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The American Way: Resisting the Empire of Force and Color-Blind Racism
A j a Y. M a r t i n e z

The universe and its rulers may be unjust, but if they are [] we have the right to call them that. An essential ingredient of our humanity lies in our capacity to make that charge or claim, and the denial of that capacity is the essential foundation of the empire of force in all its forms. Nothing would suit the empire better than a way of viewing the world in which justice was no longer to be a topic, but was replaced by a language of objectification, gratification, self-interest, instrumentalism, or mere causation. James Boyd White

A Story

to

Begin With

This is a story about the kinds of beliefs that my first-year Chicano and Chicana students express in their personal writing. Its a story that I understand. As the first in my family to attend a university, I was proud of the fact that I was one of nearly a dozen who had managed to graduate from my high school and gain admittance to college. My graduating class of 250 consisted of 95 percent students of color, split more or less between Chicano/a and African American students. Of the 250, only 11 of us went on to attend a four-year university, because only 11 of us were granted access to the idea that a college education was an option for us. At my high school, only students in the Honors and Advanced Placement (AP)cohort were allowed to meet with the local universitys minority student recruitment representative, so the ten students that I began and finished my high school career with were the only students in my grade who were ever told by the institution, Hey, you should go to

A j a Y. M a r t i n ez is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric, Composition, and the Teaching of English at the

University of Arizona. Her dissertation will focus on the rhetorical tropes of Eduardo Bonilla-Silvas colorblind racism and the composition pedagogy she has formed in response to Bonilla-Silvas theory. She is currently working on a collection about code meshing and world Englishes with Vershawn Ashanti Young.

College English, Volume 71, Number 6, July 2009

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college. The assumptions made about students outside my cohort prevented them from access to the idea that college was the next logical step in their lives. Granted, the other students knew college existed, and perhaps they even wanted to go to college, but our schools counselors and teachers did not offer the knowledge, support, or encouragement necessary for applying to college. Furthermore, information about how to pay for college tuition was not disseminated to these students, nor was counseling about how to plan a four-year high school course of study required for college eligibility relayed to them. The students outside my cohort never had a chance. I, on the other hand, was in the cohort that began in and graduated from high school as Honors and AP students, and I, a Chicana student, was thus guaranteed the same opportunity for access to higher education as were my white peers. These white peers comprised only 3 percent of the student population, and, significantly, nearly 100 percent of these students were in the Honors and AP courses. I was the exceptional minority in these courses, the one who believed the ideological myth that access and retention in higher education are achieved primarily through an individuals effort. Scholastic equal opportunity seemed a reality for all of those students in my cohort, and I believed that those outside of it did not attend college because they did not value education and did not want to achieve the American Dream. I stand now as a graduate student, and, more important, as a college teacher who has experienced firsthand the disparities represented in academia. Although I do not claim to be free from or outside of the empire-of-force ideology concerning structural and systemic inequality, I am becoming aware of how not to respect it (White 11). I know people like me are not represented in large numbers in the classes I teach or in the classes I take, and I understand the pressure this statistic places on the few marginalized peoples who do make it through the doors of higher education. This pressure, both implicit and explicit, involves continuing to perform the ways of assimilation that marginalized peoples learned in order to get into college in the first place. This assimilation aligns itself with color-blind racist ideology, and it pressures young Chicano/a students to discard their own cultural and ethnic representation in the same way that Richard Rodriguez, in Hunger of Memory, has described his loss of ethnic identity through the pride he felt in losing all trace of his Spanish accent and the embarrassment he felt because his parents were not educated (4647). Likewise, Chicano/a and other students of color, when pursuing a college education, are cast into an ethnicity representation crisis that is riddled with guilt, shame, and trauma concerning who the student is culturallyas this representation is juxtaposed with who the institution is pushing him or her to become (Torres 32). This crisis can in turn affect the students very ability to maintain his or her place in academia. If the student is successful in the institution, what has the student lost?

