The two of us writing this review of Aja Martinez’s (2020) Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory have been colleagues with offices next door to one another for seven years at the University of Delaware. As a White and deaf tenured faculty member with expectations for research built into her workload, Stephanie’s experience of support, access, and privilege is distinct from Jessica’s as a Black nondisabled continuing-track faculty member whose workload predominantly comprises teaching and service. Despite the familiarity we’ve built with each other and the ways that we’ve shared (parts of) our lives together, we find ourselves in Fall 2020 needing to re-figure out how to work and move amidst continued calls for justice for Black Lives as well as needs for meaningful conversations about access that were intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Counterstory teaches us how to create meaningful change in ourselves and those around us through Martinez’s repeated invitations to story for social justice. Defining counterstory as a methodology emerging out of Critical Race Theory that “use[s] a narrative method to theorize racialized experience,” Martinez asserts that counterstories “serve the purpose of exposing stereotypes and injustice and offering additional truths through a narration of the researchers’ own experiences” (17). Indeed, it is through exchanging stories that we learn how, even though we are in the same department and university, we are not having the same experiences. The COVID-19 pandemic has further revealed systemic health disparities and problems with technological access for BIPOC and poor people across the United States, and the murders of Black people and the continuous sharing of these murders on social media impacts audiences in various and unequal ways. We see writing together as one way for us to address inequities in our work; it has also provided opportunities for us to explore the role of story in our classrooms as we learn with our students during this time of widening educational inequality.
At the core of Martinez’s book is a commitment to telling and sharing stories from minoritized perspectives. Such sharing and circulating of stories have been central to the work behind initiatives such as the “Say Her Name” movement (African American Policy Forum n.d.) and the Disability Visibility Project (n.d.). However, counterstories are not just stories told from minoritized perspectives. As Martinez explains, a key role that counterstories play is to challenge “stock stories” that act as unquestioned “just the way things are” accounts. To show how counterstories work, Martinez describes eight tenets of Critical Race Theory that are central to resisting stock stories:
- Permanence of race and racism;
- Challenge to dominant ideologies;
- Interest convergence;
- Race as social construct;
- Intersectionality and antiessentialism;
- Interdisciplinarity;
- Centrality of experiential knowledge and/or unique voices of color;
- Commitment to social justice (9-17).
To these eight tenets, Martinez adds a ninth: “accessibility” (18) insisting that stories must be available to those audiences they speak to and about. Such accessibility requires that we consider the audiences we center for our stories as well as how material interfaces and environments enable our stories to circulate.
As the two of us engage together in processes of personal and professional reinvention and navigate new interfaces and environments, then, we hold on to Martinez’s reminder that we must always remember our responsibility to use our various privileges to curtail racism and racial inequities. This also means being alert to forms of institutional Whiteness that are often reinforced or doubled-down on in our daily encounters and environments. Reading Counterstory and talking about it together has created a chance for each of us to consider how the moment we are living through can be an opportunity to reconsider and challenge stock stories. In what follows, then, we both offer stories and listen to each other’s stories in an effort to encourage all of us in rhetoric and composition studies to engage Martinez’s teaching of counterstory and to also take up her invitation to story for social justice. In the space available to us, we seek to model how Martinez has moved us to story and we center our experiences to understand the teaching and writing of counterstory as important racial literacy work.
Two Stories
Jessica: How can I use my strength in the service of my vision? This is a question born out of Audre Lorde’s work that I think about more often since the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic began. A few years ago, I was in a meeting after the murder of Philando Castile. It had only been a day or two since the murder and a group was discussing it in the distance. Someone leaned over and whispered to me upon overhearing the conversation, “this is good for the kind of stuff you’re teaching.” I didn’t say anything. Mostly because, well, what do you say? I’d been absorbing off-the-cuff comments like those for some time and throwing myself into work to help teach those people who were open to learning. In doing so, I did not take in consideration as much as I should have how comments like those and my work itself was taking a toll on me.
So as I evaluated who I was becoming, quarantining in my Delaware apartment, getting more involved with my local community virtually, seeing the continued state-sanctioned violence around me, mourning the death of loved ones whose funerals I could not attend because of travel restrictions, and thinking about how others who may be experiencing similar occurrences were feeling, I realized that my approach to life had to be more about the business of living, reframing, and sharing my story. So, reading Counterstory during this time, reading its many stories and Martinez’s illustrations of ways that history shows itself through the ways we story, was just the balm I didn’t know I needed. I realized that doing work that I care so much about both professionally and personally while encouraging students to do critical self-work through story was a must.
Stephanie: Jessica, listening to your story I hear an emphasis on the way daily lived experiences of racism moved you to create more opportunities to connect with your students and to build community outside of the university. In this, I feel how hard it is to listen across our different racialized realities within environments, like our workplace, that are suffused with institutional Whiteness. With that, here’s another story.
I’ve had to reinvent procedures for access in order to understand what people are saying in online environments, a challenge that has been harder than I anticipated given all of my race, gender, tenure, advocacy and educational privileges. I’ve lost track of how many well-intentioned but not-always-informed suggestions I’ve gotten in response to my access requests, often from people with little knowledge of my experience with various meeting interfaces. While all of us are affected by the pandemic, we are not all equally affected as we navigate differently-accessible online environments suffused with institutional Whiteness and politeness norms shaped by patterns of ignoring inequity. A colleague with whom I have multiple meetings a week seems to be in a different environment for every meeting. I ask them about this one day during a rare minute when we are both in a meeting before anyone else has shown up, and it provides an opportunity to learn a little bit about how they and their partner are navigating their shared living and workspace. But this encounter is a rarity: there are almost no institutional spaces where such glimpses occur outside of a happenstance small talk conversation.
