Writing & Rhetoric MKE
  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Social Justice
    • Antiracist Literature
    • Taking Action
  • Submit
  • #4C20
    • Welcome
    • Accessibility
    • Land/Water Acknowledgement
    • Lodging & Transportation
    • Local CCCC Events
    • VisitingMKE >
      • Museums & Tours
      • Outdoor Activities
      • Recovery Groups
      • Restaurant Guide
      • Social Spaces
  • Contact

BLOG

WritingMKE for Racial Justice

8/12/2020

0 Comments

 
By Rachel Bloom-Pojar, Danielle Koepke, Chloe Smith, and Madison Williams
Picture
Milwaukee activist mural on the corner of N. 14th St. and W. Vliet St. in Milwaukee, WI. From left to right: Vaun Mayes, Markasa Tucker, Tommy Franecki, Elle Halo, Jeremiah Thomas, Khalil Coleman, Sam Alford, & Frank Nitty. Photo by Madison Williams.

​August 2020 has just begun and educators around the country are wrapping up an unprecedented summer as they prepare for an uncertain academic year ahead. Here at Writing & Rhetoric MKE, we have been spending the summer engaging in weekly conversations about renewed attention across the country to structural racism, #BlackLivesMatter, and community-police relations. Starting in June, we began to shift our weekly team meetings to figure out how we wanted this website and blog to be more responsive to our current moment, to the historical injustices Black communities have faced, and to the ways we might more critically engage with challenging white supremacy in our daily lives. We began with some difficult conversations about the pervasiveness of whiteness on our editorial board, at our institution, and within our field of study. These topics have been part of our conversations for the past few years but we recognized that too often we were using language that was more palatable for white audiences by emphasizing the celebration and amplification of community writing and rhetoric across Milwaukee but not explicitly naming the types of writing and rhetoric we really wanted to engage with and support. 

We continued our conversations week to week as institutions, businesses, and public figures released statement after statement (finally) affirming that Black Lives Matter. We discussed critiques of these statements as not going far enough and reflected on how we might
take action in ways that did more than perform allyship. We didn’t want to just release another statement that did little more than check a box for public relations in our current moment. And we had to acknowledge what our desires were for engaging with the fight for justice and the limitations of what our small team and locally-focused blog could do in that fight. 

We’re writing today to share a new set of pages on the site dedicated to our commitments to racial justice. These are meant to be live, evolving pages that will be updated in the coming months and years to continuously improve our reflection of antiracist work in Milwaukee. First, we invite you to check out our
commitment to antiracist action, which includes details about what we hope to do over the next year and how we will try to remain accountable by reflecting on actions each month. By August 2021, we will review how this all went and what needs to be done for the following year to improve our engagement with and support of antiracist organizing, writing, and rhetoric with our local communities. We have created a page that features a list of relevant texts for learning more about racism in the U.S. and the fight for racial justice. This page also reflects that while reading is an important first step for many people,  it is not enough--it must be accompanied with action. We have also included a page to emphasize how you can take action with local and national organizations to support activism, social justice, and community change. 

Beyond creating these pages, we commit to the following actions: 
  • Solicit and publish blog posts that highlight community events, organizations, and spaces that are focused on antiracist work
  • Diversify our contributors in order to represent a more inclusive range of perspectives and experiences
  • Continue to educate ourselves on how to pursue liberation for all and avoid performative allyship
  • Use the privileges we have to fight racial injustice and reduce the labor asked of people of color
  • Foster connections between students of writing and rhetoric and local antiracist organizations

In order to hold ourselves accountable to these commitments, we will publish Antiracist Action Updates every month for the next year while also inviting our readers to engage in conversations across social media about how we all are taking action for social justice in our communities. We invite you, our readers, to hold us accountable and actively participate in the evolution of this blog’s commitment to antiracist action. You can connect with us through email at writingandrhetoricmke@gmail.com or on Twitter @writingmke.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Categories

    All
    Activism
    African American Rhetoric
    Antiracism
    Archival Research
    Art
    Asian American
    Basic Writing
    Borderlands
    Bronzeville
    Campus Event
    CCCC
    Chicanx
    Code Meshing
    Code Switching
    Community Engagement
    Community Literacies
    Composition Pedagogy
    Creative Writing
    #CSPJustice
    Cultural Rhetorics
    Decolonization
    Digital Humanities
    Disability Studies
    Diversity Rhetoric
    East Side
    #EatingMKE
    Englishes
    Ethics
    Feminism
    Field Notes
    From The Editors
    FYC
    Historic MKE
    Hostile Terrains
    Immigration
    Indigenous Rhetoric
    Labor Issues
    Language Policies
    Latinx
    LGBTQ+
    LGBTQ+ Archival Research
    Lindsay Heights
    Linguistic Diversity
    Literacy Narratives
    #LoveIsRhetorical
    Milwaukee Film Festival
    MKE Neighborhoods
    Multimodal
    Public Writing
    Qualitative Research
    Queer Archives
    Race
    Resistance
    Restorative Literacies
    Rhetorical History
    Rhetorical Listening
    Riverwest
    Shorewood
    Social Justice
    Teaching
    Translation
    Translingual
    UWM
    Virginia Burke Awards
    WAC
    Walker's Point
    Writing Center
    Writing Programs

    Archives

    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018

    RSS Feed

  • Home
  • About
  • Blog
  • Social Justice
    • Antiracist Literature
    • Taking Action
  • Submit
  • #4C20
    • Welcome
    • Accessibility
    • Land/Water Acknowledgement
    • Lodging & Transportation
    • Local CCCC Events
    • VisitingMKE >
      • Museums & Tours
      • Outdoor Activities
      • Recovery Groups
      • Restaurant Guide
      • Social Spaces
  • Contact