One extraordinary thing I’ve come to appreciate in the past two years at Hostos is the fact that its history is fascinating and even inspiring. As I learn more and more about the institution—why it was founded, whom it serves—I feel quite privileged to be a member of its faculty and in a position to promote its mission. I have been affiliated in the past with institutions built upon shameful legacies, so to serve an academic community with the potential to dismantle oppression motivates a lot of the pedagogical work I do.
I’ve been collecting materials about the college to use in my developmental and first-year writing courses, largely because I’m interested in learning more, but also because the issues raised by those who established this campus remain pertinent today (educational apartheid, poverty endemic to the South Bronx). And, for that matter, students love learning this bit of history. So many arrive at Hostos largely because of proximity and affordability, so when they learn that they just so happen to be at a school whose mission relates directly to their own educational goals, and when they identify with the reasons for which people founded the school in the first place, this knowledge ignites a spark.
Below, I’m compiling a list of articles and resources for future reference, and because I think everyone can benefit from learning more about this particular history. It’s a tale that documents the power of grassroots organizing, the importance of the Young Lords and other 1960s radical movements, and the educational obstacles endemic to historically oppressed communities.
I have spent a lot of time this semester, and while preparing to teach freshman writing composition this semester, thinking about assessment. I’m experimenting with not grading essays, “ungrading,” and questioning the feedback I provide to students about their writing. I also am trying to figure out ways to make the students’ essays feel more public to them, creating an audience of actual readers for them to write for, and wondering how other people do this in their classes. I’ll report back later on what I’ve found out in this experimental semester.
Meanwhile, outside my own classroom bubble, a lot of people have been prompted to discuss assessment in the wake of Professor Asao B. Inoue’s recent speech at the CCCC conference in Pittsburgh. I’ve been re-reading that speech, and don’t want to comment on that here. But after reading it, I came across a post on a grad-school friend’s Facebook wall, asking how we grade students’ vernacular. Like, do we take off points if a student doesn’t use proper Standard American English?
I think my response encapsulated my current feelings on this matter, and I just want to preserve it here for posterity:
Ah! I have been wondering this as well for a while and have spent the past year realizing there is a whole field of people who study this stuff deeply. First, check out Asao Inoue’s Presidential speech from this year’s CCCC conference (the MLA of Rhet-Comp world). It was an indictment: https://docs.google.com/…/11ACklcUmqGvTzCMPlETC…/edit…. Next, you can read his book “Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies,” which goes into depth about this: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/inoue/ecologies.pdf. There are other people who talk about this stuff really well. Alfie Kohn (https://www.alfiekohn.org/) is a good place to start.
Here’s the short of it: I hear a lot of people say: “You have to teach them how to write SAE in order to give them access to blahblahblah cultural capital blahblahblah.” First, this is racist because it presupposes that people don’t know how to register switch. Second, no, that’s not true. Third, good writing is about communication and meaning. Frankly, I’d take Cardi B on politics any day over Trump. She’s a former stripper from Highbridge and Trump has his Ivy League credibility, yet her ad hoc political statements have more substance than he’s capable of regurgitating from a teleprompter. People are surprised by her depth because we are racist: we’re conditioned to look down on people like her. So what are we looking for in communication? Substance? or things that tag a speaker as having “cultural capital” aka “white”? I like to take a direct approach in the classroom about this: we discuss register switching, the whiteness of academic English, and racism. My experience is that my students have already internalized a lot of racist rhetoric about their vernaculars and are relieved to discuss these things openly.
I would also like to state, for the record, that there technically is no “Standard American English.” Some countries do have an official language of record (France, for instance), which is why it is noteworthy that we do not have one. I try to muster the courage to say this once in a while in official settings, but I’m often met with disbelief and frustration. If we are to accept that there is no standard, then what, in fact, are we experts of after all? And how do we maintain our hierarchical position above students if we have no “standard” on which we lean to support our claims of superiority? (Bad mixed metaphor, I know.)
I did not spend ten years as a graduate student just learning about grammar, after all. I did study a lot of history, and most of it (history) is a record of a world without dictionaries. Even Shakespeare himself spelled his name differently on different occasions.
I’ve been meaning, since last summer when I read this book, to begin to post more about what I’m reading. Mainly as a strategy for documenting this for myself (since I’m the main audience of my own blog, according to my own statistics).
Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (Duke, 2017) came out at a time which, for me, was personally very difficult. I had just finished my Ph.D., I had moved back to NYC, I didn’t know whether or not I’d ever be able to teach college again or spend time ever again with the research project I’d spent nearly 10 years developing, and I was coping with the longterm effects of some deeply ignored trauma. When I read Ahmed, who openly discusses the trauma of institutionalized academic work, it felt like a balm. I continue to recommend the book to people who work in institutions—academic, religious, corporate— plagued by sexual and racial trauma.
