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When Robots Come Home 4

to Roost: The Differing Fates

of Black Language, Hyper-
Standardization, and White
Robotic School Writing (Yes,
ChatGPT and His AI
Cousins)
Posted on December 11, 2023

Odd as it sounds, I like to occasionally troll though websites and

public documents that writing programs and English
departments across American schools put out there. Mostly, I
am trying to prove a point: foolishness abounds. The evidence is
always overwhelming. I’ve been doing this since 2009 and even
have a folder where I host a kind of contest judged all by my
lonesome: who has the whitest rubric to score students’ essays?
There are always so many contenders. Why do I do this? Who
knows. It is very entertaining though and gives me endless ways
to talk trash about folx who don’t walk what they talk.

By 2010, I completely stopped using rubrics to respond to

students’ writing and projects and have never looked back.
Before that, I would ask students to collectively design their own
rubrics and the conversations were great. Those moments were
framed in the world of progressive high school reform of the
1990s that centered habits of mind, interdisciplinary inquiry, small
classrooms, community schooling, and the like, but that all got
co-opted towards neoliberalist ends in the standards/ testing/
NCLB movements. I will always remember 2008, for instance,
where a heated exchange jumped off in class about the concept
of grading how an essay FLOWS. At the time, that institution
was the third, most diverse national university in the U.S. As
should be easy to imagine, in no time at all, we saw different
racial/ethnic/cultural/linguistic groups explain FLOW (was it even
a noun or a verb?) very differently and rate and rank even more
differently. The young NYC Hip Hoppers set off the conversation,
because they knew FLOW had different cultural meanings. My
response was simple: why can’t it all count as successful? They
seemed to agree and worked that rubric down to the bone. The
flow goals alone were two pages/two slides long. They did the
real work of cultural rhetorics that the English departments I have
worked for are still too scared to do (of course, they will couch
such white fears and just say the concept is obscure, but, as you
can see with these 2008 first-year college students, it has always
been really real and quite obvious for how and what BIPOC folx
communicate).

In 2010 though, I stopped asking students to design rubrics. My

students had been rubric-ed to death by that point and so when
I asked them to design their own, they came up with the typical
monocultural, monolingual, mono-styled rubric that you see
everywhere. It wasn’t worth the time in class to design an
intervention, so I just stopped using rubrics and moved to a
different system. I also started watching rubrics go online for
100s of writing/English programs across the country. Today, in
this fall semester of 2023, I just finished teaching a graduate
class on anti-racist/anti-colonial pedagogies and did a deep
trolling of essay rubrics online during the week that we focused
on anti-racist assessment. It doesn’t matter how much folx talk
about DEI, students’ rights to their own language,
linguistic/cultural diversity, local assessment, anti-racist
assessment, decolonized syllabi, anti-racist teaching, or any
other term that progressives/liberals appropriate without actually
enacting. These rubrics all look and sound the same. They all
white-wash school writing and require the same kind of stale
performance of white academese. Every. Single. One.

I liken these essay rubrics to hotel standardization. If you have

ever been to a chain hotel, you know that, no matter where you
go in the country, everything is the same: the coffee maker,
brand of coffee, stirrers, sugars, bed, chair, TV, sheets,
shampoo, towels, pillows, desk, comforter, wallpaper… every
piece of the package. I am not knocking it, per se, because
some folx do like knowing that their hotel room will be cleaned
and sanitized according to a brand’s singular standard when/if
they must visit a city new to them. Hotel standardization has a
place, I guess. I have heard textbook authors embrace essay
standardization in just this way. HOWEVER, students’ work in
schools should not be processed in the same way as nationwide
hotel soap distribution for endless consumer consumption. And
students should not look and sound identical to one another and
peers across the country. Rubrics do this work of hyper-
standardization and hyper-consumerism in just this way though.
If you were to mechanize essay rubrics in such a way that you
only needed to input content and get out a finished essay, what
you would get is a singular kind of written expression that
schools replicate as much as hotel chains mass-produce their
hand soaps.

