Cross-Examining Bigotry: Using Toulmin's Argument Model and Huckin's CDA to Interrogate Overt and Covert Racist Arguments

Abstract

Thomas Rickert warns of the dangers of “pedagogies that seek the disruption and politicization of hierarchies of power and privilege, especially in terms of race, class, and gender” because they can “nevertheless produce new forms of power and privilege that in turn produce new resistances, further alienate already cynical students, and (re)produce the possibility of violence” (165). However, for those students who are not in the majority, interrogations of people’s attitudes about race, class, and gender can prove empowering and can, to borrow from Rickert’s own argument, generate jouissance. Moreover, critical thinking is fundamental to good writing, and the ability to decenter one’s perspective and therefore understand one's opposition is central to sound argumentation. In this article, the author shares a unit in which composition students are taught the analysis protocols developed by Stephen Toulmin (the Toulmin Argument Model) and Thomas Huckin (Critical Discourse Analysis) in order to expose the logical fallacies, invalid warrants, and authorial manipulations found in various racist texts, including Anne Moody's _Coming of Age in Mississippi_.