African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives

8. Coming from the Heart: African American Students, Literacy Stories, and Rhetorical Education

155 8 Coming from the Heart: African American Students, Literacy Stories, and Rhetorical Education Elaine B. Richardson WHILE ONE OF THE GOALS OF THE STUDY PRESENTED HERE WAS to make visible vernacular discourse/rhetorical patterns and strategies in students’ texts, the scope of identified strategies and policies is broader. Extending the research tradition interested in exploring vernacular discourses and literacies in relation to school discourses and literacies, this essay focuses attention on the academic personas acquired by two African American students. Exploring issues surrounding Black students’ acquisition of school and rhetorical personas may help us to understand how to help them acquire critical stances that will help them participate more meaningfully in official sites providing rhetorical education. Although it is a fact that many people of African ancestry do not identify with African American culture, hardly any of us can escape the aura of race and class issues since they are interwoven into the cultural fabric of our society. Background Freedom through literacy has been an important trope in stories about literacy acquisition for African Americans. These complex stories revolve around issues of dominance, suppression, economics, culture, racism, freedom , equality, and justice. As Valerie Smith (1987) notes, this narrative runs throughout the experience of many African Americans. Literacy, in and of itself, helped to develop and organize the thoughts of Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, and others; however, it was the application of literacy in its expanded uses and senses 156 Elaine B. Richardson that helped these great Americans to create new stories about their lives, by inventing lives for themselves and making life better for others. In fact, literacy stories permeate the history of Black people in the twentieth century. In the enslavement era, those stories concerned laws against Africans learning to read and write, and they were transmitted by word of mouth and through enslavement narratives. During Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, stories reflected how literacy was used as a gatekeeping function, for example, how literacy tests operated to deny African Americans the right to vote. The lives of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois have come to symbolize two dominant stories about African American literacy during the twentieth century: Washington’s narrative focused on helping Black folks develop literacy skills necessary for them to function within the roles established for them by White society , whereas Du Bois’s story proposed that a “talented tenth” be academically educated to lead Black people to political, cultural, economic, and social freedom. This education would not limit the possibilities of what Blacks could do or become and would rival the education received by the most privileged White Americans. Another important theme circulating in various stories about literacy in American culture is reflected in a well-known childhood Black folk rhyme that sums up a truth that critical race theorists and others are paid great sums to stretch out into lengthy texts and speeches: If you black, get back if you brown, stick around if you yellow, you mellow if you white, you right This rhyme illustrates the mostly unwritten rule: the closer you and your ideology are to White supremacist ideals, the better your chances of assimilating into mainstream White middle-class society. Most Black people living in any era know that story. The ideologies of White supremacy clearly resonate through these earlier literacy narratives and are still a major motif in stories about literacy education in our classrooms today. In contemporary times, though, the visibility of White supremacist ideologies is, ironically, at once the backbone and the distant background in literacy education. Let us explore some of these insidiously visible, yet obscured, stories. This one comes from many scholars who identify African American culture as a subculture of American culture. They believe that most African Americans are non–second language learners and that the shift Coming from the Heart 157 from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) to “Standard English ” or the language of wider communication (LWC) is one that should be “natural” for them. African American language is reduced to a dialect rather than seen as a discourse involving a system of living in the world with others (Gee, 1996). These scholars are unable to identify a dominant ethos underlying African American lifestyle that transcends geographic boundaries. As the story goes, (middle-class) African Americans assimilate to middle-class school culture and acquire literacy much the same as European Americans, since the...