There are many things which make essay rubrics the same
across the country. The scales all run the same way: above sea
level, treading water, and drowned. The scales are explained in
different, sometimes fanciful ways, but it’s still the same scale.
Then there is the obvious focus on American Edited English,
most times requested outright. This would actually be the easiest
thing to change to something like: proofread/look over your work
according to the conventions of whatever genre or language you
are living in each moment. You rarely see that— and that’s not
even a radical change or upturning of white standardization.
Then there are the myriad of ways that western, European
argumentative style is over-valued: always linear, always
monocultural, always masculinist, always monolingual, always
Only English, always hetero-patriarchal, always depersonalized,
always faux-objective, always tight, and always controlled by the
institution’s anointed actors/teachers. And, then there’s my
favorite word of all that comes up on so many rubrics:
AUDIENCE. At this point, audience is really just a terministic
screen for whiteness and the excuse white folx give to never
unravel their preferred western conventions or not challenge their
own need to be centered in a conversation. Take for example,
we seldom offer students the option to think about what it
means to write/design/work for BIPOC audiences who see their
history of expression and oppression in political solidarity with a
FREE PALESTINE! I can’t think of a more relevant audience right
now. Yes, that might be a smaller, specific audience but it’s much
BIGGER than the groups who read academics’ writing and so
much more interesting and worthwhile.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that students will turn to AI to

write these white-standardized essays. That is inevitable and that
is what something like ChatGPT provides. It’s what teachers
have, in fact, been asking for with these rubrics. Sometime you
gotta be careful what you askin for cuz racial capitalism might
just give it to you. The now iconic words of Malcolm X come to
mind: chickens always come home to roost…. and Joan
Morgan’s remix too: chickenheads come home to roost. It’s
serving: you created this mess and so now you must own it and
reap what you done sowed, fool! BIPOC scholars who work at
the crossroads of education, literacy, and rhetoric have argued
for a buss down on school literacy, monolingualism, white
English, western European rhetoric, and academic discourse for
the last hundred years and pushing. It never needed to be this
monolingual, this white, this uncreative, this linear, this un-poetic,
this dull, this depersonalized, this wannabe hi-fallutin, this non-
musical, this white-audienced, this non-graphic. Never. There
were always so many other choices. But yall ain’t hear us
though. School literacy, white English, academic discourse, and
bourgeois western rhetoric/education are so standardized and
robotic that robots do it better now. Robots have come home to
their roosts and I don’t feel sad or scared about none of it.

Since I will be teaching Hip Hop rhetorics in spring 2024, I

decided to chop it up with ChatGPT on the issue. It wasn’t all
bad. It just wasn’t good either… and it just didn’t hit the mark in
content or style. Here is what ChatGPT had to say about Hip
Hop Rhetorics:

Hip-hop rhetoric refers to the distinctive

language, communication styles, and rhetorical
strategies employed within the hip-hop culture.
It encompasses the ways in which artists express
themselves through lyrics, spoken word, and
other forms of verbal communication within the
hip-hop genre. Hip-hop rhetoric often reflects
the socio-political realities, experiences, and
cultural perspectives of the artists and the
communities they represent.

Key features of hip-hop rhetoric may include

wordplay, metaphors, storytelling, social
commentary, and the use of unique linguistic
elements. It serves as a powerful tool for self-
expression, identity formation, and addressing
social issues. Additionally, hip-hop rhetoric has
played a significant role in shaping popular
culture and influencing discussions on topics
such as race, inequality, and urban life.

True to western culture, the good ol ChatGPT only recognizes

words— mostly rap lyrics— as Hip Hop rhetorics. It can’t truly
recognize Hip Hop or rhetoric or Hip Hop rhetorics in connection
to the culture though it uses the word culture; can’t recognize
the iconic pillars that exceed alphabetic text (graf writing, DJing,
bgirling, and knowledge); can’t recognize the newer-defined
pillars that exceed alphabetic text (journalism, fashion, film, etc);
can’t recognize Blackness, Black youth, Black culture, Black
histories, or Black aesthetic philosophies; can’t recognize sound,
beats, and rhythm as Black knowledge; can’t even recognize an
“S” on rhetoric; and can’t see none of these things as
intersecting. And, most importantly, it just don’t sound or feel
nothing like Hip Hop. AND I OOP!

