2020 Chair’s Address: Vershawn Ashanti Young

Vershawn Ashanti Young’s 2020 CCCC Chair’s Address

Friday, April 9, 7:00–8:00 p.m. ET

Webcast Auditorium

Introduction: Julie Lindquist, CCCC Chair, Michigan State University, East Lansing

Say They Name in Black English: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, Aura Rosser, Trayvon Martin, and the Need to Move Away from Writing to Literacies in CCCC and Rhetoric and Composition

In his rescheduled CCCC Chair’s Address, dr. vay, Past Chair of CCCC (2020), asks CCCC members and the Convention audiences to review the “Know Their Names: Black People Killed by the Police in the USA,” found here https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2020/know-their-names/index.html .

dr. vay’s address will argue that the exclusive focus on writing and standard language ideology in first-year composition replicates and fosters state-sanctioned violence against Black peoples. Drawing on American history, discourses of composition studies, the attempts to make comp/rhet only about writing, and current calls for Black linguistic justice, dr. vay will provide other rhetorically and linguistically based options that instructors must use to inform their literacy pedagogies geared away from racial domination and toward liberation of Black peoples, they bodies, they tongues, and they sociocultural performances.