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 in freedom, of humanity, of respect - as 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 is George Floyd’s reverberate around the world then? This problem is portrayed in Ben Okri’s article “I can't breathe': why George Floyd's words reverberate around the world” published in the guardian on the 8 of June, 2020.
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Uddrag
He expresses his opinion through British newspaper, The Guardian which is one of the biggest newspapers in UK.
The receiver for the article is good educated and intelligent individuals with a critical sense and cultural interest.
The Guardians target audience primarily comprises people between 35-65 years. The Audience lean left democratic and mostly vote for the labor party and liberal democrats.
He wants to enlighten people about the problems with racism repression, and poor treatment against colored people in America.
To achieve this Ben Okri primarily uses the appeal form, pathos and this is the dominant form of appeal in the article. Okri establish pathos by appeal 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 as “freedom”, ”humanity”, ”institutional racism” and so on.
Another thing he does is make 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 poor treatment of colored people in America is a major problem that need to be solved.
The data he uses to justify his claim is the episode with George Floyd - where a police officer 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”.
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