Royster, Jacqueline Jones. (1996). “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 47, No. 1. 29-40

• (29) “terministic screen”: (Burke, 1966) “a screen composed of terms through which humans perceive the world, and that direct attention away from some interpretations and toward others” (it is basically about why people interpret messages differently)
• (29-30) The diversified subjectivity and analytical lenses (or in Royster’s word “this enterprise”) require the rhet/comp field to take more open and diversified approaches. However, it is confusing to see where the calling for “systematic, even systemic” attitudes and actions come from.
  • (1) I don’t understand the difference between the two words: systematic and systemic
  • (2) It seems Royster calls for a diversified collectiveness–differences have to be framed/frameworked in systems.
• (30) 3 tasks in the project
  • (1) three scenes: stories demand thoughtful response
  • (2) an intent: the nature of voice is problematic (voice as spoken and written phenomenon)
  • (3) suggest a transformation: voice
    • both expressed visually and orally
    • and a thing heard, perceived, and reconstructed
    • Voice is not only expression, but is about listening.
• Scene One
  • Royster listens to other more powerful faculty members speak about Black community.
  • “when the subject matter is me and the voice is not mine, my sense of order and rightness is disrupted.” (31)
    • Royster talks about the scene when white faculty prevale their opinions on Black communities, while Royster, a black woman, is expected to be silent and listening.
    • In a similar manner, I can edit the sentence and make it echo to my dilemma as an international when dealing with a very self-centered DEI leader: “when the subject matter includes me and my voice is excluded, my sense of order and rightness is disrupted.” I started to question if I am not belonged to the anti-racial narrative and me being excluded is because international students are aliens and the anti-racial narrative is only about the US citizen, or what should be questioned is the systemic discrimination against Black citizens, indigenous citizens, and to more extent, ethnic minorities who have immigrated to the US, while aliens are problems of their own countries.
  • (31) Royster takes the narrative from The Bell Curve (a book by white scholars on black communities) for example and illustrates how the black community is depicted as a whole race (a race to be interrogated and questioned about its capacities and potentials)
    • Analysis of the white scholars’ subject position: their interpretation is only an interpretation due to their epistemology
    • However, such an interpretation has impacts to the black communities: the black is still under considered and uncredited.
  • (32) Royster questions that the outsider scholars are lack of “home training” and they only see through their own perspectives.
    • “we must … respect points of view other than our own” (to be truly open-minded and respectful)
  • (33) Royster calls for the black communities to be open to the strangers’ critical inquiry into the black communities, too.
    • the black should “resist locking ourselves into the tunnels of our own visions and direct experience”
    • so share
    • “set aside our rights to exclusivity”
• Scene Two
  • (34) negotiator: guide and translator for Others
  • But when Royster wants to voice, she finds herself is used to looking at self through the lens of others.
  • (35) the choice of stories, cultural proofs and instructive examples as pedagogical paradigms
    • but the choices of stories have to be pedagogical, that can be transformative
    • to unmask truth
    • to be accessible
  • (35-36) However, the problem of disbelief of an interpreter still prevails, or the audience does not trust Royster as a negotiator. Even she speaks; she does not have enough agency.
    • Spoke, but without being heard.
• Scene Three
  • (36) My interpretation of the scene is that the white audience superficially understands Royster’s speech from an exotic perspective–it is strange, so it should be celebrated as authentic
    • While Royster’s voices are hers, all are authentic.
    • “authenticity” is taken as less academic by the white scholar.
      • The dominant culture takes the less academic as authenticity; and takes Royster as an stranger to academic; and when Royster was academic, the dominant culture takes her to be performative.
  • (37) Who are the “hybrid people”
    • Blacks who dream in English
• Reflections (37)
  • need for a better practice in cross-boundary discourse
  • talk and listen
  • “In light of a record in classrooms that … we ask a lot when we ask them to trust” (38)
    • The block quotation transfers the prior more racial context of the essay to a different self-other scenario. Such a transfer, though it is still about a particular scene, due to its transferrability, means what the essay discusses, the self-other question, has the general or universal application. If the strangers interpret the black communities through their embodied lenses, so are the instructors to students in the classroom. We ask for trust without knowing our students well.
  • “Too often… name, categorize, rank, and file, while our true-to-life students fall between the cracks” (38)
    • This citation can be used in my colonial model of the classroom essay. Teachers make use of their dominant power, working together with the institution to request students to conform to standards so that they can be recognizable and visible.
  • “silence can descend” (38)
    • Silence is the impact of the power disparity, of how the powerful executes the power to the powerless.
  • “from Alex Haley’s Roots. We engage in practices…’Your name is Toby’” (39)
    • https://youtu.be/X9NNlztQPaA?si=t8Ygx5_32ZfowUR0 A clip of the scene can be watch.
    • What Royster means is that in various ways, we are still indoctrinating the students. We don’t respect their knowledge.
    • The Roots scene is a perfect example for me. It is a colonial scene.
  • “to raise a politically active voice” to the more general public audience (39)
    • Here, I see how the diversity is related to the “systemic.”
    • The systemic moves should be called to safeguard the diversity.
  • to listen: to practice multiple perspectives
• References can be used for my colonial model essay:
  • Adisa, Opal Palmer, “I must write what I know so I’ll know what I’ve known it all along” (1995)
  • Williams, Patricia, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (1991) (in page 55, Williams mentions “spirit murder”)