"Oh no she did NOT bring her arse up in here with that!" - A taste of academic publishing

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The first time I ever submitted an essay about young Black women in college writing classrooms was in 2005. One reviewer commented with a very typical response to my work at the time: why would anyone think that Black women’s writing is important? I remember these words because the editors cited this sentence as the major note of agreement for them. I could tell dozens upon dozens of stories like this, and it would take even longer than that for institutions to address, redress, and repair such a legacy of deliberate racial harm and neglect. I return today to stories of Black women, Black feminist pedagogies, and college writing classrooms not as a new beginning or as a return to the past but as the source of our futures.

At the heart of this essay is a soul-excavation of Black feminist pedagogy. This is not the kind of digging through that steals from the earth in ways that might be reminiscent of white settlers’ obsession with archaeological hole-making. This soul-excavation is a site of storymaking where Black college students, classroom moments, and Black feminist educators have made specific interventions in the ways that I think, move, and understand reparative justice. My storying thus unfolds what I see as the materiality of Black feminist memory, rhetoric, and praxis in institutions and alternative ways we might imagine more critical pedagogical futures. (pg. 318)

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But I am also not being hyperbolic by referencing plantations either; it is a system of logic and an organizing structure that is twinned to the white settler state (Grande). The Mason–Dixon line never precluded the North from plantation-based racial economies, which get everywhere injected in how Black presence is represented. Most white composition faculty would be horrified if someone called their memory discourses a Trump-esque/Confederate white nationalist sentiment and yet that is exactly what it is. This essay acts instead from the place of Black feminist memory. Re-imagining a Black feminist past is not simply a process of talking about the past but simultaneously a project about restorative justice for the future. In this sense, it runs very differently from white nostalgia’s central function of erasing Blackness from the historical record and dismissing historical Black pain and present-day trauma/ (pg. 319)

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As a Black feminist memory, this essay is, at times, an inward-reach to understand how specific moments have catalyzed an understanding of a Black past that helps me to read and move beyond the terms of institutional racism and whiteness. At other times, this is a story of a Black feminist methodology. In some moments, this is me just pissed dafuq off and holding onto my righteous anger as a Black feminist methodology where refusal of white affect (and therefore thought ordering) does its own work. (pg. 320)

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Let’s just be honest here with each other, rhetoric-composition studies: I am not your greatest fan. On many, many occasions, I have even said, out loud and very loud, that you ain’t about shite. But, hey, I ain’t tellin you nuthin that you ain’t already heard from me. Here’s the thing. I love the work of rhetoric composition, just not the field: I love the teaching, the writing, the classrooms, the commitment to pedagogy, the entanglement with the American university-plantation system. I love all that. It’s your white ways and all your codependent folx who let things slide to be with you. It’s time for you to roll with some Black feminism . . . otherwise, well, we gon keep havin these problems, you and me, and Ima drag your arse every chance I get. (pg. 323)

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