Kindle Notes & Highlights
The racism in our writing centers, like racism across our institutions, communities, and across the social, political, and economic landscape of our lives, is not a series of aberrations, but the everyday manifestation of deeply embedded logics and patterns.
When Krista did begin working in the center, however, the white tutors repeatedly failed to recognize her when she came to work. Each time she entered the writing center, she was asked by her colleagues if she needed to schedule an appointment.
The tutors in this story were unable to conceive of an African American woman who possessed the knowledge, abilities, and skills to be a tutor. She must, they thought, need help. These tutors were well-intentioned: they wanted to help. They didn't consciously set out to dishonor Krista.
In what ways does the student's sense of her own whiteness intersect with her immigrant status to produce an expectation and desire for a white American tutor as the norm? What factors have eased and/or troubled this student's own assimilation into racial rules and order, both in America and in her country of origin?
People of color internalize their own oppression much as whites internalize superiority.
Eventually we stop asking, commenting, questioning. If we can't speak about race and we stop seeing social injustices, eventually we lose awareness of injustice in general—those done to us and well as those done by us.
Consequently, we believe that we must consciously and consistently recognize that racism is an everyday experience for students, tutors, and directors of color, and concomitantly, that the benefits and advantages that accrue to white people as a result of racism are an everyday experience for white students, tutors, and directors—like the five of us.