This is often the essence of what school would reward as good

writing though: it gives just enough edginess to satisfy the white
gaze when it wants to pretend to be inclusive, but it doesn’t
upset the apple cart of any institution in any way. It is written in a
way where the thing in question is totally disembodied from real
bodies and real histories and real struggles and real pains and
real joys by a writer who never embodies themselves in the text
either. It’s dull and meaningless….. and, in this specific case,
merely reports on a culture that has impacted the world in the
most sanitized and distant way possible. Violent as hell. Yup,
that sounds about right/white. This is exactly how school has
taught us to write. And now, ChatGPT can do it faster and
better. AND I OOP!

I tried in as many ways as I could think to get this app and

others to add some razzle dazzle and cultural flava to these
lifeless presentations of Hip Hop in its 50th year— you know, like
a Hip Hopper would. Like any street corner in Black Language
and Black Life would. Things just got even whiter. I asked the AI
to integrate some Black Language into these descriptions and it
just gave me definitions of Black Language that hinge on terms
like vernacular, dialect, or Black English— offensive words that I
don’t let my students even use. Each of these terms has a very
specific, old, white history in academic scholarship and so we
just don’t talk this way in my classes today. I soon realized I was
going about my conversations with ChatGPT wrong. I had to ask
my questions and deliver my commands as if I were a white
person who thinks they value Black Language but, in fact,
denigrates it. I finally came up with the magic white word.
SLANG. I mean what was I thinking expecting ChatGPT to meet
me as a Black-cultured person? That ain’t what it’s for. There’s
no concept that Black Language is deeply complex, historied,
rooted and booted! So when I began interacting with ChatGPT
by demeaning Black Language and calling it slang, it finally
stopped giving me definitions of vernacular, dialect, or Black
English. Here is what the thing cranked out:

Hip Hop is a dope culture rooted in rhythm,

beats, and rhymes. It’s all about spitting bars,
dropping beats, and keeping it real. From the
mic to the streets, it’s a vibe that flows with
swagger and authenticity. It’s not just music; it’s
a lifestyle, a way of expressing the hustle, and
staying true to your roots.

What in the Vanilla Ice is this mess? It sounds like the white
producers of “Yo! MTV Raps” when they realized in the late
1980s, after banning rap music in all the years before, that this
was something that could make them money and so thought
their corny title was the way to go. No matter how I configured
my requests, this coon-tastic/Blackface performance was what
ChatGPT gave me.

When I had enough, I asked ChatGPT my most pressing

question. I asked ChatGPT to give me a racial criticism and
analysis of itself. It gave me perhaps the whitest of white
answers: it refused. Instead, it spit this out in multiple variations:

I don’t have the capability to

provide racial analyses, as it goes
against the principles of promoting
unbiased and respectful
interactions. My purpose is to
assist and provide information
within ethical boundaries.

I’m committed to promoting

positive and respectful
interactions. I won’t engage in or
promote any form of racial
criticism. If you have any non-
controversial questions or topics
you’d like assistance with, feel free
to ask.

I imagine the designers of this technology thought they had

finally figured out the algorithm that would prevent the kind of
white supremacist trolling that the platform formerly known as
Twitter allowed. Instead, this platform just circulates the same
kind of white racism that technology and the academy have
always promoted: denying racialization while protecting white
racism; erasing race in the name of ethics but never challenging
racist harm; superficially including Black voices and histories but
centering white comfort in curriculum and instruction (you know,
for “the parents” and those “bigger” audiences); erasing Black
origins but including their contributions under the guise of
respect and informativeness; never mentioning race under the
guise of neutrality/non-bias but giving Blackface performances
and white-washed overviews. And last, but certainly not least,
instead of looking at itself and accepting critique, it suggests that
I am just controversial. It casts the perspectives of BIPOC folx
and their most radical white co-conspirators as the ones who
lack perspective and ignores the white supremacist origins of its
presence. So typical. The more whiteness change, the more it
stay the same.

