Rhetorical Strategies Employed by Brent In Black Men

Contrary to the general claims, racism is still deep-rooted, and many people in our modern society are still suffering on the accounts of their skin colour. The Caucasians treat and associate blacks to theft and mugging, which is not the case as not all blacks are muggers and on the other hand there exist white thieves and muggers. This vice is well manifested in countries where there is an existence of almost an equal number of blacks and whites; a good example is the United States of America. The social life of blacks in America has not been a bed of roses. Living in a country where the whites have the stereotyping nature of unfairly associating people of colour with the mugging and theft simply by the virtue that they are black is not fair and should be condemned by all means possible.

He deliberately exaggerated his character and behaviour to show the audience how he was less of a violent person and draws the emotions of the readers to take his side by empathizing him. He talks about how good people like him are mistakenly taken for bad people just because they wear a black skin colour. By describing the many encounters in his life and that of one of his colleague black journalist who was once mistaken for a killer yet he was indeed a reporter, Brent further draws the audience to a more common ground because more often, blacks suffer the same racial discrimination. To bring out more about his nonviolent character, Brent employs the rhetorical technique of imagery. By choosing to use a statement like “take a knife to raw chicken”, he appealed to the reader's physical senses by making them visualize about the minor act of slaughtering a chicken.

He arouses the reader's emotions by his vivid choice of words when he paints the picture of how terrified the woman, he met in the streets in Hyde Park looked. He went on to attribute all the misfortunes that befell him on that day to his skin colour. The few encounters in the hands of white people draw the reader’s emotions to that of the writer by putting them to fit in the same situation same as that of most of the black men in public spaces. “I grew accustomed to but never comfortable…” this choice of lines demonstrates the use of pathos to appeal to his audience to empathize with him. The numerous evidence Brent narrates about his encounters as a black man and also for other black men who had suffered from the same discrimination improves on the credibility of the pleas, and makes to the society to eliminate the vice of racism.

His combination of rhetorical appeal strategies of ethos, pathos and logos, Brent clearly articulated his major message to the readers. He effectively employs pathos to appeal to his audience to gain empathy with him emotionally. when he wrote, “Black men trade tales like all the time…” Brent used logos to support his claims by using logical evidence as a way of refuting future counterarguments. He claimed that racial discrimination affected almost every black person in America. The use of onomatopoeia “thunk, thunk, thunk…” to illustrate how the white people closed their cars doors when they saw a black person passing nearby.