“Wanted: Some Black Long Distance [Writers]”: Blackboard Flava-Flavin and other AfroDigital experiences in the classroom

Abstract

This essay examines how students of African descent at a predominantly black college on the East Coast digitally perform their ethnic identities and rhetorics in a freshman composition course. The essay begins by showing how multiple uses of signifying frame students’ Blackboard discussions where they use a type of trickster motif to enact their agreements, disagreements, challenges, and questions, very much akin to Flava Flav's initial cultural role as part of the Rap/activist group, Public Enemy. Students’ online writing groups are then examined by focusing on one particular group, the “Black Long Distance Writers,” whose title signifies and signals the work of the African American writer and activist, John Oliver Killens, most notably, his seminal 1973 essay, “Wanted: Some Black Long Distance Runners.” The understandings of these “Black Long Distance Writers” bear the most powerful definition of literacy and computer-based writing instruction because their framework is not contingent upon making digitally divided minorities more technologically advanced and better at one type of English, its culture of power, or its academic discourses. Instead, these students experience rhetoric and writing as a way to alter the ways that knowledge is constructed for them and about them, “revocabularizing” the academy and its technologies. Such freshman writers are re-envisioned in this kind of cyberspace as constructors of and co-participants in black intellectual and rhetorical traditions … now AfroDigitized.