For this essay, the authors provide an "introspective retrospective." A senior scholar of basic writing provides his views on the development of basic writing as one who began graduate school in rhetoric and composition two years after Mina Shaughnessy's 1977 Errors and Expectations. That perspective carries us through the discussions that took place during the 1980s and early 1990s. Of note are the ways in which a discussion that began with providing greater access to students who would not otherwise have entered the university eventually became racialized, given perceptions of orality versus literacy, with basic writers having been deemed as oral learners and thereby cognitively insufficient. That perception is then complicated by a junior scholar who came to basic writing in 2012, when basic writing studies was no longer offered within the graduate program in which she entered. She provides her own introspective on how she has experienced the learning about and the teaching of basic writing. Together, the authors speculate on the political implications of the current status of basic writing.