Example Of Essay On A Call To White Americans By Jennifer Passmore

Rhetorical propaganda can almost hypnotize listeners; the danger is that the techniques convince people to agree with very shaky theories. The essay Passmore uses many of the tricky devices to hook white listeners to believing she is speaking the truth. This essay discusses these devices by giving examples and showing how to recognize them.
In the very first two sentences the author uses a strategy that has been working very well in the United States for years. She tells her white listeners that they are a group that faces a frightening future because they are afraid. Fear is a very persuasive emotional appeal to use when a speaker or author has no basis for their claims. Their fear is focused on something huge, too – losing their place in the world. She links feeling fear with the doublespeak “. . . He has no one flag to rise except the Stars and Stripes.” The Stars and Stripes have been the American flag since the American Revolution and carried proudly for two centuries but Passmore suggests (cynically) that now the white man has “only” that one flag. And that is embedded in the first paragraph that rolls all these misleading statements together using sophistry.
The sophistry starts in the first paragraph by suggesting that a scary gang of people from other nations are raising different flags in the USA and dressing in their other nation’s costumes. Not only that they are celebrating non-American holidays and even “inventing holidays.” Her suggestion is an eye-raiser of the perceptive listener when later in the essay she suggests whites “blaze a new trail” and “clear a festival ground to celebrate our achievements.” Those phrases linked with the whole meaning of the essay are advice from Passmore for whites to reinvent themselves. A person listening very carefully could understand the irony of her doublespeak, sophistry and very twisted ‘reasoning.’
Repeating words and phrases, sometime in a regular rhythm have shown throughout history to be very effective propaganda devices. The last sentence of the third paragraph is a good example of using the rhythm of trios of words and phrasing to make a point. “no month, no week, not even a day,” “his children, his neighbors, and his countrymen,” and “the white race, ancient and modern white history, the accomplishments of white individuals and the issues facing modern white people.” The author is exaggerating when she says that a white man has no opportunities to teach others, because for most of the history of the USA only whites have been in charge of what was taught in the schools and churches. The word ‘white’ is repeated four times in the one sentence.
The phrase ‘melting pot’ explains a situation that is acceptable, but the phrase ‘salad bowl’ is Passmore’s way of using derision to describe the state of affairs in modern times. A person listening and/or reading carefully will notice that the intermarriages considered appropriate in the melting pot were all between white, western European immigrants. The salad bowl also refers to a “savage tribal struggle.”
Finally in the last paragraph the author makes a comment that is hard to categorize, but it is still spin. She uses repetition to describe the white heritage in terms of white history with one slip up. She mentions Ireland and Scandinavia, two western European countries. She mentions the Caucasus which is in Eastern Europe and it was part of the USSR, but probably this is acceptable to her argument because white people are called Caucasians. But the fourth location is puzzling; she brings up Xinjiang which is located in China. Reviewing her essay thought it is very clear that blacks and Africa were not mentioned, not even once.