Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in Composition-Literacies Studies

Chapter 2: “I Want To Be African”: Tracing Black Radical Traditions with “Students’ Rights to Their Own Language”

2 “I Want To Be African” Tracing Black Radical Traditions with “Students’ Rights to Their Own Language” At a time when ev’rybody and they momma, black and white academics alike, call everything black folk said and did in ’60s social justice movement essentialist, Parks’s (2000) Class Politics: The Movement for the Students’ Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) came along and blew up a new spot, giving us a different context and paradigm.1 Class Politics uses SRTOL to reassess institutional and pedagogical reform. He places a central emphasis on a foundational argument of the SRTOL resolution: We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language-the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another. In order to locate and historicize this kind of stance on social dominance that was wedded to a politics and policy of language education, Parks resuscitates the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, the New Left, antiwar movements, and Women’s Liberation for composition studies. Right from jump, he lets you know that “composition studies owes its current status to the counterhegemonic struggles waged around access to higher education.”2 He even takes it straight to Shaughnessy and lets you know that without that history, she would not have had an audience for her ideas. This is not that same ole song and dance about access coming from the super-courageous explorers out there in the big bad higher education 73 74 Vernacular Insurrections jungle, stomping through the ever-wilder brush of anti-remediation legislation , giving the suffering natives that good ole dosage of the academic discourse serum that the empire has purposely kept from them, so that we can now act like we have significantly—both ideologically and pragmatically —undone literacy paradigms in the academic empire. Naw, Parks don’t go there to this kind of jungle madness and I give him his props for that.3 By revisiting the work of the Black Caucus, particularly the work of Ernece Kelly, and the radical rhetorics connected to Black Power as part of Black Radical Traditions, I hope to offer a frame to insert the picture-possibility of a black vernacularized paradigm for critical literacy and social justice. Today the possibilities for SRTOL, always imagined and yet never fully achieved, fall squarely in line with our inadequate responses to the anti-systemic nature of ’60s social justice movements. The legacy of SRTOL and its current possibilities must also be understood inside of the systemic calls for change forwarded by Black Power movements. In his work on critical social theory that has sustained and mirrored the situation of black folk, Outlaw asks us to grapple with Black Power as more than a political campaign for civil and human rights, but also as complex processes that moved toward “consciousness-raising” and “consciousness-transforming” cultural organizations, curricula, disciplines , and programmatic possibilities.4 A nationalist tenor meant that the specific histories and interests of black communities would propel unique national, state, and local educational, political, cultural, and economic organizations that helped, as just one example, elect as many black candidates to political office as during Reconstruction following the Civil War. In sum, the Black Power movements have set the tenor and tone for our twenty-first-century referents of identity, difference, and recognition.5 For college composition, the impulse of the Black Power was articulated via two concurrent platforms: (1) a protracted campaign for social justice and racial equality by African American scholars in and against NCTE as they formed their first Black Caucus; and (2) a protracted campaign against racism in education where language rights carried the Black Power banners of self-determination, independence, and freedom from white rule. “Murder of the American Dream” Before SRTOL, the fields of composition-rhetoric and linguistics advocated the legitimacy of all language variations alongside the social inad- 75 “I Want To Be African” equacy of nonstandardized forms, what you might call the sister-policy to Myrdal’s American Dilemma, as discussed in the previous chapter. As Smitherman argues in “CCC’s Role in the Struggle for Language Rights,” the turning point was the murder of Martin Luther King...