Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change

Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan have created a rich resource for writing center tutors, administrators, and scholars. Motivated by a scholarly interest in race, literacy, and pedagogy, and by an ethical commitment to antiracism work, contributors address a series of related questions: How does institutionalized racism in American education shape the culture of literacy and language education in the writing center? How does racism operate in the discourses of writing center scholarship and lore, and in what ways are writing centers unwittingly complicit in racist practices? How can they meaningfully operationalize antiracist work? How do they persevere through the difficulty and messiness of negotiating race and racism in their daily practice?

The conscientious, nuanced attention to race in Writing Centers and the New Racism is meant to model what it means to be bold in engagement with these hard questions and to spur the kind of sustained, productive, multivocal, and challenging dialogue that, with a few important exceptions, has been absent from the field.