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A DiScourSe community SuBject

to the

empire

of

force

James Boyd White asserts that only a particular form of language/rhetoric1 (what he terms dead speech) embodies the empire of force. The empire of force, an idea which he draws from a Simone Weil epigraph, is characterized by White as an ideology subscribed to and maintained by a dominating presence that affects everyday life and circumstance. This ideology manipulates, destroys, and exploits those it seeks to dominate and, in essence, denies the very humanity of the subjugated (2). Accordingly, dead speech is the rhetoric of this ideology that manifests itself in everyday practices of socialized notions that are integrated into meanings that make practices immediately definable and manageable. Practices that can carry implications about social inequality and racial stereotypes inspired by empire of force become, in themselves, familiar and repetitive and are in turn actualized and reinforced through routine or familiar practices in everyday situations (Essed 190). White urges us to resist this ideology, and the power that he claims as a means to resist resides in the same source from which the empire of force maintains its influence: rhetoric. Rhetorician Wayne Booth and sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva claim that rhetoric creates lived social and material realities. Booth focuses on rhetoric in its form as verbal communication, and he believes rhetoric has the potential to produce understanding, to reveal and/or construct good, ethical realities. Bonilla-Silva, although never directly acknowledging rhetoric, is analyzing the rhetoric of racetalk through frames that work as tropes. These tropes serve to recognize the power that racetalk possesses, and Bonilla-Silva views this rhetoric as a way for the dominant to establish and maintain their position of dominance (Villanueva Blind 5). Particular to this essay, Bonilla-Silva argues that the rhetoric of color-blind racism, the current and dominant racial ideology in the United States, constructs a social reality for people of color in its practices, which are subtle, institutional, and apparently nonracial (3). He argues further that this race rhetoric supports a hierarchical racial status quo that maintains white privilege and superiority. However, he does not limit his argument by claiming that the empire of force, manifest through color-blind racist ideology, is something subscribed to only by white people. Bonilla-Silva acknowledges that those who rule [] have the power to [] color (pun intended) the views of the ruled, which brings me to the topic of this essay: personal writing on the subject of race by my Chicano/a first-year composition students (10). Students of color like myself (but, in particular, those who are first-generation Chicano/a as well as first-generation college students), form a discourse community with a tendency to rely on dominant color-blind ideology concerning freedom of choice and equal opportunity to explain their positions within the academy. James Boyd White states:
But as human beings we have a need that other animals do not seem to have, namely to tell the stories of our life in a way that makes sense of them, that yields a tolerable

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meaning []. We want to be able to affirm the justice of what has happened to us. And of what we see around us; in default of what we needour integrity demands itto be able to express our sense of injustice. This need is essential to the dignity and value of human life. (197)

I want first to analyze the rhetoric of this discourse community by identifying the color-blind and dead speech that these students use to make sense of the structural racism they have experienced in life and continue to experience in college. I would like to come to a better understanding of why this group of students subscribes to a dominant ideology that seeks to suppress them. Through use of anonymous student writing samples, I illustrate the kind of individual who internalizes these views, and I analyze why such an individual uses a color-blind ideology to explain his or her views concerning racism and academic achievement. I plan eventually to apply what I learn from this project toward a better understanding of the struggles, based on circumstance, that my students face when assimilation into mainstream culture is viewed as their only option toward academic and, above all, American success. Through the structural racism prevalent in the university tradition, these actions of assimilation are (implicitly or explicitly) encouraged, and, as part of my greater work, I seek to both disrespect and resist this empire of force. I believe a step toward this resistance involves educating students about dominant color-blind racist ideology and encouraging them to imagine and express themselves outside of the rhetoric in which the ideology manifests.
color-BlinD rAciSm: A neW rAciSm for A poSt-civil rightS AmericA

According to Bonilla-Silva, color-blind racism is an ideology that acquired cohesiveness and dominance in the late 1960s, [and] explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics (2). For example, Jim Crow racism of the pre-Civil Rights Era maintained a rhetoric that explained the social standing of people of color in biological and moral terms. More specifically, this sort of rhetoric explains that people of color are underrepresented in higher education because of their inferior intelligence, which is attributed to biological factors such as smaller brain size and unfavorable breeding. However, color-blind racism does not rely on such a simplistic argument but instead rationalizes the current social status of people of color as a product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and minorities self-imposed cultural limitations (Bonilla-Silva 2). Thus, color-blind racism explains the lack of representation in academia as owing to marginalized peoples own failure to value education. In this way, racism has shifted from blaming the victim practices based on biological shortcomings to blaming practices that focus on the victims cultural shortcomings.

