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Rhetorical Analysis Of Welcome To The Club

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Welcome to the “Club”. What club you ask? The club of being racially profiled. Although the memberships to this club is not as appealing as most clubs, it is unfortunately the harsh reality for many people of color in America. Charles Blow in his New York Times essay “Welcome to the Club” uses the arrest of Harvard Scholar Henry Louis Gates at this own home to draw attention to the daunting issue of racial profiling. With the ongoing fog and controversy in this country surrounding racial profiling, this essay serves as a strong piece of rhetoric. Through the exploration of Bitzer’s Rhetorical Situation I will unpack this claim by analyzing “Welcome to the Club” through the lens of Bitzer’s rhetorical criteria. In order to understand the …show more content…

An exigence is a reason, “a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done” (6). There will be many exigences, but, according to Bitzer, not all are rhetorical. Only those exigences that can be modified are rhetorical—the changes of season, Bitzer notes, are exigences, but nothing can be done to modify them. The audience is the second part of a rhetorical situation. For Bitzer, “a rhetorical audience consists only of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change. […] “the rhetorical audience must be capable of serving as mediator of the change which the discourse functions to produce” (8). The constraints on a rhetorical situation emerge as a result of the “persons, events, objects, and relations which are parts of the situation … [and] have the power to constrain both decision and action needed to modify the exigence” (8). Sources of constraint include beliefs, attitudes, documents, facts, traditions, images, interests, motives, etc (8). Two main classes of constraints: those originated by the rhetor, and those which are operative. In order to support the claim of “Welcome to the Club” being a strong rhetoric it must be examined through text, reader, author, constraints, and exigence as Bitzer would see

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