Deconstructing the Writing Center Mission Statement

Suffer little children (just not my children)

Asao Inoue, anti-racist scholar

UMass Boston’s writing center supports writers across the university community. Its mission statement starts with the following (emphasis ours):

The University of Massachusetts Boston Writing Center serves the university community by supporting undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff and by creating an equitable, socially, racially, and linguistically just culture of writing throughout campus and in the community. In doing so, we contribute to UMB’s mission of inclusive excellence in teaching, research, and service, and support the goal of being a leading anti-racist health-promoting institution. As part of an urban research university, we seek to center the needs of first-generation writers, writers of color, and multilingual, and international writers, knowing that their cultural and linguistic knowledges haven’t always been valued. We believe that the diversity of their backgrounds, ways of being, and lived experiences should be at the core of the knowledge creation that happens on campus. Our writing center aims to provide accessible and adaptive services - such as individual tutoring, workshops, and consultations with faculty. 

The mission statement, which is so strong on linguistic justice, inclusive excellence, lived experience and anti-racism, conveniently neglects one important thing - actual writing skills.

Yes, we know what you must be thinking- the writing center staff is either too lazy to correct our students’ English, or maybe they just gave up because no one, present company included, seems to be able to construct a coherent sentence these days. If this is what you think - you are bigots! Their approach is deeply rooted in linguistic justice, which states that “Standard American English” is deeply rooted in white supremacy. We already got a glimpse of it in the (now infamous) “Decolonizing Rigor” talk, where one participant recommended a paper titled “Should writers use they own English” (sic). Read it at your own risk.

Let’s go straight to the source. No one explains linguistic justice better than Asao Inoue, a leading anti-racist scholar in the field of rhetoric and composition. He was asked what to do when ignorant BIPOC students, in particular black students, insist on using standard English (the horror!) and resist “code meshing” their home dialects in their writing. According to Inoue¹ (emphasis ours):

I hear a real, savvy student thinking, “I came here just to get stuff to succeed.” I, as a teacher, don't want to take that from that student. I also feel like this is a really shitty choice. I have to create a classroom and a learning experience that demeans the long linguistic history of that student in order for that student to go into the world and go into unfair, racist, white supremacist systems and succeed?

Furthermore, I have to accept—and this is going to sound bad, but I'll explain why—the selfish motivations of that student to succeed, only because if that student says, “You're setting me up for failure,” what they're saying is “I want to succeed in that system. I want to game that system.” …That's okay. But I think it's an immature goal in some ways. It may be a realistic one. It may be the only real option that someone has…

…There are so many bigger things in the world we should be striving for, and perhaps our students just aren't quite at that moment yet in their life. And that's okay. And maybe they just haven't been exposed, because what they've been exposed to is capitalist-inflicted bullshit about education being the way in which we get to become a nice little cog in the system and you get skills.

If a student still has any shred of hope and optimism after reading this, Inoue takes great care in squashing it:

…It's never going to be enough, man². You're going to go out and you're always still going to be Black, or you're always still gonna be LatinX, or you're always still going to be something else.

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Seeing as linguistic justice is the primary guiding principle of UMass Boston’s writing center, trust our university to think exactly the same way.

Dear Black and LatinX students - listen to Inoue. Who knows better than a successful scholar that success and scholarship are shitty goals? Who knows better than a half-white, half-Japanse, sort-of-white-passing man that the system is gamed against Black and LatinX students so there’s no use trying? You’d better just give up and make way for other children to succeed. Inoue’s children, for example.

1. The full, unedited transcript is available here: https://share.descript.com/view/qQtjoUNemU0

2. A tad bit sexist, aren’t we?