In the spring of 1999 I took a graduate-level course at the University of Illinois, called The Rhetoric of Race in Writing Studies. There were 11 people who attended the class meetings. The course was scheduled from 1-3 p.m. on Tuesdays, and after several changes classes were held in room 113 of the English building.

Many of the students enrolled in the course had been encouraged to take it by the Director of Writing Studies, as it related to important issues which were finally receiving more attention within the discipline. Our interactions in the class illustrated the complicated nature of conversations in which race acts as a primary determining factor. In certain ways the issue of race shaped all of the interactions in the class; however, the relationships in this classroom were also colored by many intricate communications and varying levels of power negotiation. In fact, I sometimes felt as if "race" became a code word that did more to disguise than uncover power plays in the classroom.

My experience in this class was as both insider (I knew most of the other students very well) and outsider (I was auditing the course rather than taking it for a grade). I often observed a sense of frustration and unease which I felt were at higher levels than in other courses I took with many of the same people.

It might be easy to say that this feeling of tension had to do with the issues under discussion. Perhaps people were struggling with the issues, perhaps they felt unable to represent themselves and their experience in ways that would work in the academic or theoretical framework of the class. Certainly there were power plays in action -- moments of negotiation about who had the authority to speak and about what.

But these in-class relationships were complicated in ways which could not be explained using only languages of race and racism. As in any situation there were multiple forces at work. For example, one of the most difficult (for me) moments in the class was when one student (a friend of mine) spoke out about ways she felt alienated in course -- ways which had more to do with her relationship to the forms and languages of academia than with the forms and languages for discussing race and racism.

The problem with isolating race as a primary factor in discussions involving complex interactions among people of various racial backgrounds, is that it may confine the ability people have to fully represent themselves as complex beings. Perhaps our problems in the class had something to do with our inability to find languages for discussing racism, but it is also possible that because we were constrained by the language of racism we found it difficult to express ourselves clearly.