Race, Literacy, and the Value of Rights Rhetoric in Composition Studies

Abstract

The fiftieth anniversary issue of CCC included a call from Geneva Smitherman for compositionists to renew the fight for language rights. In this article, we take up Smitherman's call by situating the theory of language rights in composition studies in a brief history of rights rhetoric in the United States. C ommemorating its fiftieth year, Geneva Smitherman celebrated CCC as an "advocate for those on the linguistic margins" (349). As Smitherman makes clear in both the title of her commemorative article-"CCCC's Role in the Struggle for Language Rights"-and in her opening reference to "Students' Right to Their Own Language," composition's advocacy for those on the linguistic margins has been most meaningful when it has been expressed through a rhetoric of rights. Drawing attention to the legacy of a rights rhetoric in composition studies, Smitherman demonstrates that the constitutive ambiguity of rights rhetoric continues to create contexts for exchange, deliberation, and progress. While rights rhetoric has served us in our search to understand and enact a just redistribution of literacy resources through the teaching of writing, the rights rhetoric of compositionists has not been without its problems. A rhetoric of rights is limited by the collision of shifting meanings of rights in