JAC Volume 21 Issue 3

Stephen Parks' subtitle does not do justice to the range of issues he addresses or to the importance of his book for English studies. Beyond tracing the history of CCCC's controversial 1974 pamphlet "Students' Right to Their Own Language" (SRTOL), Parks argues that SRTOL was a highly compromised expression of the progressive political and educational movements of its time and that factors similar to those that limited its scope must still be overcome today. The intensity of political events that unavoidably impinged on English studies in the sixties and early seventies is gone, but Parks makes a convincing case that there is a greater long-term danger to all humanistic education today in the unrelenting pressures toward economic downsizing, corporate control, and privatization of schools at all levels. He laments the fact that the most prominent political organization of academics today is the conservative, corporate-friendly National Association of Scholars. Parks' ultimate cause is to make composition studies a more active counterforce to the corporatizing of American society and education. Among his proposals is that CCCC "focus its efforts on analyzing the interrelationship among economic, racial, and gender structures" and offer "concrete strategies to engage composition scholars in working for broad-based social justice that goes beyond classroom and university practices."

SRTOL evolved out of the black liberation and New Left movements of the sixties, so Parks must initially reconstruct a large part of the separate and intertwined histories of those movements; he then traces SRTOL's introduction, implementation, and ultimate transformation in CCCC. Parks in turn frames this sequence within the history of English studies in the sixties and its tenuous relation to progressive political movements nationally. (His viewpoint on the depoliticizing tendencies of professional disciplines owes much to the work of Richard Ohmann, whose foreword to this book notes aptly that it "restores politics to the history of composition studies.")

In the beginning was the Civil Rights movement, superseded in the mid-sixties by advocates of Black Power such as Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and the Black Panthers. The integrationist politics of the early phase of the Civil Rights movement did not place strong emphasis on black English versus standard English or on the related issues of minority cultural identity. However, as the American Black Power movement arose and allied itself with movements for colonial liberation in Africa, "the image of black English also became recoded in terms of anti-imperialism. The image of an African-based black English changed from one of cultural integration to one of African alliances, economic empowerment, and black nationalism."

Leaders of the Black Power movement, however, were divided over the relative importance of black dialect in a radical critique of capitalist class injustice and imperialism. Speaking as president of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Carmichael understood the retention of black English to be a "form of resistance" by African Americans to "the economic oppression being perpetuated on them by the `speakers of Standard English.'" By contrast, the Black Panthers' "liberation schools" emphasized critical literacy, presumably in standard English, for the purpose of political consciousness that transcended black nationalism. One teacher described assignments in an elementary school such as "choosing articles and writing about them or giving them an oral report about an event that happened in the world. . . . Their work shows that they can relate to what is happening to them and other poor people in the world. Some of the children who can't even write, try because they understand that we are there to help each other." As Parks observes, "While connections are indirectly made to other countries, African cultural heritage is not seen as the common bond. The ethnicity paradigm's attempt to define black English has been left behind. Instead, what is created is an image of the student (even the very young student) as recognizing through their writing and engagement with written materials the extent to which a common economic oppression links them with other individuals around the world; `Africa' has been subsumed under the language of socialism." Here, then, was one origin of later divisions between those leftists (whose cause Parks supports) who would subsume racial politics into a broader coalition confronting capitalism, and those like Carmichael who advocated identity politics and cultural nationalism—a division emblemized by the black English/standard English binary.

The next step on the road to SRTOL was taken by the New University Conference (NUC). Leading groups in the campus protest movements of the sixties such as Students for a Democratic Society and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, whose members were mainly white and middle class, actively supported the civil rights and Black Power movements' educational projects. NUC was a short-lived extension of Students for a Democratic Society into the academy in the late sixties, with branches in CCCC and in the Modern Language Association (where it evolved into the still-active Radical Caucus). Parks points out that NUC in turn was conceived as part of a broader coalition of Radicals in the Professions, a group that never got off the ground—a fate lamented by Parks, who calls for just such a national umbrella organization in academia and other fields such as law, medicine, journalism and the arts, as well as trade unions. (NUC, which never numbered more than a few hundred members, was deemed such a threat to national security by the Nixon administration and FBI that its meetings at MLA came under surveillance—as I later discovered through the file on me that I recovered under the Freedom of Information Act, which included a report on my attendance at one such meeting.)

