RACE, RETENTION, LANGUAGE, AND LITERACY: The Hidden Curriculum of the Writing Center

When we began the process of writing this piece we realized how troubled we were. My mama would say we were “troubled in our souls.” Our souls, our bodies, our very selves were troubled by the gap (the disharmony) between what the vast majority of writing center (WC) literature purports the WC to be and do—a comfortable, inclusive, anti-institutional space where students work on their writing with peers—and what the WC often is and does: reproduce upper-middle-class white domestic comforts (Grimm 1999; Grutsch-McKinney 2013) that may often exclude those not from that class, race, or domestic space. Although