Indledning
Racism is a major problem that leads to a hierarchy of being human, that some are more human than others, or that some are less.
People understand racism. It is not difficult to understand. But still, people do not behave as if they understand.
They still deprive other humans of freedom, of humanity, of respect - like the police officer who pressed his knee on George Floyd’s neck snuffed out one life, in the spite of the fact that he whispered, “I can’t breathe”.
But why are George Floyd’s words reverberating around the world then?
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Uddrag
To achieve this Ben Okri primarily uses the appeal form, pathos and this is the dominant form of appeal in the article. Okri establishes pathos by appealing to the audiences’ emotions through his argumentation.
He persuades his argument through the agency of different pathos strategies. First of all, he uses emotive words such as “freedom”, ”humanity”, ”institutional racism” and so on.
Another thing he does is that he makes use of the linguistic device repetition, which underlines an emotional/heartfelt message - for example,
“I can’t breathe” as he repeats 18 times in the article, which refers to the horrific and heartbreaking episode when George Floyd died.
This sentence clearly appeals to the audiences’ emotions and reinforces the message that Ben Okri wants to convey.
This is correspondingly connected with another strategy he uses: speaking of moral issues and core values in a given society - as in this article are racism, repression, and poor treatment against colored people in America.
Ben Okri includes several arguments for his case. Fitting his emotional focus, most of his claims aim to show that racism and the poor treatment of colored people in America are major problems that need to be solved.
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