“The Christian Does Rightly and Leaves the Results with the Lord”—Sometimes: On the Pragmatic Affinities between Antiracist Writing Pedagogy and Religious Practice

Abstract

Critics of antiracist pedagogy analogize it to a religious practice in order to discredit it. This essay interrogates the rhetorical affordances and limitations of that analogy. Drawing on antiracist scholarship by Young, Inoue, and Kendi, critiques of antiracist pedagogy by Smith and McWhorter, and the author’s own experiences with Mennonite theology and antiracist pedagogy, the essay argues that despite the totalizing scope of some antiracist theory, its enactment in the classroom is often pragmatic and vitally attentive to local histories and needs. To demonstrate how antiracist pedagogy operates, the author offers two examples from the field of writing studies: code-meshing and labor-based grading. Close attention to these approaches shows that while some of the theory that underpins them is as rigid as some strict religious practices, antiracist writing pedagogy can be, and often is, enacted selectively and strategically to affirm and empower students.

Keywords:

• Antiracism
• antiracist pedagogy
• religion and writing studies
• code-meshing
• labor-based grading

Notes

1 Smitherman (1999) explains that the SRTOL Statement can be traced to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which occurred during CCCC’s 1968 meeting in Minneapolis, prompting Ernece B. Kelly to deliver a presentation, entitled “Murder of the American Dream,” which criticized the organization for its lack of responsiveness to the needs of Black students, and leading to the CCC special issue, “Intergroup Relations in the Teaching of English,” that laid the foundation for the SRTOL statement.

2 Intriguingly, given Smith’s stereotyping of religion as a rigid and empty practice, he concludes his book with an analysis of how Buddhist principles can promote empowerment. He explains his abrupt turn toward the value of religious analysis by noting that “Buddhist thought is unlike the religiosity I discuss when describing the sacred victim narrative and the collective sentiment of many social justice circles. The latter is more akin to an evangelistic and even fundamentalist take on “right” or “wrong,” “good” or “bad,” that promotes “us versus them” thinking. Buddhist philosophy as I use it here is just that: philosophy. Its ideas do not revolve around the concepts of righteousness and sin. Thus, to criticize evangelical religiosity but argue for the efficacy of Buddhist thought is not a hypocritical move” (107). This is a helpful clarification, but it makes it all the more frustrating that Smith refuses to grapple with the complexity and richness of the Christian tradition.

3 According to the most recent Pew Religious Landscape Study, only 26% of Catholic adults believe that “the holy scripture” “should be taken literally” (Pew 2014). For mainline Protestants, the figure is 24%, for Orthodox Christians, 22%; for Mormons, 33%; for Jehovah’s Witnesses, 47%; for Evangelical Protestants, 55%, and for Historically Black Protestants, 59% (Pew 2014). Many observant Christians regard scripture as an important part of their faith tradition, but not its defining feature.

4 As an example of code-meshing, here is Louis Maraj’s opening to his monograph Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics: “Aye Readers, Where I from, to ‘mash up de place’ signals a desire to revel while also denoting destruction, though sometimes the phrase might conjure one in the other” (xiii). This passage contains several words and constructions unfamiliar to those not initiated in Maraj’s vernacular, but there is enough MAE to ground readers accustomed to following those conventions.

5 DePalma does not cite Young, but he draws on Canagarajah’s (2006) account of translingualism, which also informs Young’s account of code-meshing.

6 The Ojibwe scholar Scott Richard Lyons (2009) offers another objection to code-meshing: namely, that many Indigenous Americans dedicated to language preservation wish to separate the MAE they use for practical purposes from the languages they are seeking to conserve and protect in their communities. “Sovereignty, you see, even though thoroughly rhetorical and inter subjective, requires a sense of boundedness or separation that hybridity will always contest. It is not something that is easily meshed. If anything, sovereignty requires the making of a fence, not to keep things out, but to keep important things in” (79).

7 In college, sustained attention to MAE is complicated by the limited utility of usage instruction in classes that only meet a few times per week. See Myhill and Watson (2014) for a review of the literature on grammar instruction, which suggests that there may be utility in practical, meta-linguistic grammar teaching for K-12 students. In college, improvement at the sentence-level is either the responsibility of “developmental” writing classes or of the student, who can pursue that improvement using campus resources like writing centers. Still, instructors can help students understand where and how their writing shifts out of MAE.

8 This idea dates to the work of Donald Lloyd (1952). As Smitherman (1999) notes, Lloyd, a white scholar, was one of the most important influences on the SRTOL statement. Lloyd thought deeply about how to help speakers of non-mainstream English succeed as writers and communicators and rejected the claim that instructors of writing should explicitly teach MAE. Instead, he argues that effective writing pedagogies ought to let students write and communicate in their home languages and dialects while providing them with ample practice in reading and writing and feedback on idea development. Good writing, he concludes, and increased knowledge of MAE, will emerge from these practices.

9 McWhorter’s account of Second Wave Antiracism is attractive but somewhat pat. As he puts it, “Second Wave Antiracism in the 1970s and ’80s, battled racist attitudes and taught America that being racist is a moral flaw” (4-5). Work of this sort did occur throughout that period, but McWhorter’s categorizations ignore the forceful rhetoric of the Black Power movement during that time, much of which is very compatible with programmatic calls for resource and outcome redistribution. See, for instance, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967) by Kwame Ture, previously known as Stokely Carmichael, and Charles Hamilton.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrew Harnish

Andrew Harnish, is with the University of Alaska Anchorage. [email protected]