‘This the ConscienceRebel’: class solidarity, congregational capital, and discourse as activism in the writing of black female college students

Abstract

ConscienceRebels are women of African descent who align themselves with the struggles of working class/working poor black communities and intentionally counter and re-script exclusive, dominant discourses. Any self-identified black female college student who focuses on the black poor or working class in their writing forms the basis of this study which attempts to provide a heuristic for educating black female undergraduate writers. The overarching goal is to highlight purpose and form in the writing of ConscienceRebels in order to wed three discursive and political movements for their writing instruction and education: class solidarity, cultural capital, and discourse as activism.

Keywords:

• theories of teaching
• teacher thinking and knowledge
• teacher socialisation

Notes

1. Here the student is referring to a 2004 song by R&B singer, Usher, about the bad break-up of a relationship called ‘Let it burn’.

2. Jim Crow refers to the racial caste system, way of life, and set of laws in the United States that was endorsed by the US Supreme Court with the case, Plessy v. Ferguson. Jim Crow made African Americans second-class citizens, sanctioned anti-Black racism, upheld the notion of white superiority, and condoned lynching. Laws were enacted across varied states that took various forms. The day-to-day lives of African Americans were also managed by a variety of ‘customs’: white and blacks could not shake hands, eat together (unless there was a partition), drink at the same fountains, attend/be seen at the same public institutions. African Americans also could not show one another affection in public settings, be given courtesy titles (such as Dr, Mr, Mrs, Sir, or Ma’am), ever take the right of way at intersections, or accuse a white person of lying, etc. The Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University offers an online archive of state laws and various primary documents depicting this particular form of racial apartheid in the United States (http://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/menu.htm).

3. This study is part of a larger project that looks at the collective experiences, political stances, and audacities-toward-articulation of black female students’ writings in college. This article constitutes one of four ‘overarching concepts’ that I am currently researching. The other three themes include: (1) color/beauty Caste Systems – white supremacist notions of good hair, bad hair, light skin, dark skin – the whole arsenal of body politics that function as societal discourses that divide, differentiate, and lead to unjust social practices felt most strongly by black women; (2) black mothering/other-mothering – student chronicling of the lives and experiences of one’s own mothers and othermothers, or mothers and othermothers chronicling their own stories of going to college; (3) migratory subjectivity as diasporic activism and action – a transnational ideological force in writing. I closely examine the public texts of black college female students, ages 18–35, in college writing classrooms at four different institutions. The women central to this project are ages 18–35 since 18 is still considered the traditional age for college students; meanwhile those women who are past 35 years of age are generally classified as re-entry students and have been omitted from this study. I select 20 texts to represent each of these four overarching concepts, though there were, in many cases, hundreds of such texts to choose from. The criteria of expressed permission from women who I am still in contact with offered me the focus and selection criteria of the 20 texts. For each of the 20 texts of each overarching concept, I asked each woman writer/rhetor if she still upholds the beliefs she espoused in her writing. Each woman writer/rhetor was also asked how she identifies herself such that each writer/rhetor calls herself a black woman and woman of African descent vs. race-evasive or black-evasive language like multiracial, just a human, just a person, beyond black-and-white, other, or Cablinasian. All essays were coded and analyzed using the constant comparative method (CCM) of analysis. Though CCM is not necessarily a radical intervention, I am taking on Scheurich’s advice in relation to how to think about CCM: even the most radial qualitative researchers are systematically coding and analyzing themes and patterns so CCM is one way of engaging my interpretative process. Categories were found and analyzed until they became saturated, meaning no new categories were apparent to me (Robson, 2002). As a kind of self-check on the prevalence of the categories marked, I used my ‘gradebooks’ over the past 13 years and implemented the constant comparative method of analysis here also. For major classroom writing projects, I make various notes, next to the grade, of students’ chosen writing topics. I use these notes to direct subsequent discussions, reading assignments, and final research projects. My ‘gradebook’ was, thus, a kind of check on my focalization as a place of power because of its ability to shape representation (Holley & Colyar, 2009). I needed to grasp whether or not the students from whom I had secured consent did not really capture a larger and whole vision of the black female students who have taught me in the past years.

4. Collins’ notion of a ‘praxis researcher’ forms the basis of this definition and speaks most critically for me to what it means to be a composition–rhetorician writing about one’s own classrooms. Collins has continually called for new black praxis research that addresses intersectional political locations (Crenshaw, 1988, 1991) and uncovers research, theory, and sites of activism that work against systems of racial, sexual, and class oppression. As an educator, stamping my work with Collins’ notion of critical praxis research allows me to speak from a research-space other than the usual university/discipline-approved observer in a field site. Collins’ notion also allows me to eschew the race-less construction of the individual researcher simply trying to improve her own and others’ practices, immune from the analyses and impact of the larger social inequalities that (educational) institutions maintain. Such research toward pedagogical ‘solutions and pronouncements’ (Gore, 1993) is dangerous in that it assumes that liberatory spaces for black women will be achieved through teachers’ manuals and lists of classroom suggestions and strategies rather than ideological overhaul of schooling’s structural racism and the majority-white composition faculty who benefit from it.

5. I have only taught this course once in my 13 years of teaching, but the course provides a good lens into how I approach teaching. The theme for the course was ‘Community cultural wealth and the written word’, with community cultural wealth serving as a link to work in educational studies related to critical race theory (CRT), an outgrowth of CRT in its initial conception in legal studies (Barnes, 1990; Bell, 1987; Bell, 1992; Crenshaw et. al, 1995; Delgado & Stefancic, 1995; Williams, 1991). In CRT in educational studies, one argument, in simple terms, has been that all discourses, activities, placements, and assignments related to schooling as an institution are inherently racialized constructs (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Dixson & Rousseau, 2006).

6. It seems worth noting here, however, John McClendon’s (2007) reminder that Robinson has significantly departed from Marxism – a fact that McClendon might both celebrate and lament – and calls Robinson’s work a kind of Marxism in Ebony rather than a Black Marxism (since there could/should be no such thing). There is, thus, a chance here then that the ConscienceRebels and I have also made this departure since I am aligning us so closely with Robinson.

7. DMX. ‘Party up (up in here)’; And then there was X. Ruff Riders, 1999.

8. Poor Righteous Teachers, ‘Rock dis funky joint’; Holy Intellect. Arista Records, 1990.

9. Mystic, ‘The Life’, Cuts for luck and scars for freedom. Good Vibe Recordings, 2001.

10. MC Lyte, ‘Act Like You Know’, Act like you know. Atlantic Records, 1991.