Final Portfolio

http://mayaschumb.wix.com/mysite

WP3

           

 WP3

                                                                  WP3 Reflection

For my WP3 I chose an academic article called Race and Crime Sixty Years After Brown v. Board of Education. The purpose of this article is to address blatant racial issues that remain prominent in our society today. The article talks about race in the prison system, racial issues with African Americans in relation with the police, and the fact that race is a frequently talked about issue in our society and although the topic is being addressed no progress is being made to mend the issues. For my transformations I chose to write one blog post meant to mimic the style of the Afrikan Black Coalition and then a second one imitating a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. While creating my transformations I had to not only create different writing identities-taking on different identities to cater to specific audiences- but I also had to pay attention to the the audience, exigence, and the various constraints for each (Losh & Alexander).

            For my blog post transformation, I had to pay special attention to the social context of the article as well as the audience. My scholarly article talked about the relationship between police and African Americans and how racial profiling is a prominent issue so I decided to focus on that aspect of the scholarly article in my transformation. When I wrote the article that was meant to be a blog post for my fictional “African American Students Union” I read through several articles on a website that I deemed to be similar to the group I had invented. This non-fictional group is called the Afrikan Black Coalition, by reading through several of their articles which addressed a variety of different topics (though all of them were in reference to racial issues) I was able to get a better understanding of their audience. This helped me determined the type of language to use and the formality of my language and word choice (Carroll,41). I found that many of the articles were written by young students (I even found a couple posts written by a girl I went to high school with!) and the majority of these articles were written in a very controversial and critical manner in which the authors would blatantly refer to “whites [not caring] about black people” many phrases and comments similar to that were extremely common. The most important factor I kept in mind while attempting to mimic the style was “their sense of position within [the] world” which greatly affected the style of writing (McLoud, 19).  I found that in order to comply with that convention I would have to mimic their very blunt style where they made little effort to be politically correct. The authors would also continuously ask rhetorical questions a ‘move’ used which evokes a feeling of injustice in the reader as exemplified by phrases such as “why are we putting up with this?” or “we need Black media to inform our people about our people”.  The authors would also use the words “we” and “our” in order to address their audience who they believed to be other African American students following their organization. The authors also continuously ended their posts with phrases such as “in struggle and revolution” and “we must resist, we must liberate, we must educate”. This is done to create a sense of community and unity between the author and the readers seeing as they are all members of the African American community and share similar social struggles.

            I attempted to pay special attention to the formatting and style of the website blog page in order to capture the same vibe as the website I was replicating. I attempted to add as many symbols referencing black power and identity. For starters I used the black fist symbol as the main symbol of the entire website. I chose to do this because the website for the Afrikan Black Coalition displayed an extremely large number of photos and graphic designs of African Americans mimicking the same exact symbol so I gathered that it was something crucial to the identity of the blog post and website (empowerment). I attempted to use a large number of photos and visuals (though it was difficult because I only made one page). Even in situations similar to mine where they were addressing an event that hadn’t occurred yet they would still use stand in visuals that had to do with the event/subject at hand which is why I chose to use a picture of a large group of people holding candles in a vigil-like situation. They also used the same color scheme over and over again (red, black, white, green) which is meant to represent the colors of the African American flag as a result I used the same color scheme.

            The scholarly article also focused a lot on the African American presence in the jail system which is what I decided to focus on in my second transformation. I chose to mimic a report created by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, this particular report was analyzing jail population changes between 1999 and 2013. I chose to mimic the style by making my report very official looking and refraining from adding a lot of unnecessary colors since the colors used in the original article were relatively dull. I also added a couple subtle graphics including the great seal of the United States and a section at the bottom that references the Office of Justice Programs something that would be found on an authentic reporting. I also replicated the format by having several subcategories all only a small paragraph long and containing a lot of statistics and numbers. The purpose of having such small paragraphs was to get straight to the point. I made sure to follow a similar format by creating several subsections that all had titles and were followed by an extremely concise statistical elaboration of what was written in the title.  The audience- those who are the intended or unintended recipients of the rhetorical message- of something like this would be a board director looking for a concise and compact way to get annual data or in my case, data from an extended period of time, about the prison system (Carroll, 41). The original report I read didn’t necessarily grab my attention so in my transformation I tried to take statistics and demographics straight from the scholarly article and relay it in the most banal way possible.

