preview

How Does Alexander Use Ethos In The New Jim Crow

Decent Essays

Michelle Alexander in her eye-opener novel, The New Jim Crow, makes a dauntless premise that the racial caste system that was supposedly ended in America during the Civil Rights Movement still exists today and is completely redesigned in the sense that colored men are the target of an intentional “War on Drugs.” Alexander claims that the criminal justice system is used as a mean to racially control millions of colored people and the same system is used to demote them to a second-class citizen status. Alexander employs a great deal of rhetoric in her novel to appeal to the reader’s emotions and values, so that she is able to alter the ethos of the readers and ultimately reveal the blindness present in the United States Justice System. Alexander …show more content…

To achieve this effect, Alexander appeals to the pathos of the readers. According to Thank You For Arguing, “Pathos, or argument by emotion…appeals to the brain, gut, and the heart of your audience,” (Heinrichs 40). To appeal to these various parts of the readers, Alexander utilizes rhetoric. The rhetoric in Alexander’s text basically gives the readers a call to action. Alexander uses an experience of an individual, who was targeted because of his race to appeal to pathos of the readers, “In that case, Terrance Bostick, a twenty-eight-year-old African American, had been sleeping in the back seat of a Greyhound bus…suspicionless police,” (Alexander XX). Alexander uses this personal experience of Mr. Bostick to reveal the ambiguities in the American justice system. She frames the experience in such a way that the police are looked upon as the bad guys, which shows how she has appealed to the pathos of the readers. The specific readers, who are are target of Alexander’s text, feel that there is something wrong with the justice system if people are only being suspected and arrested based on their skin color. They do not feel bad for the person’s actions, as they were illegal, but they demean the manner in which he was arrested and it sort of riles them up. Alexander uses this type of rhetoric in her text to emphasize that the United States’ justice system is set up in a

Get Access