Rhetorical Analysis: Is The Ugly Wake Up Call America Needed

Too Familiar “Breaking News, Police Officer Kills Man!” That headline has been in the news way too often recently. In Charlottesville North Carolina, citizens are protesting the police for killing a minority man in their community. In response to this, the white citizens of Charlottesville were protesting about it. Ms. Sophia Nelson wrote an article arguing about how “Charlottesville Is the Ugly Wake-Up Call America Needed”. Inside her article, she writes that she is of African descent. Ms. Nelson argues that America needs a wake up call, and supports her argument, more or less, with tone, implicit claims, and rhetorical appeals. Tone, according to Webster’s dictionary, is “[the] style or manner of expression in speaking or writing”. Ms.
This claim is shown in the text when Nelson writes, “The wealth of the southern colonies was in the billions of dollars at the height of slavery to the civil war. The author was trying to show that slaves were the number one source of revenue for most places in the colonies. This claim was not appropriate for their response because it shows that she would much rather go back to having slavery when the economy was better. Well that may sound good, the immigrants were treated much worse in the times of the colonies. That fact contradicts her original argument and makes it so here whole argument is too confusing to follow. The author appeals heavily to pathos in order to convince people that it is our responsibility to end racism in America. One phrase in the article that shows this is, “ race and racism continue to be this great nation’s birth defect: It is our weak link…” This is an example of Pathos because it appeals to mothers and/or parents who have lost/have a child with birth defects. They can relate when Sophia tells them that racism is a birth defect. Some parents may say, though, that it would be rude to compare this to a birth defect. Some birth defects are deadly, and racism, most of the time, is not