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This article and its five authors investigates how writing programs, writing instructors, and the profession itself engage in the erasure of race-of blackness and brownness specifically-and perhaps most importantly in a hesitancy to address white privilege.
Race and writing instruction is not exactly a road untraveled. Racial equity work in composition has had its moments of high visibility and has often been examined through a number of scholarly lenses: how to assess grammar or value students' primary languages, what curricular materials and assessments should be used within developmental education, and which hiring practices can attract more faculty members of color. However, many of these conversations have devalued the emotional components of racial equity work and diminished ways in which these conversations continue to perpetuate institutional and personal violence against black and brown bodies: students, faculty members, and staff. In fact, many of these innovations have continued to center white masculinity while students of color continue to be failed by the institution.
This erasure of race is especially perilous for students and faculty of color. We reflect all of this, the erasures and the hesitancies, the perils and the pain, and as none of this is neat or orderly work, the piece reflects this roughly ordered, even fragmented state. We align ourselves in this approach with educational researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings, in that we are "attempting to speak to innovative theoretical ways for framing discussions about social justice and democracy and the role of education in reproducing or interrupting current practices" (9). That our primary mode of doing so is storytelling is not an accident; it underscores our belief in a foundational principle of critical race theory (CRT) to disrupt dominant racial narratives by "analyz[ing] the myths, presuppositions, and received wisdoms that make up the common culture about race and that invariably render blacks and other minorities one-down" (Delgado xiv).1
The contributors to this piece are members of an urban two-year college English department that has adjusted its curriculum to better reach our culturally diverse student population, a student body that has grown to 58 percent students of color at a site where over eighty languages are spoken ("Campus"). As we broadened our work from curricular diversity to more diverse hiring practices, which later led to...