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Rhetorical Analysis Of The Age Of White Guilt By Shirley Lee

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White-collar crimes like what happened to Shirley Lee are prevalent today. Many view white-collar crime as less threatening than typical blue-collar crime (i.e. robberies). Both crimes however, affect society in a negative way. White-collar crimes cause more direct financial harm than blue-collar crimes. Blue-collar criminals cause more physical harm and for that reason are often perused and punished more rigorously. Both crimes have significant emotional implications and should both be treated and prosecuted to the furthest extent of the law. The emotional trauma for someone being a victim of a blue-collar crime like robbery can seem more traumatic, than having been a victim of a white-collar crime like embezzlement. Though it may seem like …show more content…

“The greatest problem in coming from an oppressed group is the power the oppressor has over your group. The second greatest problem is the power your group has over you” (Steele 36). By using parallelism Steele can take a hold of the reader’s attention and really make them think about what he just said. By building his credibility in the early stages of his essay, Steele can appeal to ethos. By doing so, he proves to his audience that he truly knows and understands the topic of white guilt, and that he has placed himself in the shoes of others. By opening his essay with an anecdote, Steele is personally relating his personal life with the subject of his essay which causes his credibility to increase in the eyes of the reader and it also appeals to pathos. “Did he again need… to be out from under the impossible demands of a symbiotically defined black identity, to breathe on his own?” (Steele 40). By using this rhetorical question, Steele can engage the reader and have them think about what exactly Baldwin did. The diction that is used throughout The Age of White Guilt gives the audience a look at the kind of person Steele is. From his style of writing, one can assume that he is a smart black intellectual, giving him the ability to relate to more than just blacks. At the same time, Steele also makes himself seem pretentious and a bit stuck up at times. This would be a turn off for his black audience because at certain point in the essay such as when he talks about how blacks are wrong; many readers would not agree with the claims that Steele makes such as “...greatest miscalculation in black American history. Others had oppressed us, but this was to be the first “fall” to come by our own hand. We allowed ourselves to see a greater power in America’s

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Williams, H. E. (2006). Investigating White-collar Crime : Embezzlement and Financial Fraud. Springfield, Ill: Charles C Thomas

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