How does discourse community influence warrants?

A discourse community uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback. Discourse community influences warrants because of the overall main point. It helps find the warrant.

The Gap:

Morgan thinks his readers don’t understand that if African Americans get equal rights and get up to white people’s standards it can mess up white’s race and won’t be good for them and their family life.

The Readers:

Morgan’s readers are white people that agree with him and don’t want other races building up to their standards which is wrong. But this is what Morgan wants, he wants people on his side so he doesn’t look as bad stating these things, he wants people to think this his facts when it is just his opinion. Also, people that are on his page our people wanting all the rights to themselves and don’t believe in equal rights and are very hypocritical. (Fence-sitters)

Annotations of “The Race Question in the United States” (pg. 62-76):

• This is by John Tyler Morgan
• Morgan was born in the eastern hills of Tennessee, and grew up in Alabama.
• In 1890 Morgan was instrumental in defeating two important post-Reconstruction bills: the Blair and Force Bills.
• In 1900 about 180,000 blacks were eligible to vote in Alabama.
• Morgan was also considered a progressive in his economic policy, which advocated the growth of industry and trade in the South.
• The 14th and 15th amendments furnish a strong support for the contention of the negro race that it was the purpose of these amendments to give them higher and more definite security for their liberties than was provided for the white race.
• Social and political questions connected with the African race, in the United States, all relate to and depend upon the essential differences between the negro and the white man, as they have been arranged by the hand of the Creator.
• Slavery has been a rudimentary condition – the first exercise of political government, after the family government, and no nation or race is to be despaired of because it’s government was first rooted in slavery.
• This inferiority and dependence excited, in all classes of white people, that’s sort of Christian benevolence that compassionates, always, the poorest and least attractive of the human family. The Christian training of the Negro race in the south is the undesirable proof of the state of sentiment towards them.
• The first movement of the Negro party in the south, and of their white leaders there and in Congress, was directed to the vital point of securing raise equality, and social as well as political privileges, by the compulsion of law.

Annotations of “The Mismeasure of Man” (82-92):

• Samuel George Morton—empiricist of polygeny
• Agassiz did not spend all his time in Philadelphia reviling black waiters.
• Morton won his reputation as the great data-gatherer and objectivist of American science, the man who would raise an immature enterprise from the mires of fanciful speculation.
• Morton gathered skulls neither for the dilettante’s motive of abstract interest nor the taxonomist’s zeal for complete repre-sentation.
• Morton published three major works on the sizes of human skulls—his lavish, beautifully illustrated volume on American Indians, the Crania Americana of 1839
• Morton began his first and largest work, the Crania Americana of 1839, with a discourse on the essential character of human races.

In your respective blogs, type out what your group thinks is the gap

In “Race Amalgamation” By Frederick Hoffman’s he says that if you mixture races it isn’t good. He talks about how rare it is for a white women to marry a African American man. The Gap of this book is that Hoffman is trying to get the point a crossed that it isn’t best to mix faces and to stay away from that. He feels it makes the black people look worse when they get with a white women. I feel the audience of the reader of this would be white people that believe it what he thinks. The audience agree that interbreeding isn’t normal. Others would be very offended by this, such as myself.

What do you and your group believe is Morgan’s claim, Morgan’s reason, and the type of evidence he produces to support this reason. 

The claim is Hoffman’s main point which is negative stuff will just come out of mixing races, and it shouldn’t be happening unless you basically you want to be looked down upon.

The reasoning he wants people to think this is all true is by him making people think the races should stay separate. “infusion of white blood, through white males, has been widespread, and the original type of the African has almost completely disappeared” (Hoffman, 1997, pg. 78).

The evidence Hoffman has is that white and black mixing together is more prone to getting illnesses. He is showing off what his beliefs is.

The warrant is Hoffman knowing that is point is right and that he won’t change how he feels. And he believes that if he thinks this way everyone should.

The Rebuttal is that he wants his thoughts to be right and everyone to agree with him and follow the so called “rules” of mixing races.

Annotations of “Race Amalgamation,” (pg. 76-)

• Frederick L. Hoffman was born in Varel, Germany.
• Hoffman immigrated into the United States in 1884.
• He began a career in the insurance industry in 1887.
• Hoffman was a very well respected man by the people. He received a gold medal for the prudential exhibit Insurance Methods and Results at the 1904 St. Louis International Exposition.
• Hoffman faults the “great attempts at world bettering” that ignored studies of “racial traits and tendencies” A “vast sum of evil consequences,” he warns, is the “natural result of misapplied energy and misdirected human effort.”
• Today Hoffman’s statistics themselves look foolish to most scientists.
• Of the original African type few traces remain, and the race is largely a cross between the African and the white male.
• Gobineau maintains that intermixture of different races leads to final extinction of civilization.

