Making our invisible racial agendas visible: Race talk in Assessing Writing, 1994–2018

•This content analysis examines race in Assessing Writing (1994–2018).•Nearly a quarter of all issues contain explicit references to race.•Race participates in conversations about perception, performance, and content.•Race mostly plays circumstantial or marginal roles in articles, referenced but unanalyzed.•“Race,” “ethnicity,” and “racism” are underdefined constructs within the journal. “Writing” is far from the only construct relevant to writing assessment research. The construct “race” is arguably crucial for the field’s considerations of human diversity, difference, and inequity. To examine how race has been constructed within the field, this paper provides a content analysis of explicit race talk in Assessing Writing (1994–2018). Drawing on insights from critical race and Whiteness theories, this study examined a corpus of 304 articles and found 68 containing explicit talk of race, which were characterized by four trends: scholars discuss race in the contexts of examinee/examiner perceptions and preferences; patterns in assessment performance; and the textual content of students’ writings or assessment documents; but most commonly, they engage with race in more marginal or circumstantial ways, referencing race without analysis (e.g., in literature reviews, calls for future research). Additionally, “race,” “ethnicity,” and “racism” seemingly have never been explicitly defined within the journal, potentially contributing to denotative uncertainty and confusion. These findings suggest that future research could benefit by more consistently clarifying its race constructs; disaggregating data with an attention to racial fairness; deepening historical and theoretical engagements with race; diversifying the voices and interpretations that circulate in the field; and turning toward intersectional justice.