FINDING ROOM FOR “WHATEVER”: A CRITICAL APPROACH TO ANTIRACIST COMPOSITION PEDAGOGY

Whatever. That’s what I thought about the assignment when it was assigned and the paper that resulted. It was difficult for me to transform thoughtful research, extensive contemplation of the texts I had read, and attempts at forming a thesis into an actual, final paper suitable for turning in. It wasn’t until I read Jeff Rice’s article “The 1963 Hip-Hop Machine: Hip-Hop Pedagogy as Composition” that I was even able to write a paragraph—this paragraph, in fact. Whatever. This word can be seen as “an indifferent or oppositional student reaction to course demand” (Rice 457) that stems from cognitive dissonance. In my case, the cognitive dissonance was located in the gap between the assignment (a discussion of how “race and ethnicity have influenced the teaching of writing today” [Ottery 2007]) and the scholarship that had grabbed my attention, both in the class-assigned texts and in my own research. It was the cognitive dissonance caused by my experience as the only person of color in a class about race and rhetoric. And it’s the cognitive dissonance (whatever) that Rice suggests can be used as the site of “invention strategy for research-based argumentative writing” (453). Whatever. It’s a “popular, everyday term used heavily by youth culture when an experience or reaction can’t be named” (Rice 455). An experience, perhaps, like a student of color feeling ostracized in a class full of white students but unable to put her finger on exactly what it is they “did” to make her feel excluded. Edited American English, or “standard” English, seems to lack the language to discuss race and expressions of covert racism. We struggle to describe our experiences as marginalized people in an oppressive institution when we try to use socially sanctioned language—language that is linear, binary, abstract. Perhaps this is why Victor Villanueva posits that it’s in “generalizing personal events” (Okawa, “Removing Masks” 126) that racism can be spoken of and ultimately combated. Perhaps this is why Patricia Hill Collins, Malea Powell, and other feminists and womanists of color believe in the power of storytelling as a synechdochal description of hegemonic oppression. Racism is so often expressed in covert ways. Legally we are all the same—no three-fifths law, “protection” from racism in the workplace—yet the victims of oppression continually shout that the supposed equality we possess is not the reality we face daily. Catherine Prendergast talks about this whatever—this racism that lacks language to properly describe it—in a legal context: “since so much of racism in this society is unconscious—the norm rather than a deviation from the norm—there is no language with which to expose and punish it given a legal system that demands proof of conscious intent” (39). A student of color can’t point to a classmate and say, “He hit me!” or “She called me a name!” She struggles for the words to describe the pervasive feeling of exclusion, the subtle discouragement from too-lofty goals, the silencing of her contribution to the class discussion. “Too often,” Prendergast writes, “the words just aren’t there, or they haven’t been heard yet (there is no precedent), or they aren’t permissible (or, they are ‘off-register’)” (39–40). Whatever. The student can’t describe her experiences in the rhetorical strategies offered in the