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Introduction Runnin with the Rabbits, but Huntin with the Dogs On the Makings of an Intellectual Autobiography After five years of teaching high school, I needed space and time to think through what I had witnessed in the education of the African American and Latino/a youth whom I had taught. I wrote to my college undergraduate mentor, Sylvia Wynter, explaining that I was taking time off to “think my way out of this twilight zone that has become my daily reality.” The personal statements that my graduating high school seniors had written for college were to be a guiding intellectual force for my graduate study in English. These were students I had followed since 1994 when they were freshman at a new high school in the Bronx, New York. I had asked them once to close their eyes and imagine what they wanted from a college education. Why was education important to their lives? One young woman talked about her mother’s heroin addiction and argued that college would show her how to offer guidance and support to other young people living with these experiences, as well as enable her to impact drug rehabilitation in her community. Another young woman wrote about the murder of her brother and the legal system that ignored it. She wanted to understand the world that created such life chances for African American men and then intervene in the judicial system that did not offer them justice. One young man talked about a friend who had a minimum wage job, went on to college, and later started a business. He explained that it was the way that critical literacy, not material success, could offer him a sense of independence and freedom too, just as it had for Frederick Douglass in Narrative. These were the stories that I held closely to my side, like they were my human companions, as I reentered the doors of higher education. I felt and knew that my students and I 1 2 Vernacular Insurrections were connected to alternative histories and definitions of literacies and I wanted to sink myself more fully into those histories. I was, however, apprehensive about my high school students’ images of college because I did not believe that the American university would match their intellectual, political, and social visions, except for the work of the few marginalized professors of color who organically link their scholarship to the political situation of racially subjugated masses. When I enrolled as a master’s degree student with a teaching assistantship that allowed me to teach two freshman composition courses per semester, I was met with the very tangible reality of my own apprehensions about higher education in the academic curriculum that was offered to me and my undergraduate students. In the end, I had simply traded one twilight zone for another. My initial goals were to rethink politics of critical reading and literary texts for urban youth of color by using English Studies for curriculum theory, critical pedagogy, and critical literacy. I made the assumption that composition‑rhetoric studies would provide a space for this rethinking and I was certainly correct, only I had not imagined that I would have to fight so hard to do that work. Before my college composition classes began, I attended my first composition‑exclusive conference, a day‑long conference designed to introduce doctoral students teaching across multiple campuses in the university system to the teaching of composition at the various campuses throughout the city. An overview was first provided of the demographics of the student population, also highlighting which campuses had the largest concentrations of black (making clear distinctions between West Indian and African American students) and Latino/a populations (making no ethnic distinctions). The purpose for this public overview was to offer insight into how “different” the City University of New York1 looked from “other” college campuses across the country while also stressing that these students were as “mainstream” as any “other” population. We were advised that these students usually wanted the same “mainstream” liberal arts curriculum as “everyone else” and not a “multicultural focus” that many might assume. There was never any mention as to who “everyone else” was or how and why such “wants” had been determined and by whom, particularly since the speaker, a compositionist, did not represent the populations that were numerically cited (nor did the graduate students). We were also told that these undergraduate students were mostly looking to become members of the middle class. After this...

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