Rhetorical Analysis Bell Hooks

In Bell Hooks, Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor, Hooks writes about what she considers to be hazardous in dispositions towards neediness in the United States, and in proposing arrangements. Hooks starts the essay off by saying, “Americans today rarely talk about the poor” (Bell Hooks). She explains that Americans acknowledge the existence of four groups: the poor, the working class, those who worked and have extra money, and the rich.

In Bell Hooks’, “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”, Hooks introduces the reader to the state of poverty of many individuals that have to suffer because they are unable to live a normal life due to them being extremely poor and uneducated. She stresses about comparing the higher class people to the poor and how different their lives are in terms of survival rates and healthiness. The higher class people tend to be way healthier and survive longer due to them having many ways of treating their problems, while the poor have absolutely no way of paying their medical bills due to their low income. She makes many valid points referring back and forth to different stereotypes of people (mainly black people) and how each of those

Because it is very credible, emotionally appealing, and slightly academically based, bell hooks's essay "Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education" is an essay that I consider to be very touching. While arguing in her essay that the rich class and the working-class should come to respect and understand each other, bell hooks employs three elements of argument: ethos, pathos, and logos. With her usage of ethos, hooks relates her experience as an undergraduate at Stanford. Providing an experience from a time before she went to Stanford, hooks uses pathos to inspire the audience. However, hooks uses logos by appealing to the readers' logic. These readers are the working-class and the privileged, the audience of her book: "Ain't I

As a main point of her argument, she argues that poverty is generally stereotyped into the poverty that would only be seen in Africa, or another third world country. To support this, she establishes a sense of ethos for her readers by citing other individuals that have also noticed the poverty representation gap. Seeing that poverty is a complex issue to begin with, George addresses this complexity by simply suggesting that it should be represented as such in the media. Nonprofit charities may now have to reconsider their

Shorris wanted to explore on poverty in America and write a book based on opinions on what keeps people poor. Therefore, as results of varied conversations with special people in prison, Shorris came to support the prisoner, Viniece Walker’s, argument that destitute students are those most in need of a liberal education. Viniece introduced

Every conflict in Bell’s life can be traced back to her childhood, and her mother’s parenting methods. If Bell was told to strive for what she did not have, then she may have been accepted by her peers. It is clear that she wanted to be accepted by her classmates, because otherwise she would not have been hurt by how they treated her. If Bell was taught to strive for what she did not already possess, whether it was friends or material objects, she would have had a completely different school experience.

Sitting on the porch with her sisters, hooks saw that “next to the white drivers in the front would be the dog and in the back seat the black worker.” This subtle image taught hooks the “interconnectedness of race and class,” and a demeaning message that white people placed animals ahead of African-Americans. Taking the high road, hooks attempted to spark conversation with her white neighbors; however, she was turned down and ridiculed. While trying to be friendly, hooks was told that “they came to this side of town to be rid of lazy blacks.” Time and time again racial and sexist tensions worked against Hooks, but instead of letting injustice get the best of her she made her porch a place of “antiracist resistance.” Hooks’ porch was an oasis in the male/white desert that dried up her life. On hooks’ porch she could experience the peace and joy she had as a child sitting on her porch with her sisters before her father came home. Hooks could have talked back to the white people that mocked her, but instead she chose the high road and conquered race with peace.

Persuasion is a key focus in many essays, stories, commercials, and other forms of media. There are many methods to this, one of which is rhetorical devices. Bell hooks, the author of Feminism is for Everybody, writes to persuade the reader to her own cause: feminism. She uses rhetorical devices, which can be used to persuade—or dissuade—readers in comparison to the writer’s own point of view.

