine as a way to continue the train of comments about her guest writing for this blogging series.

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My Comments:

Your post, "Scaling the North Face," as I hear it, is about the corporate branding structure in the visual and verbal rhetoric of the American public sphere—see Naomi Klein’s No Logo, a book that really helped me to see the visual rhetorical analysis underlying your writing in ways that I could not before. Also see Sven Birkets' new article on the future of reading in Reading in the Digital Age.

I then, later, found this interview with Tavis Smiley and Tim Wise on color blind rhetoric (Wise's new book) after I read your piece (http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/201006/20100628_wise.html?vid=1532520412#video (about 28 min).

I love the fact that Wise speaks so well to folks who work in rhetoric (including visual rhetoric) and composition. The interview also shows how well (or not so well) journalism dominates the subject of diversity, race, whiteness, and the discourses of difference (you know about “intersectionality,” right?). Maybe journalism has always dominated the public sphere in the U.S.

So, for example, we’re all "post-racial" now. That’s according to what most of our corporate-owned journalism tells us to believe. That’s certainly what most of our students think--no matter what "color" they are (and it's what too many academics in higher education think these days—did you see the blog on the chronicle.com new hiring new faculty about encouraging administrators to include criminal and, possibly, credit background checks about their new hires?). Wow!

Wise talks about our country’s racial progress—as we all do. But have you also seen any of the reports that he cites on the growing wealth gap between Blacks and Whites in this country (or really, whites and non-whites, as I talked about this in Cheryl Glenn book on the rhetoric of silence and according to the census that decides who is considered to be white). The most recent report about this topic actually appeared from a study done at Brandeis University. A powerful, but somewhat questionable commentary. In fact, I wonder if Noah Feldman knew about this one or any of these kinds of resports when he wrote in his NYTimes Magazine article on 6/27.

It's interesting that Wise appeared on "The Tavis Smiley" show on 6/28, the very next day after Feldman's article. I'd like to know more about how some of these studies on the racial wealth gap are done. But I know that the basis for these studies (since the 1970s) are real. They point to your finessed comments about race, whiteness, your students, and issues of economic class in the post.

In fact, the discourses of difference that our other guest writers contribute to this blogging series on diversity have helped me, CCCC members, and others to think about these symbolic discourses of difference and of visibility versus invisibility. About these differences, I hope that our generation (and who read these blog posts) can do the hard work on practicing Toni Morrison’s concept about “shifting the gaze.” I really try. It's very tough. . . . I mean, whatever happened to integration. Oh, I forgot, that has become virtual and effervescent now.

Robert Redford's last film Lions for Lambs, which I teach and like a lot, reminded me of Morrison's concept in several ways, especially about choosing to be domestic or being global in our thinking about political engagement and "shifting the gaze." He's really good about this in his own film commentary.

I noticed that none of the posted replies, except your own, mentioned your African American male student. Importantly, the subject of diversity is not always a racial one. It's the discourses of difference that we want from diversity studies, right?

But if diversity does not include the racial (not racist) topic, then how do we talk about the subject to avoid the inevitable dominance of “default whiteness” (Kathleen Welch is so good for talking about that concept in her rhetoric). I honestly don’t know, but, with hope, I'm learning.

That lack of racial inclusion in the replies to your post made me wonder about the lack of it in too many of our public high schools today. Thanks so much, by the way, for introducing me to Danielle Allen's work, especially in the way that she thinks about "interracial distrust," classical rhetoric, and the rhetoric of our country's democratic republic.

I discovered the website “stuff white people like,” while I was searching the internet in response to your work. It's a wildly humorous and arguable take on racial and ethnic stereotypes, and I’m glad that you liked it enough to post it on your facebook page, while also discovering the “stuff black people like” website. Ha!

Of course, I deleted all of the really political, more broadly ethnic and diverse stuff from the email for this blog post (at least, I think I did for my epistolary audiences)! Ha!


What academic work helps us to talk about our practices informed rhetorical listening for diversity and for the polycultural logics of our country's rhetoric (see, especially, Kris Ratcliffe, Jackie Royster, Shirley Logan, Jeff Chang, Bonnie Tsui, Junot Diaz, and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. These are a few of the many and varied and great writers who inform my work on rhetoric, composition, writing, and the future of diversity studies.

