Uncommon Ground: Narcissistic Reading and Material Racism

Admitted to a large, urban university through the regular admissions process, the entering students had nonetheless all been identified as at risk for academic success because all had attended urban schools with reputations for underpreparing students for college-level work. I had been hired to teach these students composition in a summer program designed to jump-start their academic careers by providing eight-week intensive instruction in academic skills and problem-solving strategies, an effort repeated on many campuses each summer in various forms and informed by the same hope: that by immersing these students in academic culture before the onset of fall term, the university could diminish the dismal dropout rate that curtails the academic careers of so many promising inner-city students, many of them African American and some of them poor.

They entered my two composition classes in teams of twenty, grouped according to intended majors and carrying a seating chart they were required to sign to verify their attendance. The team concept was meant to draw them together, create a camaraderie that might sustain them. It took a few days, but the students soon re-sorted themselves. In the first class of the afternoon, the young African American women who dressed in a self-consciously urban fashion gathered on the side nearest the door. The African American women who displayed a more middle-class fashion sense settled into the center of the classroom, and three white women sat alongside them. A handful of African American men took possession of the back row, except one who settled in with the women by the door and another who sat in a chair by himself in the far corner of the front row. The second class of the afternoon settled into a similar pattern. By the end of the first week, the classroom seating charts could be plotted in shades of black and white, reinscribing the racial segregation so common in midwestern cities.¹

Part of my job is to teach against the racism that gives rise to this kind of material segregation. As William Pinar (1993: 66) put it in his essay arguing for an understanding of university curricula as racial texts, "Racism makes one stupid. The denials and distortions of memory and history it requires guarantee malignant intellectual development." The obligation to teach against it becomes especially pressing in a composition classroom because the distortions racism requires render us illiterate in the sense that Henry Giroux (1988) and others define the term: the inability or unwillingness to read history, its material effects, and present cultural forms in any way that allows one to intervene in the practices of everyday life that perpetuate inequities. Since racism produces illiteracy, teaching against it deserves the critical attention of composition theorists and teachers.

And we do pay attention to race. Our attention has yielded a much clearer understanding of the intersections among critical literacy and multiculturalism, intersections that can be, as Keith Gilyard (1999: 47) points out, elided: "Although challenges to racism and exclusion launched the multicultural movement, the rhetoric and aims of that movement are not necessarily co-terminous with the rhetoric and aims of, say, anti-racism. While the former often gestures toward the formulaic polycultural curriculum, the latter insists on unflinching criticism of racist domination and its impact on education, including composition curricula." Gilyard's differentiation relies on a commonsensical and commodified definition of multiculturalism as a grand narrative that celebrates our national unity across difference, a tale in which difference is rendered superficial and similarity substantial. As E. Shelley Reid (2004) reminds us, however, this widely circulated understanding of multiculturalism reduces a complex intellectual undertaking to the point that it may do more harm than good and calls for teaching practices that incorporate at least two of the five curricular criteria Ramon Gutierrez (1994) proposes for multicultural studies, including histories of ethnic and racial groups and their internal stratification; theories drawn from comparisons of groups; constructive principles for intra- and intergroup relations; and longitudinal studies of ethnic identity construction. Reid points out the institutional limits—including lack of institutional support for preparation and development...