NUC called for rejection of grading and tracking and for the correction of traditional Eurocentric and class-biased curricula through ethnic, women's, and working class studies. Parks notes that "the emphasis on university reform is intended to expand the services available for nontraditional students to ensure that they receive basic literacy skills; the role of the radicalized professor or teacher was to create a basic skills program that would generate critical thought against the corporate structure of the United States." This program was presented to CCCC in l969 by NUC members as a proposed set of six resolutions—of which the last one dealt with dialect: "CCCC and NCTE Executive Committees should work actively to make nonstandard dialects acceptable in all schools from kindergarten on."

At the heart of Parks' analysis is the process by which CCCC officers and committees evaded NUC's broader call for radical action in politics and education, in which black English was but one issue. In producing SRTOL, CCCC isolated the issue of dialect and displaced it from a political context into a less dangerous paradigm of linguistic scholarship and educational-cultural pluralism in a country that is "proud of its diverse heritage and of its cultural and racial variety." Parks' acute insight here goes a long way toward explaining the vagueness and equivocation in the eventual text of SRTOL (beginning with nearly every word in its title), equivocation that has bothered many otherwise sympathetic readers, including myself. (See Lazere, "Orality, Literacy, and Standard English," Journal of Basic Writing 10.2 [1991]: 87-98.)

Among several other problems is the fact that the document came across all but explicitly as a defense of black English specifically—and solely as a dialectal issue, with little attention to other dimensions of language or critical education for the whole range of disfranchised groups in American society. Parks observes, "Metaphors based on African American history could not explain the social and economic terrain upon which composition teachers and students were now working. An explanation was needed of how the writing teacher was involved in more than writing issues," an explanation that should depend on "a professional perspective that understands the writing classroom as one point within a larger system of social and class oppression."

Moreover, like other manifestoes of the time, including Ken Macrorie's Uptaught and Jerry Farber's "The Student As Nigger," SRTOL appropriated the moral authority of African American collective struggle while displacing it toward individual aims. As Parks says of Macrorie, "African American struggles for social equality become equated with his struggle to enable an English student's quest for personal freedom." So for African American students, SRTOL became primarily a warrant to feel good about their own culture, while for other students its implicit message became the same as that of the process movement then prevalent in composition studies, as expressed in Herbert Muller's report on the l966 Dartmouth Conference: "The right of every person to have a mind and a life of his own, and the value of realizing his individuality."

In English studies, then, SRTOL became a harbinger of the whole subsequent predilection of compositionists toward individualism, expressivism, identity politics, and postmodernist diversity, difference, and localism—as opposed to Freirean and other versions of critical pedagogy that have maintained NUC's insistence on education that emphasizes the cause uniting all disfranchised groups: challenging corporate hegemony throughout America and the world and building organized opposition to it. In this respect, of course, the history of rhetoric and composition is a typical instance of the persistent American tendency to sidetrack the need for political action into personal therapy—to substitute individual "liberation" for political liberation.

Likewise, in tracing the history of SRTOL, Parks provides a keenly nuanced analysis of the way that risky political positions and actions invariably get defused in organizations like NCTE through being transformed to fit into professional and disciplinary paradigms—in this case those of linguistic and rhetorical scholarship. Parks finds shortcomings even in an ostensible leftist like James Berlin, who wrote about SRTOL mainly in the context of linguistic study and whose "social-epistemic rhetoric" Parks sees as emphasizing scholarly mediations of political theories rather than political activism and agency per se. Thus, in Berlin, "Arguments and activities by composition activists concerning the role of class, race, and gender in progressive coalitions become completely covered over." However, Parks' book, developed from his dissertation at the University of Pittsburgh, only covers Berlin's work through Rhetoric and Reality and ignores Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures and other late writings that moved more in the direction Parks favors.

Parks devotes a later chapter to the abortive efforts within CCCC to revise SRTOL or replace it with a more coherent and comprehensive statement—efforts that lasted well into the eighties. Even the politically sanitized version of SRTOL was greeted with ridicule by right-wing linguistic ignoramuses such as John Simon. (Alas, Parks misspells his name and, worse yet, that of Wallace Douglas, who was widely revered as a CCCC officer and who was on the side of the angels politically throughout the battles over SRTOL. This book generally needed better editing for typos and repetition.) Mainly because of these ill-informed attacks on the document, the subsequent attempts that might have produced a more defensible version in scholarly and political scope were blocked by SRTOL's adamant defenders, some of whom in a truly lamentable instance of political correctness branded (and continue to do so up to the present) as racist and reactionary any principled disagreement with SRTOL or with positions consonant with it. In spite of his own criticisms, though, Parks defends SRTOL as a relatively progressive statement within the political and professional limitations impinging on its production.

