Rhetorical Analysis

Welcome back to the readers who have stuck around for the third installment of my blog. I am a little more than halfway done with this assignment, and I hope you've gotten as much out of it as I have from reading Race by Marc Aronson.

This week, I read about sixty more pages, which consisted of part four: "Race: The Beautiful Skull" and the first half of part five: "The Age of Racism." I wanted to spend this blog discussing the rhetorical devices that Aronson used in this section and especially the devices he continues to use throughout the entirety of the book.

Aronson begins part four as he has begun every other part, chapter, and topic switch. I talked about it briefly in the last blog post, but I felt that it should be brought up again because of how essential it is to Aronson's writing style and rhetorical devices. This time, Aronson writes, "The day after Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Jane Elliott, a teacher in an all-white Iowa school, tried exactly this experiment. She invented the differences between blue- and brown-eyes children and immediately had a classroom of masters and slaves" (pg 115). While the format of this chapter is the same as the rest of the book, it differs in its focus on logos. The blue- and brown-eyed experiment is relatively well-known in pop culture today and unlike his other beginning stories, this one is entirely true. I must admit that sometimes I have struggled to seen why Aronson begins his chapters in this way. However, this time, I understood right away that Aronson would be discussing race and biological features since Elliott's experiment was a logical connection to said topic.

Aronson also makes use of what I think of as an unexpected rhetorical device---his incorporation of images. Images are a powerful tool that we don't see all the time in non-fiction writing. For the majority of Race, it is easy to see how his images strengthen his argument. I wanted to point out a section where I wasn't so sure about this. On pages 124 and 125, Aronson posted this image:

(Courtesy of Resolviendo La Incognita)

This image is a visual depiction of how Carolus Linnaeus was a pioneer in biologically defining race. I am confused by this image for two reasons. The first is that Aronson spends more time talking about Linnaeus's follower Blumenbach and his five races rather than going into detail about Linnaeus. Secondly, I can't read this image. When I tried to find it online, I only found it on a Spanish blog. If Aronson didn't even describe the races that Linnaeus created, than why include an image of said races in a language that most readers won't be able to follow? Despite not understanding the reason for this image at first, I later realized that Aronson was making a point about the Enlightenment. While the Enlightenment helped make leaps and bounds in scientific fields, the ways of the Dark Ages and the concept of race stuck around. 

This has probably been the most difficult blog post to write so far. That is because, even with limiting myself to how many sticky notes I use during my reading, there are so many little yet effective things Aronson is doing with his rhetorical devices. However, I don't want this post to go on forever, so I have chosen what I think is the most important device out of the ones left and would like to end with it.

The device I have chosen is the use of "we" and "you" pronouns. Aronson has certainly used pronouns earlier in the book, but it caught my attention in this section in particular because he used them as a more of a challenge to the audience. The quote goes like this: "We, those like us, those we find beautiful are superior. You, those unlike us, those we find alien, are inferior" (pg 127). He puts the responsibility of racial prejudice not only on his own shoulders but also on the shoulders of his readers. It is especially effective for me, since I am white.

Thank you for reading, and I will see you next time.