Race: The Absent Presence in Composition Studies

Abstract

go through to locate race in the first part of Ways With Words as emblematic of my experience reading much of the scholarship in composition studies where race seems to function as an absent presence. For while it is often called upon as a category to delineate cultural groups that will be the focal subjects of research studies, the relationship of race to the composing process is seldom fully explored. Instead race becomes subsumed into the powerful tropes of basic writer, stranger to the academy, or the trope of the generalized, marginalized other. But if race has been an absent presence, racism has been an absent absence. Even when the subject of a study is identified by race or ethnicity, the legacy of racism in this country which participates in sculpting all identities-white included-is more often than not absent from the analysis of that writer's linguistic capabilities or strategies. Discussions of racism in composition are confined to determining how to handle individual, aberrant flare-ups in the classroom without exploring racism as institutionalized, normal and pervasive. As Keith Gilyard has observed, race remains undertheorized, unproblematized, and underinvestigated in composition research leaving us with no means to confront the racialized atmosphere of the university and no way to account for the impact of the persistence of prejudice on writers and texts.