INTRODUCTION THE CREATION OF DIFFERENCE: FOUNDATIONS, CHALLENGES, INTERVENTIONS

Imagine 25 rhetoricians gathered in a straight line across an expansive courtyard. As a group we ask them to take one step forward if they were raised with English as their first language. Three quarters take one step forward. We then ask them to take two steps forward if they had more than 50 books in their home growing up. All but four take two additional steps. Take two steps forward if the English spoken in your home was a prestigious dialect of English. All but two take two steps forward. Take one step forward if your parents read to you growing up. Three quarters of them take a step forward. Take two steps forward if you were asked to write something more than a five-paragraph essay in school. This time only one third takes two steps forward. And so on through a list of 20 questions until our colleagues are spread across the courtyard. Because our questions related to the language and literacy practices that these scholars had been raised with, we see a pattern emerge: some of our colleagues are noticeably several steps behind others of our colleagues, and some of our colleagu es are noticeably several steps ahead. If viewed from above, one might notice that groups of colleagues have begun to sort by race, socioeconomic background, and gender into a scatterplot indicative of their various kinds of privilege.