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Particular to my analysis of color-blind racist ideology in student writing are four frames, that, following Victor Villanuevas lead, I use as tropes to analyze these texts rhetorically (Blind). The ideology of color-blind racism relies on frames that Bonilla-Silva terms abstract liberalism, naturalization of race, cultural racism, and minimization of racism (26). These frames are central to this ideology and can be utilized for interpreting and analyzing the discourse of color-blind racism as a dominant racial ideology. Abstract liberalism is the frame that involves the use of ideas associated with political liberalism such as choice and individualism. These ideas are applied in an abstract manner to explain racial matters such as opposition to affirmative action policies. Because these policies involve supposed preferential treatment, the frame of abstract liberalism sees them as opposed to the principle of equal opportunity. However, and as is usually the case, this claim necessitates ignoring the severe underrepresentation of people of color in most good jobs, schools, and universities; hence, it is an abstract utilization of the idea of equal opportunity. Another example involves regarding each person, regardless of social status, as an individual with choices, while ignoring the multiple structural and state-sponsored practices preventing marginalized peoples from making individual choices about supposed equal opportunity. The frame of naturalization of racism allows dominant culture to explain away racial phenomena by suggesting that they are natural occurrences. For example, groups can claim segregation is natural because people from all backgrounds gravitate toward likeness; it is just the way things are. Cultural racism, as a frame, relies on culturally based arguments such as Mexicans do not value education or Blacks are violent people to explain the standing of people of color in society. These views, once explained as biological, have been replaced by cultural ones that are just as effective in defending the racial status quo. The fourth frame, minimization of racism, suggests that discrimination is no longer a central factor affecting marginalized peoples life chances (e.g., Its better now than in the past or There is discrimination, but there are still plenty of jobs out there). This frame allows society to accept facts of racially motivated acts, such as the recent Jena Six case and many other cases in which people of color are being accused of being hypersensitive, of using race as an excuse, or of playing the (infamous) race card. More significant, this frame also involves regarding discrimination exclusively as all-out racist behavior, which, given the way that color-blind racism works, makes anything outside of this behavior, whether individual or structural, nonracist. Contemporary racial inequality is reproduced through color-blind racist practices that are subtle, structural, and apparently nonracial. In contrast to the Jim Crow era, when racial inequality and segregation were enforced through explicit means (e.g., signs in business windows saying No Niggers Welcome Here), todays racial practices operate in often obscure and not readily detectable ways (Bonilla-Silva 3). Bonilla-Silva asserts:

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the ideology of color blindness seems like racism lite, as it others softly and suggests people of color lag behind the success and achievement of whites because they do not work hard enough, do not value American ideals of success and achievement, do not take advantage of the equal opportunity available to them, and complain too much while making too many excuses for themselves based on the countrys racist past (that is assumed to be something truly of the past ending with the Civil Rights movement). (4)

However, Bonilla-Silva maintains that because these assumptionsand the rhetoric that carries the assumptionsare part of the dominant racist ideology, people of color are themselves also subject to this empire of force that affects how they imagine and express their own places and experiences in the world.
color-BlinD rAciSm
in

chicAno/A StuDent Writing

The fall-semester composition course that I teach is designated as a section that concentrates on issues of race and racism in the United States. My course is open: it is populated each semester by students from varying ethnic/racial backgrounds and orientations. In the first course unit, students are asked to write a personal narrative describing their race literacy, an assignment that has proven interesting and enlightening, considering the diverse demographic experiences of students enrolled in this course. In this assignment, students can choose to write about the moment they first realized difference, a racist encounter, or how their own self-identified race has affected their life chances and opportunities. Although my students learn about color-blind racist ideology, this terminology is not introduced until the fourth week of the semester. Thus they are largely unaware of, but not inexperienced in, this ideologys frames and practices. The narratives by my first-generation (in citizenship and college status) Chicano/a students express overall a sense of accomplishment and success achieved through individual effort. Their essays are success stories, told to detail the struggles that they faced. The texts concentrate on the notion of overcoming the odds of the racial status quo in order to become successful individuals in society and to become students who will embody the American Dream. Unlike Richard Rodriguezs, these narratives do not consciously acknowledge the certain racisms and oppressions faced by students who are called to assimilate. A common theme invoked in these narratives is that of personal sacrifice. In their essays, the students discuss how they are inspired by their parents struggles and by goals involving their decisions to immigrate into the United States and how they therefore feel under pressure to make good on this sacrifice. They view the best form of repayment as their achievement of the American Dream. However, part of this pursuit, for those less critically conscious of the ways structural and sys-

