Gail Okawa
Youngstown State University
Conference on College Composition and Communication
Chicago, April 1998

Histories--and the stories which comprise them--Stories--and the histories which they portray-- give off grave resonances in times like these, endings and beginnings of millennia. In revisiting W. E. B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk as I have recently with my students, I see profoundly how histories AND stories give us insights into the change--or stasis--that we inherit and create. As DuBois wrote in 1903, "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line," and, as Karla Holloway wrote, echoing DuBois in 1993, and Cindy Selfe so compellingly pointed out this morning (in her chair's address), the problem at the end of the twentieth century is still the color line, which we toe (if not cross), only with different layers of masks.

As a member of U.S. society at the end of the twentieth century revisiting DuBois, I am dismayed by right-wing efforts to dismantle Affirmative Action in education, one of the few Institutions of Equity remaining as a legacy of the blood shed in the Civil Rights Movement of the fifties and sixties. Seen in the context of DuBois' depiction of education, this dismantling is not only a desperate attempt of the Right to regain an old status quo by erasing social change with further social change, but an erasure of a long sought for (and rightful) freedom.

As a teacher of color, who has shared Pat's idealism since the sixties, who may be tired but started late and is a still "untenured radical," I believe social change has not truly occurred until people who look like me, or Victor Villanueva, or Keith Gilyard can feel an easy participation, a freedom from dissonance, in our field as teachers of literacy in all its changing definitions. If more students of color aspired to be writing teachers, this new phenomenon would reflect a major shift in society on any number of levels.

As a Japanese American woman, recently reminded of the American concentration camps in New Mexico for which there is barely a trace, I find the currency of Dubois' insights profound: what happens when we don't remember? I had gone to the NCTE Spring Conference in Albuquerque, hoping to learn about the two camps in Lordsburg and Santa Fe only to find that no one knew exactly where those sites had been. Do we even care about social change without a sense of history or future? Perhaps this is where writing and teaching writing come in.

Put simply, I don't believe that social change of any sort will occur unless and until individuals first feel--in their bones, a need for change and then take action. I use writing in all of my classes to this end, mainly so that student writers can gain some insight into where they have come from, where they are, where they are going, and where they want to go. This writing is often honest, though sometimes not, but the honesty can be a beginning. When they find that they can construct themselves, they make their own choices. This is an attempt to act on the advice of Paulo Freire over ten years ago--to "find the spaces," to "invade the spaces," as places to create, seek, instigate change//as places where change may be created, sought, instigated//as a way of creating, seeking, instigating change.

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