I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric

1. Introduction

1 I n t r o d U C t I o n One autumn day, I was driving my daughter Grace to a figureskating lesson in Omaha. The journey would consume most of an hour and I was using the time to think about the keynote address I was scheduled to deliver at the National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing. The conference was less than a month away and I was stuck for words. So I was thinking, hard, and quite honestly I was going around in circles in my head when Grace piped up from the backseat. “Mommy, want to hear the song I learned today in music class?” “Sure,” I said, thinking that singing would keep her occupied and I could keep on working in my head. From behind me Grace’s voice rose clear and lovely, filling the car: Gonna ride up in the chariot, Soon-a in the mornin’, Ride up in the chariot, Soon-a in the mornin’, Ride up in the chariot, Soon-a in the mornin’, And I hope I’ll join the band. O, Lord, have mercy on me, O, Lord, have mercy on me, O, Lord, have mercy on me, And I hope I’ll join the band. 2 I HOPE I JOIN THE BAND Gonna meet my brother there, yes, Soon-a in the mornin’, Meet my brother there, yes, Soon-a in the mornin’, Meet my brother there, yes, Soon-a in the mornin’, And I hope I’ll join the band. O, Lord, have mercy on me, O, Lord, have mercy on me, O, Lord, have mercy on me, And I hope I’ll join the band. Gonna chatter with the angels, Soon-a in the morning’, Chatter with the angels, Soon-a in the mornin’, Chatter with the angels, Soon-a in the mornin’, And I hope I’ll join the band. I was moved to tears. The song was a gift. It gave voice to the sense of purpose I felt but had no words to express. This is what I want, I thought. I want my colleagues and the tutors with whom I work to join the band: to gather in solidarity, with joy and determination, with intentionality, openness, and mindfullness in the struggle against racism. I want for us all, together, to recognize the degree to which this struggle is already ongoing all around us in our everyday lives. As scholars of composition and rhetoric, as writers and teachers of writing, and, like it or not, as functionaries, gosh darn it, within institutions that, intentionally or not, are still implicated in the unequal and unjust organization of all of our lives along racial lines. I want us to join the band. Now, I am as well schooled in skepticism as any academic. During moments like these when I find myself quite suddenly Introduction 3 and unexpectedly overcome by the onrush of emotion, I begin to feel also some concatenation of shame and, frankly, wonder at my own susceptibility. I am not typically a joiner. I value my privacy and my independence. But as I thought more about Grace’s song and my response to it, including my sense of shame at being so moved by it, I realized there might be something more than weakness in my tears and something more than privacy and independence at stake in my resistance. There are few matters in life about which I possess any degree of certainty, but this much I know, both as a matter of life experience and as a result of my studies: racism splits us, slices us apart from one another, from our humanity, even from ourselves. Racism chains us to small, crabbed notions of self, demanding of us a simultaneous denial of relations between self and Other and dependence upon those relations for a sense not only of our own existence, but also and more especially for our sense of worth. Racism distresses memory so that those multitudes who came before us, whose labors for domination or for justice are woven into the tapestry of our lives, are remembered in shreds and tatters. Or metonymically, their collective contributions are woven into singular figures: reduced to the exceptional and heroic actions of individuals, as Martin Luther King, for example, has been made to stand for a generation of civil rights activists, and George Wallace and Barry Goldwater have come...