Institutional Whiteness–along with ableism and anti-Black racism–encompasses these encounters, shaping the kinds of things deemed polite to bring up as well as feeding my anxiety about whether I might be “creating problems” for other people with my access requests. Too, they are at the core of deeply-rooted assumptions that our bodies and lived experiences should be separate from what happens at work. To put it another way, nobody is talking publicly, openly, about the highly racialized, gendered, and ableist inequities in childcare, parenting responsibilities, family obligations, caregiving, health care access, community needs, and more that are real and pressing for the work we are doing individually and collectively. Sharing more of our stories would only reinforce ways that we—and our colleagues—are experiencing our campus’s turn to an all-virtual environment in different and complex and inequitable ways, and listening to them requires us to dig in to our difficult and never-ending commitments to addressing racial inequities in our everyday environments.
Jessica: As I read your story, Stephanie, I was struck by your reflection about the need to develop communities that acknowledge a person’s job and their life, overall, in virtual spaces. In this, I can understand how important it is to take the time to listen, to find the time to consistently check in with colleagues, and to ask for what they need to help make any experience the best that it can be. I also hear how requests for accommodations can sometimes go unheard in spaces that are not community driven. Martinez’s work models the need for speaking up and carving out time to share as a way to influence sustainable, equitable communities, whether virtual or face to face. Storying in this way opens up opportunities for the access that Martinez imagines for our field and for our world.
An Essential Contribution to Our Field
We hope that our choice to tell our own stories and to listen to each other testifies to the power and the importance of the work Martinez does throughout Counterstory. She sets the tone from the start with two epigraphs: Carmen Kynard’s “The histories that we speak shape the beliefs that we act on” as well as Derrick A. Bell asserting the “unapologetic use of creativity.” Martinez’s emphasis on creativity throughout this book, exemplified in her own writing of counterstory as well as her commitment to teaching counterstory, provided a key motivator for both of us to take seriously our own creative potentials.
The book’s organization is a pedagogical masterpiece. Martinez not only designs the book for those new to counterstory—audiences who will need the definitional and foundational unpacking she does in Chapter 1—but also, and perhaps most importantly, for those who, as she puts it, “know story in their blood and bones” (xxiii). After Chapter 1, “A Case for Counterstory,” the following three chapters each focus on a different “counterstory exemplar”: Richard Delgado, Derrick A. Bell, and Patricia J. Williams. After detailing the exemplar’s work and contributions, focusing particularly on their significance for rhetoric and writing studies, Martinez also shares an accompanying counterstory following each crit’s particular methods: narrated dialogue for Delagado, fantasy/allegory for Bell, and autobiographic reflection for Williams. These counterstories are the heart of the book, as Martinez narrates her protagonist Alejandra and her daughter Sofi into an exchange about intersectionality, textual selection, and engaged dialogue; as she imagines Alejandra/Self engaging eight rhetoric “Octalog” theorists and facilitates a new conversation among eight counterstory practitioners; and as she reflects on her own and her father’s experiences living in Arizona and navigating daily encounters that reveal the realities of racism. The book’s fifth chapter considers counterstory in educational contexts and features a counterstory epistolary exchange between Martinez and her mentor V that demonstrates the deep emotional and pedagogical commitments that are involved in teaching and performing counterstory. The book’s four appendices showcase undergraduate and graduate syllabi that exemplify Martinez’s approach to teaching counterstory and working toward social justice in her classrooms.
Careful attention to history is central throughout Counterstory. Beginning with the book’s prologue, “Encomium of a Storyteller,” Martinez considers the ancestorship of her stories in telling of her grandfather Alejandro Ayala Leyva, and she accounts for the historical and social contexts in which each of the founding counterstory exemplars thought and wrote. This storying of ancestorship concludes with an epilogue, “Birth Song,” that tells the story of Martinez’s pregnancy and birth of her daughter Olivia. With this book, Martinez offers a way to connect across generations, showing readers how careful listening to elders equips us with armor needed to meet the challenges of the world, a choice that makes clear the power of passing down stories, holding on to stories, and sharing stories.
History, creativity, story, lived experience, and theory all interweave in this eminently readable, engaging, powerful, compelling book. Necessary for graduate and undergraduate courses alike, this book lays the groundwork for generations of rhetoric and composition scholarship to come. We cannot imagine mentoring or preparing students in rhetoric and writing studies without insisting that this book be part of that work.
Works Cited
African American Policy Forum. N.d. “Say Her Name Campaign.” Accessed October 22, 2020. https://aapf.org/sayhername.
Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. 2017. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed. New York: New York University Press.
Disability Visibility Project. n.d. “Disability Visibility Project.” Accessed October 22, 2020. https://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/.
Edwards, Jessica, Meg McGuire, and Rachel Sanchez, eds. Forthcoming 2021. “Introduction.” Speaking Up, Speaking Out: Lived Experiences of Non-Tenure Track Faculty in Writing Studies. Utah State University Press.
Martinez, Aja. 2020. Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.