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5 What a Difference an Error Makes Ongoing Challenges for “White Innocence,” Historiography, and Disciplinary Knowledge Making By the close of chapter 4, I visited the following historical sites: (1) an HBCU‑locus and black student protest tradition as part and parcel of the polemics of teaching composition; (2) CUNY black and Puerto Rican student protests as literacies; and (3) the histories of black radicalism in the context of segregation (especially in the North and New York) as the context from which basic writing emerges. My goal was to resusci‑ tate these moments so that we can speak to and relate more critically to struggles against racial injustice. In this chapter, the text of Errors and Expectations will now be closely revisited, reread, and rewritten. I do not expect that most folk in the field will agree with or follow my arguments here. I imagine one of two responses from the majori‑ ty‑white constituency in composition‑rhetoric studies (now that I have dealt with the issues of knowing historical context): for the old guard, I will be seen as off base, as just going too damn far, or as representative of a bent toward cultural studies that has turned “us” away from all that good pedagogy, focus on style, and process theory in the days of old; for the new guard, many young white graduate students, who really want to do and be good with their students of color in the classroom and just really don’t know what to do with all that “different” syntax, they will simply wonder why “we” can’t interject classrooms with Errors and Expectations (still a seeming staple in graduate composition classrooms) and why I think this isn’t respectful of communities of color. My response to all that is quite simple: the current positioning of Errors and Expectations in the field and the moment of the 1960s is one that works to center white comfort and a white voice. I am not about either of those things so I am turning the gaze here and quite purposefully refusing to racially 197 198 Vernacular Insurrections domesticate my historical knowledge and ideological bent. Instead, I cen‑ ter a different kind of scholar in the field, the young folk who we still haven’t been able to draw en masse: namely, the black, Latino/a, and Asian graduate students, the radical white comrades, all the brothas and sistas sitting among a mostly white graduate classroom, conference, or bour‑ geois faculty asking themselves this about Shaughnessy: Who she callin foreign? Who she callin an ethnic enclave? Who she callin ambivalent? Am I the only one seein that sumthin done gone really wrong here? I can’t tell you how many private conversations and e‑mails I get about this, especially from graduate students of color across the country and, frankly, I am tired of it. So let me make it clear here that this chapter IS directed toward graduate students of color and radical white allies who are constantly asked to stop playing the “doubting” game and see what Errors and Expectations can teach them. This is for the graduate students who, instead of being heard, get downplayed in favor of the students of color espousing color‑blindness more than color‑consciousness. It is my hope for these color‑conscious folk, always explaining one’s self rather than actually learning, that they too can roll back the white gaze and instead, insert their own history, their own discourse, and their own positionality because it is always there for the taking. Just because you ain’t included in the master script doesn’t mean that you have not always been there. So in this chapter, we take on the white gaze. First, a contemporary discussion of presentations of language in Errors and Expectations is offered, followed by the rewritings of student texts that Shaughnessy includes in the book. My rewritings will happen in and with a conscious deployment of political discussions of racism, writing assignments, and discourse. After I go there, I offer an examination of the discourses of whiteness that were used to wage responses to both John Rouse in 1979 and Min‑Zhan Lu in 1992. And finally, the chapter ends with a (re)reading of Du Bois’s politics for writing style in Crisis as an untapped potential for writing studies in the twenty‑first century. Gunner reminds us that an original work itself is never “absolute” and does not need to be because...

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