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temic racisms operate, involves becoming victims of compulsory assimilation into empire-of-force ideology, including the ideology of color-blind racism. The rhetoric produced by members of this community has revealed itself in my students writing, as seen in the following excerpts and analyses:
When my parents and I moved out of the neighborhood where I grew up I saw some significant changes. For example in my old neighborhood everything seemed old and the things the city departments needed to take care of were not being attended to. My school was also not the best looking thing in the world. It seemed as if everything we had was old and used. When I moved out of the neighborhood in a better part of town everything seemed new. The schools were new with a lot of technology that was very helpful and the campus was clean. Another significant thing I realized was that it seemed like a lot more people were well educated than me. I did well in all my classes growing up but when I moved it seemed like what we were learning at my old schools was not even close to what other kids were learning. (Student 1 Sample-1)

In this excerpt, the student describes structural and systemic inequality between the neighborhoods that he lived in and the resulting schools that he attended. In the few paragraphs prior to this excerpt, the student describes growing up in an all-Mexican part of town, where many of his neighborhood friends spoke Spanish predominantly and lived in Spanish-speaking households. Later, he reveals that, when he moved to a new neighborhood and school, both were populated principally with white, middleclass people. In the excerpt, the student depicts his former neighborhood as old, with a neglected infrastructure. He describes the structural inequality regarding the different schools that he attended, and, importantly, he notes not just the level of educational difference, but the actual environmental and resource-related differences. However, the student does not stop to analyze why these differences exist and/or what these disparities have to do with racial inequality. He promptly proceeds in the very next sentence and paragraph to claims framed by abstract liberalism and cultural racism:
I think that the level of education being taught has to do with the way the majority of students in the schools were brought up. In most Mexican families, not all but most, education really does not play as big of a factor as say working. Especially the families who come to the country to make money and live the way they want. They could care less about the education their children receive as long as they are bringing home the money. On the other hand white families strive on their kids being successful in school [] I am not saying that there are not Mexican or even black families that dont do this for their kids cause there are those families out there. I am just saying that a majority of the families that do it are white. (Student 1 Sample-2)

Although the students statement regarding the educational success of whites is not untrue, his justification and explanation for their successes over Mexicans and even black[s] rely on abstract liberalism, because it ignores the structural practices preventing the educational achievement of Mexicans/Mexican Americans and African

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Americans. The student also invokes cultural racism when he characterizes Mexicans as a people who value work and money over education. His story is a way in which the frames of color-blind racism can and, in many cases, do operate as cul-de-sacs when issues are filtered through them to explain racial phenomena following an almost predictable route (Bonilla-Silva 26). Dominant racial frames provide a path with a set of rules used to reinforce a dominant ideology. These frames also serve the purpose of interfering with an oppressed persons realization of freedom and equality, as illustrated in the following two excerpts. These excerpts are from essays by different students and employ (in a complicated cul-de-sac way) all four frames of colorblind racism:
The point I am trying to make is that I really do not think race plays a role even close to what it did in the early years of our country. I think that us as minorities could set our standards higher and when we do we can be pretty equal to everyone else out there. We set our standards low and this cause[s] others to look down on us. It is not because of our color but because we are not doing everything that can be done to be successful as them. (Student 1 Sample-3)

This excerpt is the point at which Student 1 ends his narrative. His first sentence relies entirely on the frame of minimization: he seeks to establish his belief that race is not an issue and, if it is, that race does not play a role now that equates to the way it was viewed in the past. Although the way race is viewed and dealt with has changed from that of another era, the color-blind ideological framework of minimization has convinced Student 1 that issues concerning race and racism are somehow changed for the better toward a means of more equality and opportunity for all. This student expresses views in keeping with what Bonilla-Silva calls the racial optimists, i.e., research analysts who believe that changes in whites racial attitudes toward minorities (collected by quantitative yes/no surveys) symbolize a profound transition for the better in the United States (4). Furthering the fuel of the racial optimists is our nations recent election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Although the way race and racism manifest in contemporary society are not by the same explicit means as was the case during the Jim Crow era, racism still exists and is apparent in Student 1s concluding three sentences. Student 1 expresses the belief that minorities are not successful in the United Statesnot because of skin color and the racial status quo, but because people of colorand in particular to his essay, Mexican Americansdo not set their standards for achievement high enough. He further asserts that if Mexican Americans would just elevate their standards, they would achieve success and would no longer be relegated to the same social standing that they have historically occupied. This final section of his excerpt is one of the most complicated to analyze for color-blind racist ideology because there are three frames operating within his analyses. In his

