This was the first (and so far, only) book I’ve read for my Methods in Rhet/Comp reading list— you know, the only list that is actually in my subfield of English. At first, I was avoiding this list because pandemic-brain made this kind of content feel impossible. Then, it was because memoirs and sexuality studies just felt more interesting/fun. But this list is the most important one for me, I feel.
Counterstory was my first introduction to both Critical Race Theory and counterstory as a method. Well, sort of. I had a general sense of what CRT is but hadn’t read anything in the field, and it was only through reading this book that I realized I’d already read a counterstory-like piece in Betweener Talk, which is written as a dialogue.
An initial list of things that blew my mind in this book:
How many jobs Derrick Bell either resigned from out of protest or was fired from due to protest. Badass. And somehow he was still able to be incredibly successful in his career???
That CRT scholars agree that Brown v Board of Education probably only passed because it was the Cold War and they wanted Communists to stop trying to recruit Black people by pointing out how racist and fucked up America is/had to maintain the U.S.’s image as being the Land of the Free
The idea of composite characters/narratives as a way of integrating research and personal experience and interview data into an argument that is also fun to read!
That even though there is plenty of prejudice against counterstories, this is a real method that you can use to write about stuff!
An initial list of questions I still have:
If one of the tenets of CRT is that racism is permanent, but CRT theorists also argue that that permanence shouldn’t dissuade anybody from fighting for justice, what are the goals if not getting rid of racism/what do they think are the limits of what is achievable?
Could you use a counterstory method to write about axes of oppression other than race? Or would it be called something else, if counterstory is intimately bound up with CRT? Can the tenets be adapted to other axes of oppression also? What would be the ethical way to do that?
So, tenet 3 (interest convergence) is the idea that those in power will only let steps toward racial justice happen if they also benefit white people. But one way that racism is used is to prevent mass solidarity— if white workers blame undocumented immigrants for stealing their jobs, then they aren’t angry at the bosses who are more than happy to pay immigrants less than they would pay someone with papers. Et cetera. And that keeps wages low/causes infighting,etc. which hurts everyone, including working class white people. How can we reconcile the fact that all white people benefit from white privilege/white supremacy, while also acknowledging that tenet 3 (interest convergence) applies predominantly to bougeoise white people and is very much bound up with capitalism, rather than applying to all white people equally?