Rhetorical

Brianna D Martin

Professor Jennifer Kozar

English 1160

7 September 2015

Blinded By Diversity

Walter Benn Michaels, an author who is fearless to controversy when it involves the topic of diversity. He is known to be a theorist of American literature who is not hesitant to voice his beliefs against diversity. Not only that but he is also currently an English professor at the University of Illinois Chicago; who is convinced that diversity causes trouble amongst the American people. In his book, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, Michael reaches out to the American society. I am analyzing how Michaels uses appeals in his texts to persuade his audience into believing his claim. Walter Benn Michaels uses ethical, logical, and emotional appeals to argue that diversity is a distraction to seeing the real dilemma. America’s devotion to diversity blinds them from realizing that they are divided by those who are rich and those who are poor.

To analyze Michaels text, I have organized my paper into separate sections of how he utilized pathos, ethos, and logos to support his claim. He starts off his book by taking advantage of the emotional appeal to wheel in his audience. He goes directly into an argument between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, to force an emotional response from the reader in the very beginning. The debate if whether or not the rich is in fact different from the poor is what the two men cannot seem to agree upon. He gives the audience the opinions that both Fitzgerald and Hemingway feel, but he states that Fitzgerald made a mistake. He says, “As Hemingway told it, was that the rich really aren’t very different from you and me. Fitzgerald’s mistake, he thought, was….treating them as if they were a different kind of person instead of the same kind of person with more money” (Michaels 809-810). Michaels referring Fitzgerald treating the rich like a race as a mistake, is his way of evoking the...