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Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Steve Lamos (review)

Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era, by Steve Lamos. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011, 211 pp., $24.95, paperback.College students from low-income families and first-generation college bound backgrounds have unfortunately become significant foci when discussing educational reform. One sees this with the publication Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Arum & Roksa, 2011), where authors conclude that Black habits, Black style and Black skill sets are useless "cultural tool kits" when fostering academic success (p. 114). The book has gained popularity among academic reading groups at twoand four-year institutions. In light of such scholarship and new policies that will likely change the face of four-year institutions, Steve Lamos' Race, Racism, and University' Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era gives readers a historical and theoretical framework for understanding how racial political discourse shape predominantly White four-year institutions admittance policies and supportive programming for minority students. Relying heavily on "interest convergence"-a framework created by critical race theorist Derrick Bell (1980; the first tenured African American professor of law at Harvard), which entails equality and the educational interests of Blacks will only be obtained by succumbing to White standards-Lamos' book offers an insightful examination of the ways in which Whiteness, White racism, and superior ideologies concerning language and literacy alter, and in some cases eliminate, high risk and basic writing programs at four year universities.In Chapter One, Lamos argues that high risk/basic writing programs are compromised by the "racialized nature of discussions" in disciplines and institutions surrounding minority student deficiencies and remediation (p. 3). As such, a sudden decline in race conscious, student-centered institutional programming that cater to minorities are intertwined with convergent and divergent racial rhetoric that emerged during the post-Civil Rights Era (p. 7). Through his work with the Rhetoric Program at (UIUC) University of Illinois's flagship campus in Champaign-Urbana and archival research of journals such as College Composition and Communication, College English and Journal of Basic Writing Lamos traces conversations in the discipline, mapping institutional ideologies which shape approaches and valuing of atrisk programs tailored to support marginalized students. Starting with Chapter Two, "The Late 1960s and Early 1970s: Coming to Terms with Racial Crisis," the author establishes "bidialecticalism,"-"acknowledge a need for at least some degree of attention to issues of race and racism within language and literacy instruction," however such instructional practices "typically demand that Standard English use be recognized and emphasized as the explicit goal" (p. 36)-as having been the dominant perspective among scholars at the time. In this very same chapter, Lamos quotes on numerous occasions Geneva Smitherman's scholarship on African American Vernacular English/Black English, and the Student's Right to Their Own Language (SRTOL) which was designed in 1974 to shift curriculum design by declaring appreciation of the diverse linguistic backgrounds students bring to composition and English classrooms, as a base for examining a period that promoted and acknowledged diverse cultural literacy practices while maintaining the important of Standard English.In Chapter Four, Lamos shows how a move toward writing assessment and competency testing relegated minority students to community colleges for remediation, instead of four-year institutions (p. 103). Additionally, basic writing/at-risk student populations changed as revised admission standards targeted students who had already exhibited mastery of Standard English. Such students according to Lamos came from middle-class backgrounds and performed college materialism that did not disrupt institutional standards. …