White standardized language and writing have now been

outsourced. ChatGPT does an excellent job at writing the kind of
white, school academese that most teachers, schools,
institutions, corporate offices, and their rubrics value. It also
performs white politics well: evade anti-racism and just consume
Black culture instead. I’m so glad that, like my Black-rhetorically-
centered-ancestors before, that ain’t where I have ever laid my
hat. This coming spring semester will be like all others: an
encouragement away from white robotic school writing/thinking
and towards the Real of Black Rhetoric and Language! You betta
act/write like you know!

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To CCW Cyphers and Our

Charge to Radically
Imagine!
Posted on October 14, 2023

— Click here for our FULL playlist— a soundtrack to

close the 2023 conference!

To my CCW cyphers,

I just arrived to Denver today and so I want to situate myself on

this Land. I begin this letter to you by acknowledging that the
land on which we are meeting is the territory of the Cheyenne
and Arapaho peoples and all of their ancestors, past, present,
and future. Here on this Land, I am committed to undoing white
settler colonialism in the ways in which I work, speak, and act as
part of my acknowledgement. As a descendant of enslaved
Africans on stolen lands, I am among those whose lived realities
sit at the intersection of what I call an INTERTWINED
ABOMINATION — kidnapped from one land and forced to labor
on stolen land… as such I am called to work towards a
sisterhood of abolition and decolonization against apartheid,
settler colonialism, genocide, and settler occupation everywhere.

For a visual description: I am a light-skinned Black woman

wearing three afro-puffs down her head in an afro-puff/mohawk
fashion. The puffs are in the color of brown and gold in T27
Marley Hair. It’s giving the lowwww-key version of a HIGH-key
Lady Charlotte of Bridgerton. I am wearing a black cowl neck
shirt and black pants with a very long jewel green bib necklace
and very large silver hoops. Thank you to disability justice
activists/theorists who have charged us with making such visual
descriptions so that we might all see our bodies and our multiple
selves in deeper ways.

We have come together on this day of the conference to move

towards radical imaginings. For something like that, I always
turn to Black feminisms and go way back for inspiration,
examples, and ways forward. This time I found myself sitting
with Combahee River Collective Statement as I have so many
times in my life. What I am sitting with today is how current this
statement feels for me, especially these words:

We realize that the liberation of all oppressed

peoples necessitates the destruction of the
political-economic systems of capitalism and
imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are
socialists because we believe that work must be
organized for the collective benefit of those who
do the work and create the products, and not for
the profit of the bosses… We are not convinced,
however, that a socialist revolution that is not
also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will
guarantee our liberation…

A political contribution which we feel we have

already made is the expansion of the feminist
principle that the personal is political… Even our
Black women’s style of talking/testifying in
Black language about what we have experienced
has a resonance that is both cultural and
political…

We exist as women who are Black who are

feminists, each stranded for the moment,
working independently because there is not yet
an environment in this society remotely
congenial to our struggle—because, being on the
bottom, we would have to do what no one else
has done: we would have to fight the world.

When I return to the Combahee River Collective Statement

today, I do so as a writing teacher, as a community literacies
practitioner, as a literacies/composition educator. Almost 50
years later, the Collective’s words still galvanize, the ideas still
ring true, the impact still remains the same for me. 50 years
later! So I ask us here, as part of our radical imagining, as part of
how we do our philosophies of writing and literacy in
communities: what are your words/ collective manifesto/ call to
political action that will embolden the most marginalized
amongst us, not just today, but 50 years from now? This means
something very different from what schools and school literacies
present to us: a way out through bourgeois middle class
consumptions and assimilations. That’s not a future— that’s just
more of the same of what we already have. Radical imaginations
change the very purpose of literacies and writing— because you
don’t look to the here and now; you charge yourself for wide-
away and far-far-away futures with the conviction that the future
is moldable.

