Priscilla's Presentation

Sometimes the ultimate goal of the antiracist writing center is to achieve diversity. So there’s diversity among the tutors and they’re continuing to talk about race. Goal accomplished, right? Well, if we are truly to engage in critical reflection, we must ask ourselves who feels comfortable contributing to these conversations? In my experience as a Puerto Rican peer tutor, I often find that the discussions about race exclude or discourage minority voices. I know I was definitely resistant to talking about race. What is it about the antiracist writing center that discourages minority tutors from voicing their opinions and sharing their experiences? Why doesn’t the antiracist writing center community represent the very people who are most discriminated against?

The answers to these questions will vary for every writing center, but perhaps the minority tutor’s reluctance to speak stems from the fact that many race conversations inevitably turn into conversations about whiteness, a topic that most minority students are all to familiar with. Minority tutors already know which color dictates who is privileged and who is not. The problem then becomes that in one of the topics they have the most experience with, race, they end up talking about whiteness and about white antiracist activists’ experience with minorities. To further isolate and discourage the minority tutor, most of the antiracist literature is written predominantly by white authors, so minority tutors must content themselves with being talked about.

There are numerous other ways minorities may be silenced during a race conversation. For example, empathetic expressions, such as crying during race related conversations, not only discourages and possibly offends minority tutors, these expressions also shut down productive conversations. As Sarita Srivastava notes in her article “‘You’re calling me a racist?’ The Moral and Emotional Regulation of Antiracism and Feminism,” “empathetic expressions often revolve around an individual’s moral self image instead of institutional change” (44). To spare the emotional individual, the conversation is toned down, derailed and stopped indefinitely. Emotional outbursts, therefore, divert the focus and purpose of race discussions away from race and toward comforting the individual.

For the antiracist writing center, it is also important to examine the ways in which the race discussion changes or adds to our definitions of peerness. Can peerness exist if there are members of the community who are being silenced? Srivastava echoes Benedict Anderson when she states “the making of… [a] community requires not only imagining sameness and communion but also forgetting difference and oppression” (39). To forget difference and oppression is to deny the experiences of the individual. Yet, to belong to a writing center community and to be considered a peer, minority tutors, because of the various reasons previously mention, are silenced. In other words, the forgetting of difference and oppression is impossible and detrimental to the idea of peerness.

With all the roadblocks that may or may not discourage minority tutors from participating in antiracism, we have to acknowledge that subjects such as whiteness must be talked about and that emotional responses may follow. After all, we cannot be unfeeling, especially when we share our experiences with race. The antiracist writing center must allow whiteness to be discussed, but we cannot stop the conversation there. We have to push past the controversial and past the uncomfortable in order to move toward actually effecting change. More importantly, we MUST always be conscious of who is contributing to the conversation and, in turn, we must devote ourselves to thinking of ways to encourage minority tutors to contribute and to voice their opinions.