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This study attempts to identify normalization cues within multimodal scholarship to highlight moments of "un-seeing" multimodal composing practices and theoretical contributions from non-Western traditions. Advocates of this approach to teaching composition understand it as an effective way for incorporating other voices into the curricular structures of composition courses. However, the instructional resources do not include or cite research that does not lend itself easily to dominant views of composing within academia. I assert that academia must go further with how value is assessed. There is research that acknowledges the multiliteracies practices found within subcultures of America, and plenty of work that deems the communicative practices observed in these subcultural communities as valuable. However, it is more than just including and citing scholarship from and about people of color's compositional practices, academia must also employ these ways of knowing and being to fully empower students and utilize the knowledge that the students bring with them to the FYC classroom. The dominant assignment genre in academia is the academic essay. Other dominant methods of communication and transferring scholarship are the journal article, annotated bibliography, proposal, and personal essay. Not to mention the many scholars who have critiqued academia for privileging print literacies, which although may be multimodal, promotes a multimodality of one culture and ideological standpoint. Although the seminal texts from the study offer exceptional multimodal composition research and classroom resources, if we can agree that "the mission of education…is to ensure that all students benefit from learning in ways that allow them to participate fully in public, community, and economic life" and that literacy pedagogy, essentially what the FYC course offers, "is expected to play a particularly important role in fulfilling this mission," then failing to see the value and utilize the scholarship from and about people of color ensures those that are marginalized continue to be "un-seen" and students remain unprepared for the tasks of composing and communicating outside of school (New London Group 60).

Michael Tillotson’s Agency Reduction Formation theory is designed to expose, situate, and explain ideological trends that are intended to compel African people to distance themselves from their collective identity (Tillotson 2011, 62). Identity provides African people the internal construction to seek self-determination that allows them to strive for agency, the ability to provide the psychological and cultural resources necessary for the advancement of human freedom (Asante 2007, 40-41). In this study, I have added an agential location dimension to the discourse of “identity names” utilizing Afrocentric analysis to interrogate whether those specific “identity names” position African people toward victorious consciousness, an attitude which reflects a commitment to Africana history, values, and culture. In addition to exploring why it is problematic for African people to identify with terms such as “Nigga”, “Bad Bitch”, “Savage” and “Trap Queen” given the controversy sustained by their overuse as racial epithets and radical forms of misnaming, I also address how such “identity words” are aggressive forms of Agency Reduction Formation. To demonstrate how the use of the previously mentioned “identity words” is an agency reducing activity, I analyzed the words and photographs of African men and women featured on the social networking platform Instagram. Through content analysis, I claimed that African people identifying particularly as a “Nigga”, “Bad Bitch”, “Savage” and “Trap Queen” within their profiles and posts create an environment for dis-empowerment, identity dislocation, and internalized oppression. If tendencies to use these “agency reducing identity words” continues in this manner, African people will experience ongoing cultural dislocation that diminishes their “need for a collective agency that fights against oppression.” / African American Studies