            By examining one scholarly article about racial issues in modern day society I was able to take the information given to me and “morph” it into two extremely different genres, one a blog post for an African American student organization, and the other a census report on race in the prison system (McLoud). Writing using drastically different conventions based off of the differences in audience, purpose, and exigence and the effect of using different moves substantially changed the outcome of both transformations proving that though they come from the same subject their differences in genre distinguish them completely from one another.

Works Cited:

Census of Jails: Population Changes, 1999-2013. Digital image. Bureau of Justice Statistics, n.d.

Web. 22 May 2016.

Carroll. "Backpacks to Briefcases: Steps Toward Rhetorical Analysis." N.p.: n.p., n.d. 45-58. Print.

Alexander, Jonathan. "Writing Identities." Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing.

By Elizabeth Losh. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 114-39. Print.

Means, Kadijah. "Where’s the Coverage on Daniel Holtzclaw?" Afrikan Black Coalition. N.p., 9

Dec. 2015. Web. 29 May 2016.

McLoud. "Chapter 1." Writing with Pictures. N.p.: n.p., n.d. 8-57. Print.

Older Audience:

 Younger audience: 

http://mayaschumb.wix.com/africanamericanstdu

Thlog #8

This week in class we talked a lot about WP3 and different ways we could approach it. At the beginning of the week I was having a really hard time trying to find a good topic especially since when I looked at some of the sample articles we were given I could barely get through reading the entire thing without spacing out (I felt like I was just reading the words not actually understanding). That all changed though when we were given the option to choose our own articles. Even after we were given more freedom to pick our own articles I was stressing out a lot about finding an article that was not only interesting enough but also had information in it that would be easier to manipulate/transform into different (and interesting) forms.  At this point I have a vision of what I want my WP3 to look like but my biggest concern is that I won’t be able to create it exactly the way I want to. I also wasn’t sure if we were just supposed to choose a younger (little kids) audience and an older audience or if we had the liberty to choose two different audiences that didn’t have to have a huge difference in their age. Since I had envisioned having one of my transformations be a blog post by an African American union I hope I’ll be able to properly recreate a plausible blog post especially since I feel like there can be a lot of variation in the way in which different people chose to write blog/article posts online.

PB3A

I chose an article called “Race and Crime Sixty Years After Brown vs. Board” which talks about the way in which the bill was passed and viewed is a huge step within our society however, there still remains many prominent racial issues in our society nowadays that perpetuates racism. The article spends a lot of time talking about the presence of African Americans in our prison system as well as the effects of the high incarceration rate. The article touches on the fact that though racism is a topic that is addressed by politicians and society little progress has been made to ameliorate the situation and instead we are stuck in a place where we are just having the same conversations over and over with no resolution. The article then goes on to talk about African American presence in the crime rate (including homicide and drug cases) as well as the way in which they are continuously and unjustly profiled by the police. The underlying message of the article was that in order to “visualize redemption for each of us, we will never fully realize redemption for all of us.”

For my WP3 I was planning on my first ‘transformation’ to be an article from the perspective of a black student’s union, I researched one in particular called the Afrikan Black Coalition which was an organization created by black students in the UC system who were striving to create a place where they could come together and address the relationship between the University system and their Black students. The Coalition has a blog where they post articles regarding on campus student protests, interviews of various African American students (high school and college level), as well as articles about police violence/just violence in general direct towards African American students in the community. I was planning on writing an article that would be about the protests of the death of a young African American Male University student that resulted from racial profiling by the police and the community. So something from the perspective of students within the African American community reacting to the death/racial profiling of another African American student in their community. I decided to pick something from this perspective in order to write something that addressed current African American youth’s perspective and reaction to the demographics given by the scholarly article regarding the incarceration rate of African Americans and also the way they are profiled by the police.

For my second ‘transformation’ I was planning on replicating a police report which would be from the perspective of the police officer responsible for the death of the African American college student and would also include a “narrative” which would be a summary of the where/what/when happened the night the incident occurred from the perspective of the police officer but also from the information that was relayed to him when he received the reporting from a citizen in the community. The reason in which I was planning on doing it from this perspective is to show racial issues from the perspective of a white male police officer and the way in which (in this case) the police officer will be conforming to the facts about the relationship between police and African Americans exemplified in the article. Since the article made references to the fact that since the demographics of African Americans to white people in suburban population is 10% to 70% which accounts for an increase of profiling in suburban areas I was planning on incorporating the suburbs as being the location of the African American youth during the time of the event.