Please answer the following questions by clicking on the heading to this post. Use sentences, paragraphs, and appropriate grammar, and don't forget to answer "why."
1. After reading the four excerpts below, identify two examples of pathos. Discuss the argument the writer is trying to make, why he or she chose to use this particular rhetorical strategy, and whether or not it is working. Does the writer convince you that his or her argument is valid? Why or why not? How do the writers differ in their strategies for making a point about the treatment of African Americans? How do voice, tone, diction, organization, metaphor, etc. affect the writer's argument?
2. Next, place these arguments in context. After you think of the writer's argument "locally," describe what "global" factors may influence your reading. For instance, what does it mean for the excerpt to appear in the particular book it does? How does the current political climate affect your reading? Have you had personal experiences that affect your reading? What is the state of current American race relations?
3. After you've posted your answers to questions 1 and 2, respond to your classmates' responses until the end of class. Keep in mind that this is meant to be a class discussion via the blog. Challenge one another; agree; disagree; ask questions; etc. The work you put into this assignment will be reflected in your participation grade today.
The following excerpts are quotations from Race Matters by Cornel West, published by Vintage in 1994:
" ' Here,' she said, 'in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, You! . . . This is flesh I'm talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved.' "
~Toni Morrison: Beloved 1987
"Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion."
~Audre Lorde: Sister Outsider 1984
"You don't stick a knife in a man's back nine inches and then pull it out six inches and say you're making progress.
No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I'm concerned, as long as it is not shown to every one of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me."
~Malcolm X 1964
"Insistence on patriarchal values, on equating black liberation with black men gaining access to male privilege that would enable them to assert power over black women, was one of the most significant forces undermining radical struggle. Thorough critiques of gender would have compelled leaders of black liberation struggles to envision new strategies and to talk about black subjectivity in a visionary manner."
~Bell Hooks: Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics 1990
