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Rhetorical devices in civil rights speech
Civil rights movement rhetoric essay
Rhetorical devices in civil rights speech
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Stevenson’s constant use of anecdotes creates a personal atmosphere for an audience that will likely not be able to relate to African American society or imprisoned individuals so that they can sympathetically approach the situation. These anecdotal “depictions vivify problems that are difficult to quantify,” especially to an audience that may have difficulty connecting to the speaker (Gring-Pemble 360). Sympathy arises from the situation that excites it, so listeners must use their imagination to ignite internal passions and put themselves in the perspectives of others (Smith 87). It is much easier to employ one’s imagination if the speaker delivers stories that the audience can picture and observe in their minds; Stevenson can thus disburden …show more content…
Bryan Stevenson, in his TED talk, addresses the need for the nation to understand the context of racial ideology through discourse and action. Stevenson aims to educate the TED community about the context of racism and presents his credentials for discussing the topic. The speaker presents statistics to demonstrate objective proof of racism but then personalizes the argument with anecdotes. Once the audience recognizes the hypocrisy in America involving the contradiction between racial prejudice and the “so-called” equality for all men, he can begin to challenge their views and offer insight for an improved society. Stevenson uses personal narrative to establish his ethos and evoke sympathy from the audience, since he is both a man who suffers from racial discrimination and an American. His identity allows him to speak on the topic, but that same identity limits his power to evoke change, so he turns to the audience to join him in creating an informed citizenry. Verbal irony, logical proofs, and anecdotes allow Stevenson to powerfully present the implications of identity and the ability the audience has to change society, using their very own identity
Leon Litwack’s Trouble in Mind paints an extensive picture of life for black southerners in, and after, the Jim Crow era. Litwack takes the reader through the journey of a black youth, then slowly graduates to adulthood. As the chapters progress, so do the gruesome details. The reader is exposed to the horrors of this life slowly, then all at once. The approach Litwack utilizes is important, because he needs the reader to stick with him even through the tough chapters. By utilizing firsthand accounts of raw, emotional experiences, Litwack successfully communicated the daily struggles of black southerners in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South.
Bryan Stevenson gives a talk about social inequality as it relates to poverty and race. He is a lawyer, as well as the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization that works to fight inequalities in the criminal justice system. He has represented many clients, which he refers to as victims, facing life sentences or are awaiting their death sentence. He has represented many large cases and met many large figureheads of civil rights, such as Rosa Parks.
While most fictional characters are given a voice with which to express themselves, that voice usually does not stray beyond their realm of fiction and therefore is restricted from the power of the real world. The imaginary black man that Susan Smith falsely claimed had abducted her children in 1994, however, existed in reality in the minds of the American public for nine days until the truth surfaced about her infanticide. Cornelius Eady’s poetry cycle, Brutal Imagination, serves to give that imaginary black man (hereafter referred to as Zero), a voice that draws power from his simultaneous existence in both the real and fictional realms.
I chose this word because the tone of the first chapter seems rather dark. We hear stories of the hopes with which the Puritans arrived in the new world; however, these hopes quickly turned dark because the Purtains found that the first buildings they needed to create were a prison, which alludes to the sins they committed; and a cemetery, which contradicts the new life they hoped to create for themselves.
In this story it clearly shows us what the courts really mean by freedom, equality, liberty, property and equal protection of the laws. The story traces the legal challenges that affected African Americans freedom. To justify slavery as the “the way things were” still begs to define what lied beneath slave owner’s abilities to look past the wounded eyes and beating hearts of the African Americans that were so brutally possessed.
Stevenson, Bryan. "We Need to Talk about an Injustice." TED: Ideas worth Spreading. TED Talks, Mar. 2012. Web. 10 Dec. 2013.
In order to appreciate how Incidents reaches beyond the slave narrative genre, one must first understand how it is perfectly in synch. The slave narrative, popularized between 1840 and 1865 largely due to the creative efforts of Frederick Doug...
