Acts of Resistance as Acts of Oppression: Gender/Race Troubling White Women Writing Faculties' Assessment Practices

Abstract

White women are not only the largest race-gender demographic graduating college, but the largest race-gender demographic working as writing faculty, especially in community colleges. In turn, they are also the largest race-gender demographic contributing to the cooling out of students of color. We know that religion, the law, and education socialize white women into white matriarchal, oppressed oppressor roles so that when they work in fields like Composition, their labor will perpetuate the inequities inherent in the U.S.’s white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchal society. We also know that historically marginalized men and women of color have a long history of resisting white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy; whereas white women do not; instead, white women are complicit with this system to the detriment of themselves and people of color. This pattern is evident in the scholarship on writing assessment as well, where restorative justice assessment practices have yet to become the standard practices in a field - dominated by white women - that plays such a significant racialized gatekeeping role in higher education, particularly in community colleges. What we know very little about is how white women make sense of race/gender as a co-constitutive construct in their lives as students and then community college faculty assessing writing. This study asks the following questions as a way to better understand intersecting dynamics of power in white women community college writing faculties’ experiences’ of and participation in these dynamics of oppression: 1. How do white women community college writing faculty talk about their writing assessment practices? 2. How do white women community college writing faculties’ stories about their experiences as students and faculty influence their writing assessment practices? I use critical narrative inquiry, including interview and focus group process, and three resonant threads flow through the narratives, illuminating the ways that whiteness shapes their storied experiences: 1) white women know inequity is raced and gendered and they have strategies for resisting this in their writing assessment practices, 2) most white women choose not to use those strategies, and 3) white women use white patriarchal logics to justify their choices. When woven together, these findings reveal that white women writing faculty experience white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy as oppressive; however, their socialization into white matriarchy teaches them to think like a white patriarch and use invulnerability in willfully ignorant ways that make them act as oppressors and further their own oppression. This study suggests that writing faculty reconceptualize writing assessment in terms of epistemic vulnerability (Gilson 2011) where teachers and students both influence and are influenced. The decolonial frame and practice of answerability (Patel, 2016) provides a way for teachers and students to manage their vulnerabilities in reciprocal, answerable, and sustainable ways that acknowledge race/gender (Ozias & Nicolazzo 2025) in writing assessment practices.