Rhetorical Analysis Of Bell Hooks Keeping Close To Home

It is quite shocking for students in college to talk about their parents with no respect. Bell Hooks, a southern black girl from a working-class background in Kentucky, who has never rode on a city bus, or even an escalator, explains her feelings about going away for college in Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education. She took her first plane ride to Stanford University where she received her bachelor’s degree. She examines and challenges intertwined assumptions about race, class, and academia. She talks about her parents along with her own feelings about leaving home and how being underprivileged at a university where most people are privileged can cause one to think hard about the decision they have made. She is credible in using ethos by giving her personal experience as an undergraduate at Stanford, and logos to connect to the audience by
Ethos is a method writer’s use to convey through their tone and style of the message they are trying to give. “Class realities separated me from fellow students” (Hooks 419). In most class meetings, class disparity was not a topic of discussion and Hooks never discussed how she began to feel a sense of guilt when she thought about the brown skin Filipina women who got paid to clean the college living areas or how she tried to make an effort to send money home to help her mother out. Class disparity made a difference between the students at the university. Even though Hooks knew she would be receiving a good education she also knew she had the option to rebel at any moment. I believe Hooks is credible in using ethos in her article because she was able to explain how working-class parents were afraid for their child to enter the real world. Because of this parents felt their child might grow to be ashamed of their background, or they wouldn’t want to return home, or only come home to prove that their life will be better than their