Here are the abstracts we produced in our workshop. Let’s continue to both use these as examples of how a close reading argument moves from a “specific passage to a general conclusion” and try to improve on them.

Example 1
Citizen explores the many ways that people of color, particularly women, experience descrimination and micro-aggressions. Rankine highlights one incident in particular where Serena Williams’ body is mocked by a white woman on the tennis court by stuffing her bra and skirt to mock Williams’ strong athletic build. These types of migro-aggressions followed Williams and many other black women throughout their professional careers and lives. Rankine’s text shows that predominantly white environments attempt to use white normativity to break the self-esteem of women of color.

Example 2
The section “Stop and Frisk” from Citizen by Claudia Rankine represents racial discrimination towards people of color by depicting a scene of an innocent black person being profiled for a crime because he supposedly “fit the description” of an otherwise unknown suspect. This example of white normativity reveals the book’s main theme of social injustice and prejudices that are sometimes, but not always, intentional.

Example 3
“You are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always fitting the description.” This passage portrays that there exists a description that is targeted for stop and frisk. It shows that even if the person being stopped and frisked is innocent, they are already targeted because they “fit the description.” Citizen is about how happenings like stop and frisk feed into racism in America today. Thus, stop and frisk normalizes the prejudice toward people of color.

Example 4
Hurricane Katrina, a tragedy many felt deeply about, was portrayed on the news.”And the fiction of the facts assumes randomness and indeterminacy.” The fact is that people died due to the hurricane, but contradicting the “fiction of the facts” many died because they were left to fend for themselves. Citizen represents Hurricane Katrina by using quotes from CNN to show how the media language about Katrina was unable to