Discriminatory Writing Assessment Practices in First-Year Composition: Challenges and Solutions

The Basis Of Discriminatory Writing Practices

Racism manifests in all shapes and sizes, with institutional racism pervading our writing programs and victimizing non-white students by reiterating a fallacy that a certain race possesses a higher degree of intelligence than others. This fallacious outlook, which the Western society harbors towards BIPOC students, is rife with negative baggage shaping the mindset of a very high percentage of writing instructors who are also the products of this same society. Hence, they also appear to have internalized that disapproving attitude towards the non-white students, which has been propagating across generations for centuries. In “Basic writing: Pushing against racism,” Jones (1993), in connection with how writing teachers are programmed to think in a certain way about Black students, posits that “only when [a Black student] realized that basic writer, the term itself, was used with notable frequency, as euphemism and code for minority students could [the Black student] understand how writing instructors had accepted these conclusions with worshipful silence, without serious questioning” (p.73). In the same essay, the author also talks about how Black culture counters these beliefs to foreground the Black community's resilience towards whites' discriminatory attitudes.