Book cover of Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (Duke 2017)
It was on the heels of reading this book too that I finally developed confidence to teach feminist theory and history in my own courses. I started to talk about it in my high school English class, and then when I moved into the college classroom, I developed a unit on feminism for my composition course.
Something that has taken me aback: Students communicate a sense of relief during the feminism unit. They often don’t know what the term “feminist” means, they (both men and women) recognize themselves and their experiences in the theory presented, and they take ownership of feminism on their own terms. They often share the readings with family members. They look at their personal histories and at their cultural communities through a new lens. The student body at my college is 67% female, and once the discussion gets going, men express amazement at their female classmates’ experiences. Nearly every semester, a heated debate will develop over normative expectations about who should pay for a meal, for instance. This semester, a lesbian student interrupted the debate to describe the way in which paternalistic traditions can ironically impose themselves lesbian relationships too. She made the whole class crack up during a story she told about confusion ensuing about the check at the end of one of her dates.
Anyway, I thank Ahmed for giving me the confidence to go forth as an averred feminist in my career. I also appreciate that Living a Feminist Life gave me more of a background to discuss race as a primary component of feminist discourse. In fact, once again, it was a student who interrupted a discussion about unequal pay to remind us that the statistics I presented (the standard “women make 80-cents on the man’s dollar) really only apply to white women. In a classroom in which I’m the only white person, this sort of point lands heavily. Roxane Gay criticizes what she calls “Capital-F feminism” helpfully for its history of excluding women of color and the LGBTQ* community in Bad Feminist (2014), which is on my syllabus and which my students read avidly. But Ahmed’s chapters on “Diversity Work” in particular forced me to reckon with my own years of white feminist indoctrination. I’m still learning.
The experience of being a feminist is often an experience of being out of tune with others. (Ahmed 40)
My indoctrination as a feminist—a white feminist in particular—began early. In seventh-grade (age 12), in a used book store, I found Susan Brownmiller’s groundbreaking book on sexual violence Men, Women, and Rape. It was old (probably an early edition from the late 1970s), but each moldy yellow page shocked me. On the same used-bookstore shelf, I found Marilyn French’s 1977 novel The Women’s Room. I went around school for a few days after I’d read it asking teachers (who were “alive way back then”) if what the books said was true. “Was it really like that?” I remember asking one. She took me seriously: “Yes.” I guess the only surprise left in store for me was just how little has changed since the late 1970s.
At a yard-sale that year, I bought a hippie kiln-forged handmade mug that had the words “Pro-Choice” carved into it, and you better believe I carried it around with me. Even to my piano camp, where I initiated heated lunch-room debates with the fundamentalist Christians and Catholics I’d grown up with. We debated abortion rights and evolution and the existence of god with the cheerful abandon of young sophists with little, yet, at stake.
I Shot Andy Warhol came out in 1996, and you better believe that my friend Lara and I went to see it at the local art house theater. We bought Valerie Solanas’ S.C.U.M Manifesto, and I read it on the school bus, hoping for someone to ask me about it. This was my feminist training: flawed, undirected, and white white white. It was a start. It had an effect: it trained me to always observe gender. Even when I became shyer, less confident, depressed, and later traumatized—unable to speak up—I still noticed.
One consequence of my feminism has been that I have felt like a burden. Ahmed’s book felt like a “relief” to me was because it recognizes the loneliness of being what she calls the feminist killjoy. (Her blog, which carries this word as its title, was how I learned about her in the first place.) This is why she concludes the book with what she calls the “killjoy survival kit” – because “becoming a killjoy can feel, sometimes, like making your life harder than it needs to be” (235). Because when you know that things are bad, and you feel compelled to bring up the badness, you are responsible for “messing up” the meeting dynamic, or making someone realize their friend sexually harasses women, or “ruining” the simple pleasures of listening to “Beat It.” You don’t get kudos or raises or promotions from pointing this out to people. Ahmed’s reification of the feminist killjoy feels so familiar to me because it’s a role I’ve inhabited for a long time. Ahmed describes this process:
I have already noted how when diversity workers talk about walls, the walls become phantom walls, as if we bring the walls into existence by talking about their existence. (Ahmed 142)
You describe the problem and then are blamed for creating the problem. When you describe a problem, you are betraying solidarity.
A friend of mine recently gave me some advice after sitting and patiently listening to me list my woes about conflicts I have with people. She told me that I probably need to set aside more time in my week to be with feminists. She explained that there are people out there that already agree with me, to whom I don’t need to justify feminism. I realized that I’m in a defensive grip – maybe from growing up in a conservative place, maybe as a result of being a member of a misogynistic religious community for so long, and maybe as a result of my own trauma. But my friend is right. After all, as Ahmed explains in the intro, “to live a feminist life is to live in very good company” (17). Quite a relief.
Alexandra L. Milsom 