In order to give an accurate depiction of life during the Atlantic Slave Trade, contemporary African ‚American writers must research and read to find out exactly how life was for those enslaved. The opinions and thoughts of those who endured and survived this wretched time are valuable pieces of information about what was happening. Modern writers, such as Lucille Clifton, adapt from previous writers. Without having lived during that particular time, modern African-American writers must rely on past authors and their knowledge of human nature to put forth accurate stories with the purpose of educating and informing today's readers about America's ugly history.
The plight of the civil rights movement stands as one of the most influential and crucial elements to African-American history. We can accredit many activist, public speakers, and civil rights groups, to the equality and civil rights that African-American men and women are able to have in this country today. We see repeated evidence of these historical movements describes in fiction, plays, TV, and many other forms of media and literature. An artistic license is provided to many authors developing these concepts amongst their writing. When examining specific characters and literary works you can see an indirect comparison to the personality traits, actions, decisions, and journey to that of real-life historical figures.
Many of life’s fantasies can resemble someone from our past or someone we care about. Every so often, a reader may come across a story that feels as if the narrator is telling the story through his or her own life experiences. The nonfictional story “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” is a convincing third person limited omniscient narration by Harriet Jacobs, and it shows a diverse use of extreme cruelty and hardship slaves resisted in their condition and created their own ways of living, which allow the readers to learn how narrators can use their emotions and feeling to explain their life experiences. The story’s main purpose was to show how slaves created their own culture and ways of life through the bible and their religion, Jacobs
Throughout the story Stevenson portrays the prisons, prison guards and the prison system through his use of word choice. The structural style of the prison described through the use of gothic language, conjuring up dungeon type location, often times embellishing the actual conditions of the prison. He also used partial language describing the demeanors of the guards as harsh and uncaring. Stevenson also employed a series of shocking facts to appeal to the reader’s emotion, having them overlook his stylistic choices in language. These stylistic word choices retracts from Stevenson’s ideas of necessary reform, portraying him more as a story teller rather than an expert, which is detrimental to a his cause when an expert is clearly needed for a complicated subject like prison reform. His overuse of subtle prejudices, through his word choice was ineffective devaluing his argument as a
Born in 1933, Ernest J Gaines is an African-American author whose many novels share a common theme: “the search for dignity and masculine identity in a hostile, racist environment.” (Cliffs Notes) The focus of this essay will be on his 8th piece of work, A Lesson Before Dying, and this fictional novel is no exception. Published in 1993, Gaines brings us to the fictional community of Bayonne, Louisiana, in the 1940’s where the story of Jefferson, a convicted black man, is told. The conviction was solely an act of discrimination and Jefferson quickly feels worthless and apathetic. In any case, Jefferson “still has one freedom left, and that is the freedom to choose how he accepts death;” he can either choose to die like
America in the mid to early nineteenth century saw the torture of many African Americans in slavery. Plantation owners did not care whether they were young or old, girl or boy, to them all slaves were there to work. One slave in particular, Frederick Douglass, documented his journey through slavery in his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Through the use of various rhetorical devices and strategies, Douglass conveys the dehumanizing and corrupting effect of slavery, in order to show the overall need for American abolition. His use of devices such as parallelism, asyndeton, simile, antithesis, juxtaposition and use of irony, not only establish ethos but also show the negative effects of slavery on slaves, masters and
Novels often depict realistic situations and outlooks on life. This enables the reader to view and learn about different aspects of life through the author’s depictions. Authors expose world issues and their opinions through their novels and create stories about them. In the novel, The Book of Negroes, Lawrence Hill exposes the issue of racial discrimination through a fictional character named Aminata. The protagonist is abducted into slavery and experiences hardships, tragedies, oppression, and betrayal. She encounters the many horrors and obstacles of the world in her long journey to freedom. Aminata’s story captures the truth behind other people in terms of their treatment and judgment of the unfamiliar. Hill’s novel effectively exposes
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.