The Race to Truth: Disarticulating Critical Thinking from Whiteliness

Language is as real, as tangible in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations . . . but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in old cycles, our process may be "revolutionary" but not transformative.

—Adrienne Rich (1979: 247-48)

Leading intellectuals tend to assume responsibility for imagining alternatives and do so within a set of discourses and institutions burdened genealogically by multifaceted complicities with power that make them dangerous to people. As agencies of these discourses that greatly affect the lives of people one might say leading intellectuals are a tool of oppression and most so precisely when they arrogate the right and power to judge and imagine efficacious alternatives—a process that we might suspect, sustains leading intellectuals at the expense of others.

—Paul Bové (1986: 227)

Within the academic nervous system, scholarly activity remains the primary source of our cultural capital. Critical analysis of oversights in the work of others remains more lucrative than critical reflections on similar oversights in one's own work, on problems facing one another's work, and on how to help one another address these problems.

—Min-Zhan Lu (1999: 193)

The epigraphs by Adrienne Rich and Paul Bové suggest the difficulties that feminist and critical pedagogues face when we attempt to enact transformation in our classrooms and teaching practices. Rich urges us to find ways of naming, knowing, and being in the world that move outside sites of revolutions and into spaces of transformation. Bové reminds us that, as we take responsibility for imagining potential transformations, our positions of power and authority are reinscribed, making us increasingly entrenched in systems of privilege and oppression. Feminist and critical approaches to writing instruction have been criticized for the extent to which our agenda is revolution, not transformation, that is, for our tendency merely to replace dominant ideologies with feminist and critical ones (see Hairston 1992; Knoublauch and Brannon 1993; Thralls and Blyler 1993; Wallace and Ewald 2000). How we reify our own positions of power and privilege has also drawn powerful criticism (see Bizzell 1992; Ellsworth 1992; Luke 1992; Gore 1993; Boyd 1999; Lu 1999). In particular, Jennifer Gore (1993: 11) examines the discourses of feminist and critical pedagogies in order to explicate her own struggles with the disjunction between the transformative goals and the actual manifestations of these pedagogies. Through a Foucauldian theoretical lens she argues that they are doomed not to achieve their transformative agendas because they operate in "regimes of truth," in which "the need, desire, or willingness to question one's own work is often lost in the desire to believe that one has found 'truth,' that one is 'right.'" Gore's analysis, which echoes Bové's appraisal of leading intellectuals, encourages us to be more attentive to the discourse of our pedagogies and to be more self-reflexive about them. Finally, Min-Zhan Lu, quoted in the third epigraph above, argues that we need to recognize our compulsion as academics to critique others' work rather than our own. In lieu of this compulsion, she proposes "critical affirmation," a means of bringing critical analysis, hope, and courage to bear on the struggle to enact social transformation.

It is in the spirit of critical affirmation, striving to reconcile contradictions between the theory and the practice of alternative pedagogies yet believing in their transformative potential, that I hope to contribute to conversations about feminist and critical pedagogies in writing classrooms. Where Gore analyzes these pedagogies on a macro level, I analyze them on a micro level by problematizing one of their central tenets, critical thinking. ¹ Ultimately, I argue that critical thinking is too often conflated with feminist and critical ideologies; seductively entrenched in whitely judgmentalism, righteousness, and Truth; and therefore complicitous with the systems of power, privilege, and knowledge that feminist and critical pedagogies aim to transform.

I employ Minnie Bruce Pratt's (1984) and Marilyn...