Notes
179 NOTES Chapter 1. The Development and Evolution of High-Risk Writing Instruction 1. For further discussion concerning the proliferation of high-risk programs, see Douglass; Lavin and Hyllegard. 2. I use the term “high-risk/BW” here and in chapters 3 through 6 in order to reflect the complex racialization of these programs since their inception. Whereas most highrisk programs were originally conceived as race-conscious programs, many were reconceived in partially or fully color-blind terms as they were transformed into BW programs during the mid-1970s (see chapter 3). The term “high-risk/BW” serves as my attempt to capture this complicated history, especially since the mid-1970s. 3. See, e.g., Horner and Lu; Mutnick; McNenny; Grego and Thompson, Teaching/ Writing; Greene and McAlexander; Otte and Mlynarczyk. 4. In Talkin’ and Testifyin’, Geneva Smitherman similarly argues that racialized appeals to Standard English in the context of high-risk/BW programs were intended to reify the idea that “speech that conforms to white, middle class standards of etiquette is better and more logical” than all other forms (211). 5. Writing in the early 1970s, James Sledd contended that those advocating for raceconscious change within high-risk/BW programs were not necessarily advocating against instruction in Standard English: “There is not . . . and there never has been, a serious proposal [among those advocating for race-based change] that standard English should not be taught at all, if for no other reason than because its teaching is inevitable. Most teachers of English speak it (or try to speak it); most books are written in it (somnigraphy being sadly typical); and since every child, if it is possible, should learn to read, schoolchildren will see and hear standard English in the schools as they also see and hear it on TV. Inevitably their own linguistic competence will be affected” (“Doublespeak” 455). Instead, Sledd argued, individuals espousing race-conscious change insisted that focusing on Standard English must never eclipse the larger need to “know and respect our children’s language as we demand that they know and respect our own. And we should make no harsh, head-on attempt to change their language, to make them speak and write like us. If they value our world and what it offers, then they will take the initiative in change, and we can cautiously help them” (456). Sledd’s arguments thus share much in common with those of Rose today: i.e., the goal of race consciousness is not to deny the value of standards entirely, but rather to investigate standards and their effects with an intensely critical eye. 6. Bell does not view race as a fixed or static social category, but rather as “an indeterminate social construct that is continually reinvented and manipulated to maintain domination and enhance white privilege” (Race 9). But Bell nonetheless does use the terminology of “white” and “black” to denote the racialized dimensions of “relative so- 180 Notes to Pages 8–12 cial status” (10), particularly those related to dynamics of racialized “domination and exploitation” (11). 7. See, e.g., L’Eplattenier and Mastrangelo; Soliday; DeGenaro; Tassoni; Hoogeveen; Greene and McAlexander. 8. See, e.g., Grabill; Grego and Thompson, Teaching/Writing. 9. See also Lavin and Hyllegard; Bastedo and Gumport; Parker and Richardson. 10. For a number of other projects with a similar focus, see Ritter; Stanley; Grego and Thompson, Teaching/Writing; Otte and Mlynarczyk. 11. Parks notes numerous times that the SRTOL was developed through the racialized activism and agitation of students of color during the late 1960s and early 1970s. He even dedicates an entire chapter of his text to describing “Black Power/Black English” as a catalyst for this change, arguing that in order to “understand the SRTOL’s relationship to the 1960s . . . it is important to understand the competing images of Black English during the period in which Black Power originated” (91). But Parks ultimately concludes that race is less useful than class as the primary lens through which to understand the history of the SRTOL: he wonders openly, in fact, whether the CCCC might not have “too quickly appropriated African American struggles for social and economic justice into educational paradigms that reinforced hegemonic understandings of how race and class work in the United States” (5) as it conceptualized and implemented the SRTOL. What the CCCC should have aimed for instead, he says, is a more systematic examination of “the economic aspects of discrimination based on race, gender, or...
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