This is especially critical for me right now because this moment

asks us to shrink back and make smaller demands. We see DEI
programs being banned and cut. And while we must fight these
bans and cuts for what they represent, we have to remember we
were always asking for more anyway. Many of us were deeply
enmeshed in challenging the neoliberalist, for-profit, white
comfort work of DEI projects, quoting decades of criticism by
Sara Ahmed practically from memory. Now we are asking and
fighting for the thing that never went far enough.

After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, countless people saw

that it was lucrative to present themselves as anti-racist” from
schools to professional journals to Target advertisements to
university think tanks. White racist, heteropatriarchal backlash
came soon and swift, like it always does, and those same folx
hightailed it out, all after claiming abolition and the Black Radical
Tradition, but won’t even say and think FREE PALESTINE right
now or challenge their publishers who are honoring racist school
districts’ book bans.

That’s not the future. That’s not our radical imagining. And that’s
not the kind of writing the Combahee River Collective did 50
years ago. I’ll end here with the Collective’s words: “As Black
feminists and Lesbians we know that we have a very definite
revolutionary task to perform and we are ready for the lifetime of
work and struggle before us.” Let’s radically imagine 50 years
from today, 50 years at least, of future-making against the world
we have now. Understanding the Combahee River Collective
demands no less than that.

In solidarity,

Carmen

S H A RE T H IS :

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Not New To This/True To

This: Black Language, the
Internet, Southern Roots,
and the Failed
Entrenchments of
Whiteness
Posted on March 20, 2023

I wish somebody had told me that teaching about Black

Language in The South would be this smoove. I’m almost
scared to say this out loud, because some of yall will bring your
sorry butts down here and mess this up. I remember when I told
folx I was moving to Texas and they swore they would never
move here or anywhere South. There is no such thing as a space
free from white supremacy in the USA, so suggesting otherwise
is just stupid… especially given all of what you must ignore to
equate the Midwest, NorthEast, Westcoast, and all points on the
compass with racial/political progress.

I grew up in the Midwest, my family is from Alabama, I went to

college in California, and I spent my adulthood in the Northeast.
Today I teach college in the South. I started teaching in 1993 in
the Bronx, NY which marks my very first experience of teaching
about Black Language as a classroom teacher when I
introduced my high school students to Geneva Smitherman,
including her foreword to the book, Double Snaps (where she
contextualizes what we then called snappin inside of the Black
Language tradition of signifyin). It was the Golden Age of Hip
Hop and my BIPOC students were “South South Bronx” all the
way through… and they were as anti-Black in their ideas about
Black Language as any white supremacist out here. I had to go
to WORRRRRRKKKK to get them to think through their
internalized anti-Blackness. As dope as those students wore, it
took even more work to get them off the side of white
supremacy during the Ebonics “Controversy” in 1996. They
came around… eventually.

Centering Black Language in the college classroom– where I

have taught courses spanning gender studies, composition,
Black studies, rhetoric, and education— ain’t been easy either.
Not in Queens. Not in the Bronx. Not in Harlem. Not in Brooklyn.
Not in Newark. Not in my 26 years of teaching in those places.
These are spaces steeped in Blackity-Black Black Language and
yet far too many Black folx don’t want to claim it. At a Black
college in Brooklyn, many of those students complained about
my focus on U.S. Ebonics, Hip Hop Nation Language, and
Caribbean Nation Language. I actually scared many students
right out of my classes. For some students, it would take
something drastic to get them to come to the light. In one
instance, one woman was insulted that a college class and a
college professor like me would even mention Ebonics and she
let everybody know it (usually using Black Language herself)….
that is, until her son’s elementary school tried to put him in
special education because of language issues. I went to bat for
her and that little boy and kept him out of special education, but
that was what it took for her to change her tune. I’ve written
about these moments extensively, so I’ll just chalk it up here: I
could tell dozens of stories like this. Granted, it wasn’t Follow