Rethinking Racism: Emotion, Persuasion, and Literacy Education in an All-White High School

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“Rethinking Racism surprises, amazes, and indeed teaches. . . . Jennifer Seibel Trainor shows us how our old categories—middle class, working class, and, of course, white—occlude as much as they let us see, and prevent us from finding the ways that schools undercut their own attempts at explicit antiracist pedagogy.” —Catherine Prendergast, author of Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education “Rethinking Racism offers essential insights into the discursive dynamics of an ordinary English classroom. Trainor shows us the rhetorical complexities of teaching and learning that interfere with the goals and ambitions of teaching for social justice.” —Julie Lindquist, author of A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar In this groundbreaking work, Jennifer Seibel Trainor proposes a new understanding of the roots of racism, one that is based on attention to emotion and its relationship to a hidden curriculum of race promoted by common classroom practices. Telling the story of a year spent in an all-white high school, Trainor suggests that contrary to prevailing opinion, racism often does not stem from ignorance, a lack of exposure to other cultures, or the desire to protect white privilege. Rather, the causes of racism are frequently found in the realms of emotion and language, as opposed to rational calculations of privilege or political ideologies. Trainor maintains that racist assertions often originate not from prejudiced attitudes or beliefs but from metaphorical connections between racist ideas and nonracist values. These values are reinforced, even promoted by schooling via “emotioned rules” in place in classrooms: in tacit, unexamined lessons, rituals, and practices that exert a powerful—though largely unacknowledged—persuasive force on student feelings and beliefs about race. Jennifer Seibel Trainor is an associate professor in the graduate program in composition studies at San Francisco State University. Her research on racism, whiteness, and literacy has been published in CCC, as well as in Research in the Teaching of English. southern illinois university press 1915 university press drive mail code 6806 carbondale, il 62901 www.siu.edu/~siupress Printed in the United States of America Cover illustration: iStockphoto © Jose Gil COMPOSITION / EDUCATION isbn 0-8093-2873-9 isbn 978-0-8093-2873-4 ...