Hooks first argument stems from the false assumptions that she has encountered about the poor. She takes us years back to her college days where students and professors were labeled as ‘mindless, unworthy, shiftless, dishonest, and lazy (paragraph5). To her, those experiences were a culture shock because having being brought up in poverty, she had always been taught that there is no correlation between poverty and personal integrity. Furthermore, a person could be a hard worker and still be poor. The values of a human being can’t and should not be based on material possessions. She states that it is horrifying to think that the poor have no values. According to Bell Hooks, had it not been for the upbringing in a poor household, she would neither be the prolific writer that she is nor have good values. All the aforementioned assumptions indicate how lowly the United States contemporary society regards the poor. The poor are never portrayed as who they really are.

Ethos, pathos, and logos are all devices that Barbara Ehrenreich effectively uses throughout her novel Nickel and Dimed to prove that America needs to address the commonly overlooked issue of poverty within every community. It is important that she uses all three devices because they help support her argument by increasing her credibility, connecting to the readers’ emotions, and appealing to their sense of logic. The combination of these devices puts a sense of urgency on the problem Ehrenreich is addressing and therefore creates an effective argument.

What is your perception of the poor and less fortunate in society? Would you say that you have a low perception of them or do you regard them in the highest? Would you do your social duty to reach out to the poor and impoverished to assist them, or help assist, in establishing programs that would aid in leading them to a brighter future? These are the questions that I ask of myself as I read, “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor,” by bell hooks. My paper examines the perception that pop culture, society, and media have of the poor, as well as, the expectations and responsibilities of society to ensure a response to

In the article, Hooks focuses on the issue involving lower and higher class and comparing them in poverty by giving her own personal experiences to illustrate her argument. While addressing the assumptions made about the poor and the view in America culture in the U.S. usually portrays the poor in ways that radiate negative stereotypes according to Hooks. The way that the poor are being represented on television. Hooks clarifies that the misinterpretations of those in poverty can affect their daily lives. Popular culture in the U.S. usually portrays the poor in ways that radiate

I liked bell hook’s essay “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”. Bell assesses the light in which higher class people view the poor or lower class. Bell hooks, also known as Gloria Watkins grew up in a small Kentucky town where her father worked as a janitor for the local post office. As one of seven children she was taught that money and material possessions did not make her a better person but hard-work honesty and selflessness determined character. Her hard work landed her acceptance into Stanford University. Although she received various scholarships and loans, her parents worried that she would not have enough for books and supplies or emergency funds. Regardless of this, belle went on to earn a Ph.D. Her experiences and education earned her a very good reputation and even an authority writing critiques on popular culture and diversity (hooks 431-432). She uses ideas in her essay “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor”, that stem from her own personal experiences with poverty to add credibility to her writing, as well as examples from pop culture and mass media to demonstrate how these representations portray the lower class in ways that radiate negative stereotypes. She wrote the essay because she saw how the poor had many assumptions made about them. It wasn’t until college thought that she made that discovery. She discovered how unjustly they were represented due to the

bell hooks, renowned black feminist and cultural critic criticizes the lack of racial awareness in her essay, Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination (1992). ‘bell hooks’ is written in lower case to convey that the substance of her work reigns more important than the writer. From a marginalized perspective, hooks argues that sites of dominance, not otherness is problematic and critiques the lack of attention that white scholars pay to the representation of whiteness in the black imagination. Critical feminist scholars Peggy McIntosh and Ruth Frankenberg identify their own whiteness as a dominant discourse, but share a critical departure from hooks with the notion of whiteness as terror. hooks aim is not to reverse racism, but discuss her position to authentically inform readers about how she experiences racism. Furthermore, systems of oppression are manufactured by human thought and thus the site of the Other is always produced as a site of difference. Gender, race, sex, class, disability, and geography are situated differently in social structure, but dominant groups assume they share the same reality though they cannot experience it. In consequence, the Other cannot hold a singularized identity of their own and the binary structure succeeds in containing racialized bodies in place. What happens to those bodies when they cross boundaries of the binary? hooks recounts being routinely disciplined back into place when crossing the border; however, dominant white

The circumstance surrounding her addresses concerning poverty is where the author makes an appeal to pathos. She states,“the poor