Annotations of TMM (pg. 92-104):

• Morton’s friend and fellow polygenist George Gliddon was United States consul for the city of Cairo. He dispatched to Phila-delphia more than one hundred skulls from tombs of ancient Egypt, and Morton responded with his second major treatise, the Crania Aegyptiaca of 1844.
• Many of the Egyptian skulls came with mummified remains of their possessors (Fig. 2.6), and Morton could record their sex unam-biguously.
• Morton’s burgeoning collection included 623 skulls when he presented his final tabulation in 1849—an overwhelming affirma-tion of the ranking that every Anglo-Saxon expected.
• Among nonpolygenist, “scientific” defenses of slavery, no argu-ments ever matched in absurdity the doctrines of S. A. Cartwright, a prominent Southern physician.

Prompt one: In your opinion, how do the activities of the individuals discussed in last night’s reading match Swales’s benchmarks for a discourse community?

From last nights reading I felt that Plessy v. Ferguson’s topics matched up with a couple of the six characteristics for Swales benchmark for a discourse community. One would be the first characteristic which is “A discourse community has a broadly agreed set of common public goals”. This book is very blunt and to the point, they want to spread there knowledge on the topic they are talking about and their goals. In this book it shows they want to keep things better and succeeding. The other characteristic is “A discourse community uses its parlicipatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback”. It is about improving and going up in a certain area. This is what it is all about.

Prompt two: Based on your understanding of the reading you chose to write about in the question above, how did this discourse community spread the “knowledge” they were responsible for creating?

Plessy v. Ferguson gets their point a crossed by being straight to the point. They use a type of discourse community they use is by spending the knowledge they know. It was important that “in the segregation of the races blacks as well as whites obey a natural instinct, which, always granting that they get justice and equal advantages, they obey without the slightest ill-nature or without any sense of disgrace” (Thomas, 1997, pg. 27). There knowledge is to get their point a crossed.

Prompt three: How do you think the thinking/writing/talking (the discourse) of the special interest group you chose to write about set the foundation for American Jim Crow laws?

The Jim Crow laws was designed to keep races separate. Some people could pass as white as well as prior racial mixture already being widespread.

Annotations of Plessy v. Ferguson (pg. 20-38):

• In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company (1886) the Court, influenced by a circuit court decision by Field, ruled that corporations, as artificial legal “persons,” come under the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.
• William J. Cruikshank was a member of a paramilitary group known as the White League that killed at least sixty-nine and as many as one hundred blacks in Colfax, Louisiana, as part of a campaign to keep blacks from participating in the political process.
• In the early 1870s, the Massachusetts Republican senator Charles Sumner unsuccessfully proposed a new civil rights bill.
• In the lame-duck session in 1875, motivated by Sumner’s death in 1874 and major losses in the 1874 election, the Republican-controlled Congress finally passed the new bill.

Annotations of The Mismeasure of Man (pg. 62-82):

• The “scientific” argument has formed a primary line of attack for more than a century
• One group—we might call them “hard-liners“—held that blacks were inferior and that their biological status justified enslavement and colonization.
• Another group—the “soft-liners,” if you will—agreed that blacks were inferior, but held that a people’s right to freedom did not depend upon their level of intelligence.
• The “harder” argument abandoned scripture as allegorical and held that human races were separate biological species, the descen-dants of different Adams. As another form of life, blacks need not participate in the “equality of man.” Proponents of this argument were called “polygenists.”

Questions I have about PvF or TMM:

• In PvF, What does “Coons” mean?

The Mismeasure of Man:

1. How does Gould define biological determinism? (page 52)

Gould argues that the primary assumption underlying biological determinism is that, “worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quantity”.

2. What are the two major sources of data that have supported this theme known as biological determinism? (page 52)

• Craniometry (or measurement of the skull)
• Certain styles of psychological testing.

3. What have biological determinists invoked when it comes to the issue of race? (page 52)

It is invoking faked data com-piled by the nonexistent. And invoked the traditional prestige of sci-ence as objective knowledge, free from social and political taint.

4. According to Gould on page 53, biological determinism is useful for:

I think it is useful for groups in power. Biological determinism is used to uphold white supremacy and justify racial, gender, and sexual discrimination as well as other biases against various groups of people.

5. According to Gould on page 53, for the adherents of biological determinism, changes to a social and political system based on a racial caste system seen as an extension of nature is:

Both 2) and 3)

6. Gould’s arguments against biological determinism begin by attacking which two fallacies? (page 56)

Reification and ranking

7. In the last paragraph of page 56, what does Gould write is his book is about (his explanation continues onto page 57)?

?

8. Finish this sentence, which can be found on page 59: “In most cases discussed in this book, we can be fairly certain that biases—though often expressed as egregiously as in cases of fraud—were unknowingly

influential and that scientists thought they were following unsullied truth.”

9. On page 60, Gould describes biological determinism as a theory of limits. What does he mean by that?

Gould describes biological determinism as a theory of limits meaning it takes the current measure of groups of where they should and must be.

Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents:

1. According to Brook Thomas, the editor of Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents, what were the problems with laws designed to keep races separate (hint: it deals with the concept of skin color and “passing”)? (page 3)

The Jim Crow laws was designed to keep races separate. Some people could pass as white as well as prior racial mixture already being widespread.

2. What did Albion Tourgee want the Supreme Court to do when it came to segregation laws? (page 4)

Albion Tourgee wanted to improve conditions for freedom. Also, he wanted it to increase economic opportunity and inform them as new citizens.

3. Why was Homer Plessy chosen as a test case? (page 4)

4. Why did Justice John Ferguson rule in favor of Daniel F. Desdunes riding a train over state lines but against Homer Plessy, who rode a train within the borders of Louisiana? (page 5)

5. What is the difference between a social right, a political right, and a civil right? (page 12)

6. Why does Congress pass a civil rights act? (page 13)

7. According to Charles Walter Collins, what did the 14^th Amendment do? (page 14)

8. Which group was the first to bring a case before the Supreme Court citing a violation of their rights under the 13^th and 14^th Amendments (hint: it wasn’t African Americans)? (page 18.)

Annotations of “Plessy V. Ferguson” (pg. 1-20):

• Edited by Brook Thomas
• “Samuel E. Courtney” was an African American teacher in Alabama in 1885.
• “Coon” is a term used to refer to a black person.
• During this time in age, white people didn’t like diversity or anything different from themselves.
• White men could be very aggressive with their words, body language, and being physical. Such as when someone said “Before we’ll let you ride any further in that car we’ll take you out there in the field and fill you with bullets”.
• The men threaten and name call.
• “Jim Crow” car is a car reserved for colored people.
• The Alabama law that made it illegal for African Americans to sit in cars with whites was one of many laws passed by southern states beginning in the 1880’s that mandated racial segregation.
• “People learned their place in segregated society through the pervasive juxtaposition of clearly superior facilities marked “Whites Only” with inferior ones designated “Colored” (pg. 3).
• In 1866 a Civil Rights Act was passed, effectively voiding practices mandated by black cods by making African American full United States citizens and guaranteeing certain rights of citizenship.
• The first time the court ruled on the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments was in 1873 in the Slaughter-House Cases, which involved the rights of white butchers, not African Americans.

Supreme Court Of The United States. (1895) U.S. Reports: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537.

Annotations of The Mismeasure of Man (51-62):

• Author is Stephen Jay Gould
• The Mismeasure of Man is not fundamentally about the general moral turpitude of fallacious biological arguments in social settings (as my original and broader title from Darwin would have implied).
• This book seeks to demonstrate both the scientific weaknesses and political contexts of determinist arguments. Even so, I do not intend to contrast evil determinists who stray from the path of scientific objectivity with enlightened antideterminists who approach data with an open mind and therefore see truth.

Why did Swales’s essay suck:

First it takes me awhile to read any story or article. I have trouble grasping the point. I have to go through it serval times before I fully understand. I didn’t enjoy reading Swales article very much because it didn’t just take me a look took me a long time to read and get to the point but after I read it through more then once I didn’t understand. There is parts in their that could have been worded differently and in a way he could get the point a crossed more. Also, if the reading isn’t interesting to my liking then I won’t be interested in staying involved in it.

After watching the videos, answer these questions:

1. If we take this as true, in your own words describe what you think Swales sees as the gap in this conversation he’s participating in (the conversation described by the editors in the preface to the chapter).

I feel that Swales sees the gap as discourse community. Different people mix up how they view it. He wanted it to be known as a group of people that come together to communicate about a certain topic or issue. He defends it between six characteristics.

2. In your opinion, how does this piece fill that gap?

This piece fills the gap because he makes sure to provide six defining characteristics of a discourse community. He thinks people will grow from this and make them successful readers. He wants people to see his point.

3. Who do you think is the audience for this essay?

I think his audience is confident readers. People that can think about goals they have for themselves or talk about things and share their feelings. I think his readers are people that are successful or that strive to be successful. People that don’t take things to much of a surprise.

4. What’s the danger of an essay like this?

Stein is a type of writer that tries to just get his point a crossed. He is a very sarcastic writer. This might cause danger with people not liking the way he writes. He might get bad feed back from readers. And it will make him look bad but he just cares about getting that attention. He doesn’t care if he is disliked but the wording choices he uses. Not a lot of people tend to understand this type of writing and they will quit reading, which might cause danger.

Annotations of “Learning to Serve: The Language and Literacy of Food Service Workers”:

• The author is Tony Mirabelli. He earned a Ph.D. in Education in Language, Literacy and Culture from the University of California in 2001.
• Mirabelli introduced the concept of multiliteracies to argue that these workers do not just read texts, they also read people and situations.
• Mirabelli’s very rich analysis of a particular activity system is an opportunity for you to test the ideas you’ve been working on throughout the chapter.
• This writer is straight to the point.

Click to access mirabelli.pdf