Racial Equality in Literature

Racial Equality is something that has long been discussed and fought for. Through the look of two pieces within The Contemporary Reader, by Gary Goshgarian, the reader can see how each author employs the use of rhetoric to persuade, inform, and inspire the reader to change or reinforce their current beliefs on this topic.

David Brooks’ essay “People Like Us” set out to put down the belief that America truly cares for diversity and is doing all it can to support it. His primary focus lies in the fact that people tend to “self-segregate” in the places that they live. Goshgarian labeled this piece as a “process analysis” which is an explanation of how something operates and Brooks essay does just that. The way that he presents his information explains how self-segregation happens and how he focuses his piece around many logical appeals helps to further prove his points. Brooks writes about how marketing firms break down the U.S. population into groups so that they can cater their products to the most profitable areas and he states, “Looking through the market research, one can sometimes be amazed by how efficiently people cluster—and by how predictable we all are” (367). He also uses statistics such as “Have any of your 12 closest friends graduated from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton…? If you chose your friends randomly from the American population, the odds against having four or more friends from those schools would be more than a billion to one” (Brooks 368). Statistics like these help to prove that what he is saying is valid. This approach to his essay is strong because you cannot negate cold hard facts. If he had used another type of appeal his argument would not have been as strong because it is hard to get someone to fee...

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...alk about the issue, but used a personal experience to really explain what he meant. Adding in his own personal story, however, would have been more effective if he had actually been black himself, which he was not he was half white and half asian. His piece would have been more authentic and connected with the title of his work and more effective in the overall goals for his readers.

Analyzing the rhetoric that an author uses allows the reader to break down the piece into parts and then explain how each part works together to create a certain effect. Thus allowing the reader to determine the author’s intentions with their work.

Works Cited

Brooks, David. “People Like Us.” The Contemporary Reader. Ed. Gary Goshgarian. Pearson, 2011. 366-371. Print.

Kamiya, Gary. “Black vs. Black.” The Contemporary Reader. Ed. Gary Goshgarian. Pearson, 2011. 381-386. Print.