Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education by Tammie M. Kennedy & Joyce Irene Middleton & Krista Ratcliffe

Author:Tammie M. Kennedy & Joyce Irene Middleton & Krista Ratcliffe [Kennedy, Tammie M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780809335473
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
Published: 2016-12-21T08:00:00+00:00

9

HOW WHITENESS HAUNTS THE TEXTBOOK INDUSTRY: THE RECEPTION OF NONWHITES IN COMPOSITION TEXTBOOKS

Cedric Burrows

WHEN I WAS a graduate student working as assistant to the director of a first-year composition program at a large state university, my duties included serving on a composition textbook selection committee. What started out as service soon generated a series of research questions that undergirded my dissertation and that are informing its current revision into a book manuscript. After perusing several textbooks I noticed that many composition readers replicated the texts of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech from the March on Washington and Malcolm X’s “Learning to Read,” an excerpt from his autobiography. Initially I wondered: Why are these exact same excerpts from King and Malcolm X repeated from reader to reader? (For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, readers are composition textbooks comprised of famous essays that serve as genre models, as research materials for students’ paper topics, or as repositories of rhetorical tactics that students may identify and then transfer to their own writings.) But the question of replication soon became more complicated, resulting in the questions, “What identity construction emerges for King and Malcolm X in these readers?” and “What are the reception effects for students reading these textbooks?” With these selections, King and Malcolm X were rendered palpable to student readers who could happily echo that the content of one’s character matters more than race and that learning to read is a good way to transform one’s life. But both men are more complicated, and more activist, than these whitewashed representations in readers. Ultimately I asked myself, “What motivates the selection and receptions of these oft-repeated texts in readers?” And the answer became obvious to me: whiteness haunts the textbook industry.

I begin with two examples that illustrate how whiteness haunts the textbook industry in the twenty-first century. The first situation occurred with the alterations of two mainstays in middle school and high school reading lists. On February 1, 2011, New South Books released Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in one volume. What distinguishes this work from other versions is that the new edition replaces “nigger”—which appears in Huckleberry Finn 219 times and 9 times in Tom Sawyer—with “slave” and switches “injun” to “Indian” in Tom Sawyer. During his conversation with teachers in Montgomery, Alabama, book editor Alan Gribben learned that teachers were hesitant to use Huckleberry Finn because, “in the new classroom, it’s not really acceptable” (Schultz). Based on these talks, Gribben decided to edit the novel as an alternative for both grade-school classrooms and general readers who wanted to appreciate the novel within a twenty-first-century context. New South Books’ publisher Suzanne LaRosa agreed with Gribben, stating that the editors noticed “a market for a book in which the n-word was switched out for something less hurtful, less controversial” (Schultz).

The other situation involves what happens when textbooks question the haunting of whiteness. In 2014, the Texas State Board of Education voted on several proposed history, geography, and government textbooks for grades 6–12.

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