Links to rhetorical tools:

Here are links to the rhetorical tools used in this class:

Schemes & Tropes -- Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca -- Fallacies -- Burke -- Rhetorical Toolbox -- Conspiracy Rhetorics

Thursday, May 11, 2017

BLM Final Paper

Austin Colon
#BLM
So here’s the deal we have a country run by the White’s and everyone else gets little to no rights because of the color of their skin. Abraham Lincoln abolished discrimination in the U.S. after the civil war in hopes that everything would change. It didn’t, it snuck away in hiding like the Rambo did after number one. Then came out and destroyed everything in sight like he did in every movie because Rambo honestly could take terminator in a 1 on 1 battle and honestly could probably beat Rocky. Okay were getting off track, but not really because Rocky beat Drago, but Drago killed Apollo which means Rocky would’ve made Apollo disintegrate, right? But what I’m seeing is a form a racism in the Rocky movies, why couldn’t be Black? Why did Rocky have to fight 3 black guys in 6 Rocky movies? Why are half the boxers in the Rocky series Black? There’s a trend here isn’t there? Why does the Black guy always lose? From Master Windu, to Apollo, to Finn in the New Star Wars movie, it just doesn’t end and probably never will. Honestly Dr. Vrooman, if you got this far I applaud you because I would’ve already put it down, but hear me out. Social movements are made famous by controversy and not peaceful protest.
I’m just like everyone else, I believe black lives matter, but everyone’s going at it the wrong way. Discrimination has always been an issue, but it wasn’t this big until social media made it this big. It’s made it so big that people now know what Kanye West meant in all his lyrics, or when he said “George Bush hates black people” during the hurricane Katrina relief commercial. He said this statement because Katrina destroyed many homes on the Gulf of Mexico, predominately those of African-Americans. Or that the movement was so big in Baltimore, Maryland that they didn’t allow anyone inside of a Baltimore Orioles game. A violent social movement was happening in the streets outside the stadium so police were required on sight. Discrimination and racism is still something that we see every day. Just recently two occurrences where a racial slur was supposedly said has come about. One being from the Baltimore Orioles Adam Jones who claims he was a called a racial slur at their recent series in Boston. Another being the Houston Rockets basketball player Patrick Beverley, who claims he was, called a racial slur in Oklahoma City the last playoff series there. So obviously discrimination is not just with the police of the United States, but also with anyone who populates the world. It’s not just blacks being discriminated against, but it seems as if it’s the biggest and toughest on them.
In the video, there is a movement for Kevin Keri outside of a building in Cincinnati. This gathering starts off with Kevin Keri’s sister talking about how great of a person he was, which is an appeal to emotion, because the whole time his sister is talking she’s crying. During the first segment of this rally, Keri’s sister talks about how much Kevin’s life impacted others on how he brightened their day up and so on. Continuous appeal to emotion throughout out Keri’s sisters segment. Kevin Keri was an African American Male who was dating his murderers ex-girlfriend. This adds a large loop hole to the story because he was not shot just because he was black, but his girlfriend was the mother to Earl Jones kid. Earl Jones was accused of sending racial slurs and offensive language to Kevin Keri and his girlfriend who is unnamed. “Kevin’s girlfriend was the mother of Earl Jones child.” Which seemed to be left out at the time and other opions were said following the statement.  “Earl Jones never referred to my brother by his name only as the N-word or that N-word.” Explicit language to bring out how much of a bad person Earl Jones was to Kevin, which is an example of profanity to strengthen her argument to the people. “He could crack a joke so fast to make your day better, with another appeal to emotion in her speech. In the video, 6 people stand behind Keri’s sister with pictures of Kevin. Three of them being snapchat selfies, one being a graduation picture, and 2 being pictures people took of Kevin. All these pictures are “goofy” or “silly” selfies taken by himself to bring out the happiness that Kevin was full of that backs up half of Keri’s sisters speech about how positive and full of life Kevin was. There are also 4 different colors of balloons, them being Black, orange, baby blue, white, purple and red. All of these colors are bright, except for black, the reason they probably chose these colors is because they’re bright and vibrant, “happy colors” to once again bring out the happiness Kevin brought out in the people that surrounded him. “My brother won’t get to come in 15 years so why should Earl Jones?” This is an example of transitivity, since her brother getting shot equals consequences for Earl Jones. The beginning of the speech made by Keri’s sister is SAWFT. No attitude with it just and emotional girl standing in front of all these people crying and reading off a notebook. Now we want to say this is working, but whose attention is this grabbing? Nobodies, this is the typical one of my family members was shot sort of thing where someone is trying to preach about how everyone should feel sorry for them because someone close to them died and they could do nothing to control it. At 3:55 the video pans over to a white kid standing and holding a picture of Kevin Keri, and he gives a soft clap against his leg. This kid obviously doesn’t want to be there, this resembles the video of Brett Favre clapping for Kaitlyn Jenner after her speech at the ESPYS. Favre didn’t care about that and this kid looks like he was forced to be here by his mom. Now we look at all the people holding the pictures, they’re all white except one person who is black who just happens to be standing to the far left with the whites in the center. I sure hope he said he was going to stand there or did the white people but him on the end? Who put together this rally, A white person too? Honestly there’s too many things wrong with this rally up to this point. One being white people shouldn’t put together a rally for a African-American individual and two being that this rally has no momentum behind it. This