Writing while Black: The Colour Line, Black discourses and assessment in the institutionalization of writing instruction

Student essays for a college-level, department-wide final examination will be scrutinized to represent the ways that students who consciously employ rhetorical and intellectual traditions of Black discourses get penalized according to limited notions of academic writing. A dynamic intersection will be examined to show how this particular group of students are understood and discarded via: 1) the larger arena of race and literacy/education in elementary and secondary settings; 2) the history and institutionalization of freshman composition in college English departments; and 3) the racialised, punitive, anti-literacy nature of institutional writing assessment and programming.