
In
the spring of 1999 I took a graduate-level course at the University of
Illinois, called
The Rhetoric of Race in Writing Studies. There were 11 people who attended
the class meetings. The course was scheduled from 1-3 p.m. on Tuesdays, and
after several changes classes were held in room 113 of the English building.
Many of the students
enrolled in the course had been encouraged to take it by the Director of Writing
Studies, as it related to important issues which were finally receiving more
attention within the discipline. Our interactions in the class illustrated
the complicated nature of conversations in which race acts as a primary determining
factor. In certain ways the issue of race shaped all of the interactions in
the class; however, the relationships in this classroom were also colored
by many intricate communications and varying levels of power negotiation.
In fact, I sometimes felt as if "race" became a code word that did
more to disguise than uncover power plays in the classroom.
My experience in
this class was as both insider (I knew most of the other students very well)
and outsider (I was auditing the course rather than taking it for a grade).
I often observed a sense of frustration and unease which I felt were at higher
levels than in other courses I took with many of the same people.
It might be easy
to say that this feeling of tension had to do with the issues under discussion.
Perhaps people were struggling with the issues, perhaps they felt unable to
represent themselves and their experience in ways that would work in the academic
or theoretical framework of the class. Certainly there were power plays in
action -- moments of negotiation about who had the authority to speak and about
what.
But these in-class
relationships were complicated in ways which could not be explained using
only languages of race and racism. As in any situation there were multiple
forces at work. For example, one of the most difficult (for me) moments in
the class was when one student (a friend of mine) spoke out about ways she
felt alienated in course -- ways which had more to do with her relationship
to the forms and languages of academia than with the forms and languages for
discussing race and racism. 
The problem with
isolating race as a primary factor in discussions involving complex interactions
among people of various racial backgrounds, is that it may confine the ability
people have to fully represent themselves as complex beings. Perhaps our problems
in the class had something to do with our inability to find languages for
discussing racism, but it is also possible that because we were constrained
by the language of racism we found it difficult to express ourselves clearly.

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