Parks' concluding chapter laments the wasteful polarization that resulted from SRTOL's exclusive emphasis on dialect and the false dichotomy that opposed the defense of black English to the teaching of standard English, given that most disputants of good will regarded this as a both/and rather than as an either/or issue. As a corrective, he cites Lisa Delpit, whose 1995 Other People's Children argued that exclusive instruction in minority language and culture would leave students at a disadvantage in schooling and the marketplace and that all students should learn to survive in "the culture of power." Parks paraphrases Delpit as explaining that

Parks quotes Delpit further: "Individuals have the ability to transform dominant discourses for liberatory purposes—to engage in what Henry Louis Gates calls `changing the joke and slipping the yoke,' that is, using European philosophical and critical standards to challenge the tenets of European belief systems."

Parks' conclusion goes much further than language issues, however, with an extended critique of the limitations in any progressive approach to composition courses that are first squeezed into a first-year sequence of two terms, then isolated from an interdisciplinary curriculum "in how language, cultural, and economic politics interact," and finally bound within a curriculum in which the only model of change provided is "academics talking about the need for social change." He condemns the failure of most universities to reward faculty members for work in the outside community and public schools: "For as I study the system in which academics must survive and work, it strikes me that the call to produce scholarship which serves pragmatic local community needs, to develop university ties to the community, and to educate students as active citizens is more important than ever." The goal of such scholarship would be "to produce a new core curriculum within the university where the language of the community, the college, and the country would be studied and analyzed through the integrated insights of a variety of disciplines and community organizations." Through this curriculum, students would gain a holistic understanding of "the culture of power" that most of them will need to be capable of entering, but they would also gain the critical tools with which to resist or oppose that culture if they choose. Parks writes, "A program which would build upon this dualistic insight and offer multiple places to work out that relationship, I believe, would respect the historical impulses which produced the SRTOL."

In the last part of the concluding chapter, subtitled "New University Coalitions," Parks considers possible organizational bases for implementing his ideal curriculum. Drawing on the history of SRTOL in NCTE and CCCC, he now (somewhat inconsistently) expresses little hope of acquiring the active support of professional organizations—the same support that he called for in the earlier passage quoted in my first paragraph above: "These organizations allow progressive caucuses to exist as subunits, but with bureaucratic structures that ensure that the caucuses have little impact." (My own sense is that in recent decades NCTE, CCCC, and MLA have become much more open to change as progressive members have gained influence within their official structures—to the dismay of conservatives, who consider these organizations bastions of leftist political correctness.) As an alternative to the established organizations, Parks proposes a new organization:

For this kind of alliance to succeed, he continues, it would need to have a firm institutional base, perhaps in a university, a union, or a nonprofit organization that would share funding. Parks concludes, "Most important, any such alliance would also have to move toward real connections with other facets of the labor market: nonuniversity professionals, labor unions, service workers, and sweatshop workers. That is, it no longer seems appropriate for academics to imagine themselves as separate or different from the general labor market."

In his preface, Parks indicates that the program outlined in his conclusion subsequently found a provisional home in the Institute for the Study of Literature, Literacy, and Culture at Temple University, where he is now assistant professor of English, and in the national Teachers for a Democratic Culture, whose leadership he has taken over from its founders, who include Gerald Graff, Gregory Jay, and John Wilson. (He fails to mention Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social Justice, which has a broader membership than the English studies-based TDC and is more directly aligned with organized labor.) An important postscript to Class Politics is "Writing beyond the Curriculum: Fostering New Collaborations in Literacy," an article by Parks and his colleague Eli Goldblatt that was published in the May 2000 issue of College English. This article is an encouraging progress report on the work of these projects at Temple in developing literacy education, service learning, and community organizing, and in forging partnerships between university faculties and students and K-12 schools in the Philadelphia area (and the projects are associated with an Internet-based Progressive Information Network). Thus, Stephen Parks has become not only a formidable advocate of critical education, but a dynamic leader in implementing its practice.