Mellody Hobson's Speech Colorblind Or Color Brave

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Color Blind or Color Brave?

Mellody Hobson’s speech “Colorblind or Colorbrave” about encouraging others to speak openly and courageously about race and promoting diversity in businesses uses experience, expert testimony, and logos to support her argument and persuade her audience. She begins her speech with two anecdotes: one about being the only black girl invited to a birthday party (and her realization that, “[White people] will not always treat you well.”), and another about being confused for the help at an editorial board lunch. She talks about her own experiences dealing with race while using pathos to talk about them lightheartedly and on a more personal level because she understands that race is an uncomfortable topic for some. She also uses another experience (her swimming trainer giving her breath-holding exercises to teach her to deal with her discomfort) to promote a theme in her argument. She wants to urge people to have more conversations about race, despite them being uncomfortable, because, “If we can learn to deal with our discomfort, and just relax into it, we’ll have a better life.” She presents this theme as more of a life lesson, as opposed …show more content…

population, they hold 70% of all corporate board seats…”). She uses statistics (logos) to show how not promoting diversity directly affects businesses. She uses another statistic (“Of the Fortune 250, there are only seven CEOs that are minorities, and of the thousands of publicly traded companies today… only two are chaired by black women…”) to create a rhetorical scenario (“...Imagine if I walked you into a room and it was of a major corporation… and every single person around the boardroom was black, you would think that was weird. But if I walked you into a Fortune 500 company, and everyone around the table is a white male, when will it be that we think that’s weird

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