Jason L. Myers
About Me:
--The picture on the left is of my father and me circa 1983. I was about three at the time. Unfortunately, he passed when I was only thirteen years old. He was only forty-three when he died.
I am a first-year graduate student studying rhetorical theory and composition in the English PhD program at CUNY’s Graduate Center. My current research interests are in the areas of anti-racist writing pedagogy and assessment, multilingual (or translingual) composition, and critical literacy studies. I earned a Masters in Teaching from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2013, a Masters in English from Rutgers Newark in 2010, and a Bachelors in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2007.
I have been a composition instructor for going on seven years. Before this, I was a professional writing tutor for eight years. I believe that it is my time as a tutor, working with students one-on-one that has most informed my teaching. I feel that every writing instructor should spend time working in a writing center, as these spaces provide excellent training grounds for understanding breakdowns in communication between professors and students, as well as windows into various students’ study habits, cognitive processes, and linguistic/composing practices. It is the very dialogic nature of exchange that takes place in the writing center that I try to replicate in my classrooms.
I have lived in Newark, NJ for quite some time now, but I grew up in the predominantly white working-class city of Phillipsburg, NJ—just across the Delaware River from Easton, PA. What’s interesting to me is that most of the white folks in Phillipsburg perceive Newark as the ghetto, when the average household income for each city is roughly the same: $37,368 for Phillipsburg and $35,659 for Newark, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The cost of living is pretty similar, as well. The major difference has to do with the racial & linguistic makeup of the populations of each city. Therein lies the rub!
As a working class (let’s say poor) person of biracial heritage, I have straddled the line between two reified racial categories my entire life, never fully able to identify within either. I think that I’ve heard the question “what are you?” issued by more people than Sookie Stackhouse. (Yes, that was a lame True Blood reference). It is the life experience that my racial background and social class origin has engendered that I believe has provided me a unique lens into the intersections of race & class in the United States.
I think that to understand race as a social construction is to get to the bottom of How? When? and Why? it was constructed. What purpose did it serve? What purpose does it continue to serve? Who truly benefits? If it was constructed, how might we unmake it? Is it necessary to unmake the category of race to abolish racism?
These are some of the questions that I continue to ask in my writing and research. And I think that they’re of vital importance in relation to the political and moral impetuses behind the knowledge this website is attempting to produce, to archive, and to disseminate.
About Me:
--The picture on the left is of my father and me circa 1983. I was about three at the time. Unfortunately, he passed when I was only thirteen years old. He was only forty-three when he died.
I am a first-year graduate student studying rhetorical theory and composition in the English PhD program at CUNY’s Graduate Center. My current research interests are in the areas of anti-racist writing pedagogy and assessment, multilingual (or translingual) composition, and critical literacy studies. I earned a Masters in Teaching from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2013, a Masters in English from Rutgers Newark in 2010, and a Bachelors in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 2007.
I have been a composition instructor for going on seven years. Before this, I was a professional writing tutor for eight years. I believe that it is my time as a tutor, working with students one-on-one that has most informed my teaching. I feel that every writing instructor should spend time working in a writing center, as these spaces provide excellent training grounds for understanding breakdowns in communication between professors and students, as well as windows into various students’ study habits, cognitive processes, and linguistic/composing practices. It is the very dialogic nature of exchange that takes place in the writing center that I try to replicate in my classrooms.
I have lived in Newark, NJ for quite some time now, but I grew up in the predominantly white working-class city of Phillipsburg, NJ—just across the Delaware River from Easton, PA. What’s interesting to me is that most of the white folks in Phillipsburg perceive Newark as the ghetto, when the average household income for each city is roughly the same: $37,368 for Phillipsburg and $35,659 for Newark, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The cost of living is pretty similar, as well. The major difference has to do with the racial & linguistic makeup of the populations of each city. Therein lies the rub!