rally has no controversy behind it so it’s not getting any attention, now I’m not saying peaceful rallies aren’t the way to go, I’m saying that to get attention you have to do something that will get you attention. This video has 49 views and 5 of them are me, there are two more videos of the same rally and if they pan into the crowd it’s a bunch of white people. Yeah, they’re trying to get the white people’s attention for the rally, but you need some black folks too. “Justice for Kevin” is a popular phrase at this rally used between when they bring on other people who talk at the rally. Repetition is a popular device in this rally, along with a bunch of white people being soft on how they’re going to change things for the better. Honestly who has even looked at this video? No one, 49 views each for 4 videos and their all probably by the same person and me. Hey look, just got to the 4:30 mark on the video and it’s 8 white people singing AT THE RALLY  FOR THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN. Come on guys you could have at least got some support from some black people, but it looks like almost none is there. Let’s be honest the only time white people are noticed is when a little white kid says something cute on TV or social media. These guys are not helping out the cause and definitely not getting noticed. These 8 ladies singing about injustice and freedom and “turn me round” brings light into something their fighting for, but again no momentum behind them to back up what they are fighting for. After the ladies sing, a man with a light skin complexion (not black again) comes up to talk to the crowd with a very strong accent. Unfortunately for me, and probably most of the crowd, his accent is very hard to understand. He proposes that “the same thing killed Kevin that killed Trayvon Martin” which was a completely different case in the aspect of what happened and how everything happened. Martin was killed by George Zimmerman after looking suspicious and seeming like he himself had a gun. While Keri was killed in front of his home. No record on the internet could be found by extensive research by myself which also doesn’t help out this cause. When you make a comparison like that you have to have evidence to back it up, but this seems like a hasty generalization, since not only does he not know about the real reason Keri died, but there are also no police reports about it. Now how can we help the cause if there’s no info to back it up with? No one can make a decision on what happened and if it was because of racism or not. Trayvon Martin got social Media attention and all different kinds of attention because of people making a big deal about it. There is nothing on social media about Kevin Keri because the social movement wasn’t big enough or controversial enough. Is there a leader of this movement? Does not look like it to me which is another problem to this social movement. If anything this movement is run by a couple of white women who probably never been discriminated against in their entire life. Philando Castile is one of the main victims and subjects of the Black Lives matter movements and protests being held around the United States. Now back to what was said about Trayvon Martin, what made him popular? Controversey and social media, these two things created large social movements in more than 100 U.S. cities. These weren’t just normal protests, back to Baltimore where the baseball game was closed because of the protests, think about it. Not only do you have the attention of people because of your violent protests closing down a baseball game which then gets even more attention. So here’s what we’re looking at now. The protests of Philando Castile which almost matched up to the Trayvon Martin protests in attention. What made the Castile case so popular is that it was streamed on social media, which had not too long before that had been added into facebook. This gave evidence for police to see and for everyone around the world to see. It creates controversy and gets the attention of the people. A lot of the tweets use abbreviations probably to get within character count on twitter. People also used appeal to emotion, like a tweet of a picture with a kid holding a sign saying “Phil took time to help a kid with a disability get from breakfast to class-regularly. I didn’t realize why twitter loves hashtags so much, but it definitely has a purpose behind it. So when I do this paper, I can type in one key phrase and get everything I need, now this twitter feed also brings in a lot of extra revenue with the things they have to say. So, when one named is used in the hashtag like Philando Castile, others are used such as Alton Sterling and Trayvon Martin. Trayvon Martin was a case that did not go in the favor of the black community considering there was little to no evidence and whatever evidence there was against Zimmerman could have been completely altered since Zimmerman and Martin were the only two at the crime scene, but Alton Sterling was a fugitive on the run and I’m not saying he should have been shot on sight but some affirmative measure had to have been used against him than what other black males went through. I also used some of the twitter feed from TrayVon Martins twitter feed which was a lot of the same.
The press release has to do with how the Black Lives Matter movement started, it starts with a black person in a bar along with other people who were also black, seeing the verdict to the George Zimmerman trial. They say that everyone in the bar where they were sitting got up and left, there was this silence of depression as if they were cheated out of what was rightfully the verdict. After this they started their protests in every city they found someone pissed off in and this started what we see now as the #blacklivesmatter movement.  
In the mash-up Biesecker talks about tokenism with feminism and one must move on from it. Much like Black Lives matter, after a black person is murdered by the cops it becomes an uproar, but then everyone just moves on but instead of moving on to something else they wait for another black person to be killed or abused by the police force and do the same repetitive thing over and over again. The tokenism she uses about feminism Isnt the same as tokenism with the black population but it’s close. Mainly because tokenism started with the blacks and putting them into films just to say they were in the films.    
 


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