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assertion that achievement is not a factor of skin color, this student minimizes the importance of race in racialized social disparities. He then blames the victims (a form of minimization) for not setting their standards high enough, and, at the same time, he employs cultural racism by way of assuming that all members of this racial group do not make the effort needed for American Dream success. However, Student 1 does believe there is potential for change in circumstance and achievement for his people if, through sustained individual effort, they would simply heighten their standards and reap the plentiful opportunities that are equally available to all who have made the effort. This last part of his statement relies most on abstract liberalism, to convey the sense that the structural and state-sponsored practices are not factors holding minorities back; instead, he claims that institutional opportunities are available, waiting, and ready for marginalized peoples to take advantage of. Student 2, whose name I have changed within her text to maintain anonymity, does not utilize abstract liberalism but instead pairs naturalization of race with cultural racism:
My parents have always been extremely helpful and put themselves to use wherever they go. One day, my parents were helping my host family prepare for a party at their home. While my mother was in the kitchen, making the Mexican salsa, preparing the tortillas for the carne asada, my father was outside cooking, and cutting the meat. A neighbor who was invited to the party [] asked my mother if she was the lady who helped around the house. My mother smiled and replied, Actually we are [Danielle]s parents. The lady was embarrassed and apologized, but my mother was unaffected because she understood the different races that surround us. Being Mexican, you are automatically stereotyped into a field of service and it is a pre-judgment that all Mexicans have to live with. (Student 2 Sample-1)

In this example, Student 2 describes an explicitly racist situation that took place between her mother and a neighbor of her host family. In this students complete narrative, she identifies as being raised in a border town as a person who was admitted on scholarship to an expensive, private, college-prep high school in a nearby city. However, the meaning of the term nearby for this student entailed an hour-long commute each way every day; therefore, she and her family decided it would be best if she lived with a host family during the school year. She describes her host family as white and upper-middle class people who employed a Mexican housekeeper. The excerpt illustrates an incident in which her mother was assumed to be the housekeeper. Now, as problematic as this assumptive racism is on the part of the neighbor who committed this act, what is more troubling is the final part of this excerpt, in which Student 2 accounts for the incident. She sums up the experience with the naturalizing frameits just the way things arein her assertion that stereotypes and prejudgments are just something all Mexicans have to live with. However, before this statement, Student 2 employs cultural racism when stating but not challenging or critically examining the stereotype.

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In all, these essays form a rhetoric of color blindness and an alignment with whiteness that articulates the social issues of racial difference and subsequent social inequality. These writers rely on rhetoric that they likely view as necessary to college-level academic personal writing. They employ what they consciously or unconsciously view as the academic voice in higher education or what could be argued as a white voice. As a result, their narratives are entrenched in color-blind racist ideology, with specific reliance on the four frames or tropes. What is most troubling is the way this ideology operates within oppressed peoples values, beliefs, and their representation of each in written and spoken rhetoric that works toward the creation and maintenance of lived realities subject to the empire of force. In Racism without Racists, Bonilla-Silva concentrates mainly on the ways whites use color-blind racism to maintain white privilege and superiority, but he also briefly discusses how this dominant racist ideology is present in the rhetoric of African Americans. In a continued effort beyond what Bonilla-Silva began through his examination of a nondominant population, I have begun in this essay to explore further how color-blind ideology works to subjugate and disempower Chicano/as who subscribe to this rhetoric. Even though the white voice is a necessary tool that students of color use to succeed in academic spaces, it should be recognized as exactly thata tool, not a way of being. When this tool is presented to students as ideology, students are inclined to align and assimilate rather than incorporate the usefulness of this tool into the overall acculturation that is necessary when adjusting to a college-going culture. In the hopes that plans of action can be formed to teach our students how they can arrive at the point that disrespects and resists the empire of force, I reason that an approach that is capable of identifying and defining color-blind racist ideologyas it is represented through their own rhetoricbe considered.
Where there iS hope Just as importantly, once the racialized and aestheticized collective we is constructed it is also transformed into a fantasy: something one feels entitled to aspire to. Ghassan Hage