As a working class (let’s say poor) person of biracial heritage, I have straddled the line between two reified racial categories my entire life, never fully able to identify within either. I think that I’ve heard the question “what are you?” issued by more people than Sookie Stackhouse. (Yes, that was a lame True Blood reference). It is the life experience that my racial background and social class origin has engendered that I believe has provided me a unique lens into the intersections of race & class in the United States.
I think that to understand race as a social construction is to get to the bottom of How? When? and Why? it was constructed. What purpose did it serve? What purpose does it continue to serve? Who truly benefits? If it was constructed, how might we unmake it? Is it necessary to unmake the category of race to abolish racism?
These are some of the questions that I continue to ask in my writing and research. And I think that they’re of vital importance in relation to the political and moral impetuses behind the knowledge this website is attempting to produce, to archive, and to disseminate.
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Some salient quotes from Black Feminist Writers:
From “A Black Feminist Statement,” The Combahee River Collective:
--“We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitated the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.”
--“Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.”
From “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde:
--“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separation that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.”
From “The Uses of Anger,” Audre Lorde
--“And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in all those assumptions underlining our lives.”
--“We operate in the teeth of a system for whom racism and sexism are primary, established and necessary props of profit.”
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
--“Racism in the United States has never been just about abusing Black and Brown people just for the sake of doingso. It has always been a means by which the most powerful white men in the country have justified their rule,made their money, and kept the rest of us at bay. To that end, racism, capitalism, and class rule have always been tangled together in such a way that it is impossible to imagine one without the other.”
--“The struggle for Black liberation, then, is not an abstract idea molded in isolation from the wider phenomenon of economic exploitation and inequality that pervades all of American society; it is intimately bound up with them.”
--“Given the widespread advocacy of socialism, in one form or another, at the end of the last Black insurgency, it is almost odd when socialism is dismissed as incapable of explaining racism or Black oppression.”
--“Folding ‘the left,’ ‘activisits,’ ‘social democrats,’ and ‘Marxists’ together and describing them collectively as privileging ‘white perspectives’ while dismissing ‘the lived realities of people of color’ obscures more than it clarifies.”
--“To claim, then, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its centrality to or impact on American society. It is simply to explain its origins and persistence. Nor is this reducing racism to just a function of capitalism; it is locating the dynamic relationship between class exploitation and racial oppression in the functioning of American capitalism.”
From “A Black Feminist Statement,” The Combahee River Collective:
--“We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitated the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.”
--“Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.”
From “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde:
--“And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separation that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own.”
From “The Uses of Anger,” Audre Lorde
--“And when I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in all those assumptions underlining our lives.”
--“We operate in the teeth of a system for whom racism and sexism are primary, established and necessary props of profit.”
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
--“Racism in the United States has never been just about abusing Black and Brown people just for the sake of doingso. It has always been a means by which the most powerful white men in the country have justified their rule,made their money, and kept the rest of us at bay. To that end, racism, capitalism, and class rule have always been tangled together in such a way that it is impossible to imagine one without the other.”
--“The struggle for Black liberation, then, is not an abstract idea molded in isolation from the wider phenomenon of economic exploitation and inequality that pervades all of American society; it is intimately bound up with them.”
--“Given the widespread advocacy of socialism, in one form or another, at the end of the last Black insurgency, it is almost odd when socialism is dismissed as incapable of explaining racism or Black oppression.”
--“Folding ‘the left,’ ‘activisits,’ ‘social democrats,’ and ‘Marxists’ together and describing them collectively as privileging ‘white perspectives’ while dismissing ‘the lived realities of people of color’ obscures more than it clarifies.”
--“To claim, then, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its centrality to or impact on American society. It is simply to explain its origins and persistence. Nor is this reducing racism to just a function of capitalism; it is locating the dynamic relationship between class exploitation and racial oppression in the functioning of American capitalism.”
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That's me up front in the hat!
Image Source: "Trump protesters in Newark vow after inauguration to 'fight back'" http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2017/01/trump_protestors_gather_in_newark_despite_rain_vow.html |
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