So, how did I do with the idea of working within a tradition of epistolary rhetoric, Catherine? Like you, I hope that readers will reply to my ideas and post their own helpful sources about human diversity.

Love ya! :)

Post-Civil-Rights Whiteness and Diversity: When Are We Going to Stop Talking about Race?

Joyce Irene Middleton, chair of the CCCC Committee on Diversity, has written this week's post on whiteness and diversity. In it, she links ideas and arguments that the committee will use to develop its position statement on diversity. During the next two weeks, members of the CCCC Committee on Diversity will respond to Joyce's post by adding their own comments, and we all invite our readers to join in the conversation. We also encourage folks to use the blog series in their graduate classes come fall semester and ask their grad students to respond. Our new regular schedule for invited Guest Bloggers in our "CCCC Conversation on Diversity blogging series will on 6/4/2009.

Blog Entry

The emergence of whiteness studies helps to shed new solutions in ways to think about diversity in the twenty-first century. Initially, some readers may ask the question: “what does whiteness have to do with diversity?” The answer is, quite emphatically, everything, especially if the intersectionality of identities is important (and too often it is not). The current and lingering oppositional thinking about race (not ethnicity), as either “white” or “non-white” has actually helped to sustain early US markers of identity and difference. This kind of racializing is rooted in fossilized markers of difference: whiteness, ethnicity, post-colonial identity, race, and gender. We continue to do this, even though late twentieth-century scholars both in the humanities and sciences agree—especially with the availability of DNA evidence—that the concept of race, including the white race, is a mythology—a powerful construction of ideology and human identity that perpetuates an illusion of human difference.

Importantly, any concept of diversity that is linked to race and whiteness furthers the illusion of racial purity. This committee wants to assert a new discourse on diversity that abandons the false illusion of racial human difference (without abandoning the powerful history of racism). We hope that this new discourse on diversity will support a paradigm shift in our scholarship, teaching, and service. Effectively, we will move from talking about whiteness and non-whiteness as a personal reality (the illusion) to focus solely on the persistence of historical and institutional whiteness and racism (the reality).

In 2005, Valerie Babb, writing in Jackie Jones Royster's and Ann Marie Simpkins’ edition of Calling Cards Theory and Practice in the Study Of Race, Gender, and Culture, an award-winning anthology on constructions of race, gender, and culture, raises a question about why “whiteness continues to exert its unstated privilege” (28) in the United States in the twenty-first century, especially in the academy? The persistent invisibility of this social (and global) racial construct continues to influence the values of our academic writing, teaching relationships, and professional memberships. For example, here are the rough numbers that reflect the current CCCC membership profile:

• Asian, including Asian Indian or Pacific Islander 76
• Black/African American 146
• Prefer not to answer 130
• White--Non-Latino/Hispanic/Spanish 3,010
• American Indian or Alaska Native 18
• Two or more races 32
• Latino/Hispanic/Spanish 78

For most CCCC members in this profile, these numbers pale in comparison with the increasingly non-white student body in U.S. colleges and universities. Over the recent decades, many rhetoric, composition, and writing scholars have devoted their work to revising traditional histories of rhetoric and composition. Effectively, they have given us, not only re-gendered and re-raced readings of those histories, but they have also given us close examinations of the intersections of race, whiteness, gender, listening, silence, and other pedagogical topics (See, for example, Morrison, Booth, Allen, hooks, Giroux, Glenn, Trainor, Ratcliffe, Welch, Royster, Kennedy, Donawerth, Babb. Villaneuva, and Middleton).

These scholars, and others, are examining and questioning the specific, interconnected, relationships between whiteness, race, ethnicity, and gender with our current practices of teaching and writing in the university. One question that arises from this kind of research is: How can we recognize the influences of whiteness not only in our personal language use, classrooms, and departmental business, which are important, but also in how discourses of white privilege and racism use us? In talking about race, I always talk about whiteness and race (and racism) together. Importantly then, what kinds of antiracist work – scholarly, pedagogical, and institutional – will we make visible in our practices in order to disrupt the persistence of white privilege?