Stories of Antiracist Theory, Instruction, and Practice: A Review Essay

I believe that we’ve all been telling stories all along, but some stories are elevated to the status of theory, scholarship, and literature, while, too often, minoritized perspectives are relegated to marginalized or overlooked “cultural rhetorics” methods or genres.

–Aja Y. Martinez, Counterstory¹

An Itchy Story: Y Sigue La Comezón

I start with a story. Immediately after graduating from high school, two of my friends and I decided to take a road trip to explore a little bit of the US—I think we had watched too many white folk movies and their liberating road escapades. We hopped in the car and got to it. I drove while my two friends sat in the passenger seat and the back seat. It’s important to note racial and linguistic compositions. I pass off as white-ish when I’m in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas because I’m lighter complected, but once out of the Valley, I’m mostly Brown. My friends have darker complexions, so they don’t pass off as white anywhere. We possess these complexions and speak with a certain “Valley accent.” So about four hours on the road, a cop caught us speeding. It’s my first ticket, so I’m not sure what to expect. An older white officer, probably in his fifties, walks toward us, positions himself slightly behind the driver’s window, and interrogates us. We respond by informing him that we’re stopping in a few places, but Pennsylvania serves as our final destination. My friend on the passenger side adds that his tía will host us over there, so that’s where we’ll be staying several nights. We wait for a response while the officer pieces this information in his head.

As we wait, my friend on the passenger side scratches his upper right calf with his right hand. It turns out to be a horrible time to get an itch. The officer immediately yells, “Get your hands where I can see them!” My nervousness turns to terror, so I place my hands on the steering wheel, gripping it as if I’m holding a weightlifting bar with 300 pounds on it. The officer explains, “That’s how you get shot, son!” I feel my heart beating throughout my body. My hands tremble. I get the infraction slip and drive off. I call my parents to let them know I got a ticket but don’t elaborate on the incident. Talking about the infraction slip as a souvenir, my dad jokes, “Bueno, ya tienes un recuerdito del viaje.”

In educational settings, I used to frequently think: Where do these stories belong? In my own field of rhet-comp, I contemplate how to make the connection between composing practices and the criminalization of racialized bodies. Here’s a preliminary response. In comparison to white folks, students of color receive less education yet more criminalization, so the composition course should concern itself with understanding how these students of color fail to reach/enroll in these courses, or once there, how these courses sometimes propagate similar stances. That is, the composition course should understand racism in white America. For the rhetoric component, I consider how to embed the above story as a rhetorical event and interaction, so I learned to use the word “democratic.” Understanding this aforementioned story in relationship with other stories complicates and advances democratic practice in the US—patriotism at its finest.

In “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Black gender and race theorist Sylvia Wynter asks in 1992,

If, as Ralph Ellison alerted us in his The Invisible Man, we...