Racial Formation, Racial Projects, and Racism
To conceive of and use an antiracist classroom writing assessment theory, we need concepts like racial habitus and white racial habitus, but while these concepts reference racialized bodies and suggest a definition of racism, the terms do not inherently explain racism as a phenomenon. They also do not explain how to reference actual bodies in the classroom. As I’ve reiterated above, racial habitus is not a term that directly references students’ material bodies, and racism affects real people, real bodies, not habitus. Thus I use the term racial formation to do this referencing. Racism then affects racial formations.
Omi and Winant define “racial formation” “as the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (1994, p. 55). Any racial formation, then, is a part of a dynamic, historical process, constantly changing. These changes occur because of numerous “racial projects” that create, represent, and organize human bodies in particular times and places. These racial projects “simultaneously … interpre[t], represen[t], or explai[n] … racial dynamics,” and “reorganize and redistribute resources along particular lines” (Omi & Winant, 1994, pp. 55-56). In short, all notions of race are (re)created by various racial projects in society and schools. Individual racial formations, such as the Hmong of Fresno, are constructed subjectively and projectively through racial projects in schools, society, in the EPT, in the university, etc.
Thus racism, Omi and Winant say, isn’t simply a consequence of bigotry or prejudice. Historically in the U.S. it has been an “unavoidable outcome of patterns of socialization which were ‘bred in the bone,’ affecting not only whites but even minorities themselves.” They explain that discrimination, inequality, and injustice have been “a structural feature of the U.S. society, the product of centuries of systematic exclusion, exploitation, and disregard of racially defined minorities” (1994, p. 69). Thus today, a racial project is racist “if and only if it creates or reproduces structures of domination based on essentialist categories of race” (Omi & Winant, 1994, p. 71). In the introduction to their collection, Race and Writing Assessment, Inoue and Poe (2012a) provide this way of understanding the concept of racism in light of Omi and Winant’s racial formation theory:
If racial formations are about the historical and structural forces that organize and represent bodies and their lived experiences, then racism is not about prejudice, personal biases, or intent. Racism is not about blaming or shaming white people. It is about understanding how unequal or unfair outcomes may be structured into our assessment technologies and the interpretations that we make from their outcomes. (p. 6)
If it’s not clear already, just like large-scale assessment ecologies, classroom writing assessment ecologies are racial projects, regardless of their purposes, our intentions, or their designs. These racial projects may produce fair, good, and equitable outcomes or something else. I’m sure the EPT is not intended to be racist, nor to exclude, nor to create educational barriers for Hmong students, but that is exactly what it does as a racial project, making it a racist project. The EPT as a racial project directly affects the students in writing classrooms, and affects those classrooms’ writing assessment ecologies as well, because it affects how students get there, how they see themselves, and what the curriculum offers them. Despite the best antiracist intentions, any classroom writing assessment ecology can easily be racist if it doesn’t explicitly account for how students get there and how they are constituted subjectively and projectively by writing assessments.
To give you an example, consider Fresno State’s writing program. The conventional grading systems used in the writing program before we redesigned the curriculum, installed a grading contract, and implemented the Directed Self-Placement14 (DSP) process, produced racialized failure rates and grade distributions among our four main racial formations, which can be seen in the first row of Table 2 (listed as “2005-06 (Engl 1)”).15 Without any ill intentions on the part of writing teachers, many of whom were and are very conscientious about issues of fairness and racism in their classrooms, almost all writing classrooms reproduced higher levels of course failure in Hmong, Latino/a, and Black racial formations, with white students having the least amount of course failure.
The changes made to the program were almost all assessment-based, reconfiguring all the classroom writing assessments, from how students get into courses (DSP), to how most courses calculated final course grades (the grading contract), to the curriculum and pedagogies available (a program portfolio). As can be seen in Table 2, the failure rates in 2009-10 for the new end course, Engl 5B (equivalent to the old Engl 1) dropped by about half in all formations, except the Black racial formation, and the failure rates generally became more even across all racial formations.
Table 2. Students of color fail writing courses at consistently higher rates than their white peers in Fresno State’s First-Year Writing Program (reproduced from Inoue, 2014b, p. 338)
| African-American | Asian-American (Hmong) | |||||
| Academic Year | n | No. failed | % failed | n | No. failed | % failed |
| 2005–06 (Engl 1) | 198 | 45 | 22.7% | 454 | 90 | 19.8% |
| 2009–10 (Engl 5B) | 130 | 25 | 19.2% | 158 | 16 | 10.1% |
| 2010–11 (Engl 5B) | 109 | 18 | 16.5% | 195 | 19 | 9.7% |
| 2011–12 (Engl 5B) | 66 | 11 | 16.7% | 160 | 16 | 10.0% |
| Latino/Latina | White | |||||
| Academic Year | n | No. failed | % failed | n | No. failed | % failed |
| 2005–06 (Engl 1) | 843 | 188 | 22.3% | 788 | 121 | 15.4% |
| 2009–10 (Engl 5B) | 682 | 75 | 11.0% | 292 | 21 | 7.2% |
| 2010–11 (Engl 5B) | 685 | 65 | 9.5% | 273 | 23 | 8.4% |
| 2011–12 (Engl 5B) | 553 | 78 | 14.1% | 158 | 10 | 6.3% |
In this very limited way, classroom writing assessment ecologies in the program can be seen as racial projects, as projects that produced particular kinds of racial formations associated closely with failure and success. No one is trying to be racist, but it is happening systemically and consistently, or structurally through the various classroom writing assessment ecologies. What should be clear is that racism isn’t something that is always a “conscious aiming at ends,” rather it is often a product of overlapping racial structures in writing assessments that are subjective and projective. Racism is not usually produced by conscious intentions, purposes, or biases of people against others not like them. Racism is a product of racialized structures that themselves tend to produce unequal, unfair, or uneven social distributions, be they grades, or access to education, or the expectations for judging writing. Conversely, antiracist projects must be consciously engaged in producing structures that themselves produce fair results for all racial formations involved.
Some may argue that the above failure rates may not be showing some form of racism, rather they only demonstrate that racial formations of color have performed worse than the white racial formation, so there is no clear racist project occurring here since the cause of the above effects cannot be determined to be racial in nature. How do we know racism in writing assessments is the cause of the course failure and not something else? This critique comes from a discourse of whiteness, from a white racial habitus that demands that such racialized conclusions reveal in a logical fashion racist intent by teachers, disregarding effect or results, as those are typically attributed to the individual (e.g., failure). The white racial habitus informing this question also assumes that there be a clear cause and effect relationship demonstrated in such conclusions about racism, conclusions from observations that make no assumptions about race. But as the literature on whiteness explains over and over, there is no getting around race in our epistemologies. The assumptions around needing clear racist causes that then lead to racist effects stems from a white disposition, a rationality that is calm and cool, for such things when we discuss racism (racism is hardly a calm and cool discussion in the U.S.).