Outlaw Culture: Representing The Poor

The poor are lazy and have nothing to offer: this seems to be the mindset for most of society and media. As bell hooks (1994), a prolific writer, wrote Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor, (an excerpt from “Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations”, published in 1994), she argued that the representation of the poor portrayed by society and the media is far from actuality. In this excerpt, hooks (1994) argument was well accredited with quotes from respectable sources, relations of her own personal life experiences, effective use of emotional appeal. She concludes by offering what she believes to be some solutions to the “problem” at hand. hooks (1994) article makes the argument that both society and media play roles in the misrepresentation

She has written many books on race, gender, politics, and popular culture. Some of her well known collaborations are done with prominent scholars such as Cornel West on projects related to activism and spirituality. bell hooks excerpt “Seeing and Making Culture: Representing the Poor” is derived from her book “Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations”. This book was first published in 1994 by Routledge, an academic publisher of books, journals, and online references in the Humanities and Social Sciences. By citing sources such as Coronel West plus her word choice and sentence structure (“To change the devastating impact of poverty on the lives of masses of folks in our society we must change the way resources and wealth are distributed.”) gives the assumption that this article was written for those with higher

483) to support her claim, all of which appeals to ethos. She also incorporates her own personal life experiences such as “Poverty was no disgrace in our household. We were socialized early on, by grandparents and parents, to assume that nobody’s value could be measured by material standards” (hooks, p.484) to indicate that she has firsthand knowledge about growing up poor. By citing prominent source her audience is able to think that hooks (1994) is aware of the issue and writing of her life experiences validates the argument she was going to shortly make. Adding to her ethos appeal, hooks (1994) uses perceptive appeal to pathos. For example, when hooks (1994) writes “They almost always portrayed the poor as shiftless, mindless, lazy, dishonest and unworthy” (p. 484) she provokes an emotional response in her audience by using these undesirable labels. Another example is when she writes “…one crucial value that I had learned from Baba, my grandmother…” (p. 485). This was no doubt to have her audience relate emotionally about relationships within their own