The identity associated with the collective we of middle-class and educated America, as an advertised possibility in American Dream rhetoric, is an identity that Chicano/a students such as those previously described feel entitled to aspire to. However, to become educated and middle class requires that individuals outside of dominant culture align with certain aspects of white culture and do away with certain ethnic behaviors that Edn Torres asserts have been vilified or trivialized by people in the mainstream (33). This assimilation and de-culturation is what the young Richard Rodriguez from Hunger of Memory succumbed to and expresses pain and regret about

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in this early text. Hunger of Memory can be read as Rodriguezs plea to stop educations tradition of forced assimilation and hierarchical appraisal of only certain cultural attributes. There must be another way for young Chicano/a and other marginalized students to obtain an education without risking the resulting representation crisis caused when they are encouraged to turn their backs on their cultures/ethnicities to join the traditions of a system that has not been founded onand not necessarily maintained with the intention to servean underclass population. We cannot try to give new answers to old questions, and we can no longer rely on an old system to accommodate a new population; this creates a disconnect between past scholarship and rapidly changing university demographics. When the Chicano/a student attempts full assimilation and submission to the empire of force, the student is colonized and becomes what Homi Bhabha terms a mimic. Bhabha asserts:
Colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce slippage, its excess, its difference (emphasis in the original). (114)

A mimic is the voluntary minority Chicano/a student whofor all of his or her efforts to become mainstream, to align with whiteness, and to realize the American Dreamstill remains not quite, not white (Ogbu and Simons 159). Ten years prior to Bhabhas notion of mimicry and slippage, Victor Villanueva, in Bootstraps, discussed his own attempts at assimilation: I have never stopped trying to assimilate. And I have succeeded in all the traditional ways. Yet complete assimilation is deniedThe Hispanic English professor. One cant get more culturally assimilated and still remain other (xiv). The mimicry resides in the attempt to assimilate, and the slippage involves the fact that the scholar of color still remains and exhibits signs of being other. What is unpredictable is the moment when the Chicano/a is awakened to the cold reality that the effort has been wasted, for he or she is not quite white. Skin color (or other phenotypical attributes) betrays; the white dominance sees outsiders. This is the painful experience I want my Chicano/a students to escape, because the very worst thing to experience is the realization that, to your culture, you have become white, but, to white people, you will always remain undeniably other. Where does such an individual turn? If Chicano/a students can confront the empire of force and its historically specific racisms, I am confident that we, as teachers and students, can strategize ways to disrespect and resist it in order to achieve social justice. I anticipate that this practice can assist Chicano/a and other marginalized students in imagining themselves within the academy with honest, eyes wide-open perspectives, so as to anticipate and be unsurprised by the systemic and structural racisms they will confront in higher

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education and within mainstream America. Thus, with living speech, these students will imagine and describe their experience (both personal and cultural) in a way that validates and confers dignity on it so that they can receive their education while simultaneously navigating through the system with their identities still intact and with less or none of Rodriguezs loss or regrets.
note
1. Based on my own reading of this text, I think that James Boyd White would agree that what I call and define as rhetoric is what he terms language.

WorkS citeD
Bhabha, Homi. Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse. Essed and Goldberg 11322. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The Quest for Effective Communication. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Essed, Philomena. Everyday Racism: A New Approach to the Study of Racism Essed and Goldberg 17694. Essed, Philomena, and David Theo Goldberg. Race Critical Theories. Eds. Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Hage, Ghassan. White Self-Racialization as Identity Fetishism: Capitalism and the Experience of Colonial Whiteness. Racialization: Studies in Theory and Practice. Eds. Karim Murji and John Solomos. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. 185206. Ogbu, John U., and Herbert D. Simons. Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance with Some Implications for Education. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 29 (1998): 15588. Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. New York: Bantam, 2004. Torres, Edn E. Chicana without Apology/Chicana sin vergenza: The New Chicana Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 2003. Villanueva, Victor. Blind: Talking about the New Racism. The Writing Center Journal 26.1 (2006): 319. . Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993. White, James Boyd. Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2006.