Civil Rights Comparison: Black Panther Pathos

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Black Panther Pathos

Pathos, an emotional appeal to an audience, appears throughout "The Ten Point Plan," a document circulated in, "The Black Panther." In the 1960s, the Black Panthers were a prominent Black advocacy group. In "The Ten Point Plan," the Black Panthers outline their goals for equality. Pathos appears in many different forms in the document. Incendiary vocabulary like, "oppressed" and "aggression" highlights a strategic use of Pathos to appeal to Black audiences. In addition, each time the document references personal pronouns like, "us" and "our people," Pathos appeals to it's respective audience in an attempt to distance itself from the segregationist establishment. In point #3, the authors use the word "robbery" to insinuate their oppressors are committing a crime in their actions against, "our black and oppressed communities." In #4, they state, we want "decent housing," appealing to their audience stating their housing "indecent." Additionally, in #5, they state they want decent education, another strong claim. Throughout the document, authors are extremely effective in their use of Pathos.

3 comments:

UnknownFebruary 25, 2015 at 5:17 PM
Awesome analysis of pathos in The Ten Point Plan. I think the presence of pathos is the main rhetorical tool that made this movement so strong. The specific examples you used really show the pathos in their argument. All they wanted is equal rights and an opportunity to succeed.
ReplyDelete
Replies
UnknownFebruary 25, 2015 at 8:58 PM
I agree that pathos is a major tool used in this text. The plan continuously asks for "decent" education, housing, and even bread; they aren't asking for great schools, just "decent" implying that they lack even that. Which, of course, they did. Asking for all these basic rights that they shouldn't have needed to ask for in the first place invokes quite the emotion in the audience, both black and white. The Black Panther asks for even the power to determine their own destiny, a power that no humane person would strip from another.
ReplyDelete
Replies
UnknownFebruary 26, 2015 at 3:23 PM
This is a good analysis. The language used definitely convey that the quality of life for African Americans was well below what it should have been. I wonder if you could also examine how their attitudes outside of this text or their extrinsic ethos could influence the pathos?
ReplyDelete
Replies

Add comment

Critical Introduction

Mike (Intro/Ethos)

Our names are Mike, Tommy, Ian, Jack, and Noah and we are five English 101S students at the University of Maryland, College Park. We have been studying rhetoric this semester and have been slowly becoming familiar with various rhetorical appeals. Although we are not experts on rhetoric, we have enough familiarity with the appeals to expand on them. We chose the Black Panthers 10-Point Plan and a picture of Marin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington because we felt that both of these works greatly contributed to the Civil Rights Movement through completely opposite perspectives. The Black Panthers’ 1966 “10 Point Plan” radically and aggressively depicted the wants and beliefs of the Black community, while Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington addressed the Black community’s needs through eloquence, peaceful protest, and sophisticated rhetoric. The Black Panthers’ 10-Point plan was aggressive in nature, often expressing radical views. They were not necessarily bad, as many people followed the regime. Martin Luther King Jr.’s approach was obviously more peaceful and sophisticated, thus creating more of a politically correct movement.

Jack (Major argument/Stasis)

Our blog shows that the Black Panthers’ 1966 Ten Point Plan radically and aggressively depicted the wants and beliefs of the black community, while Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington addressed the black community’s needs with eloquence, peaceful protest, and sophisticated rhetoric. We compare these different approaches to the Civil Rights Movement by analyzing the ethos, pathos, and logos of each of the texts. Furthermore, we contrasted the types of audiences each text targeted and the audiences with which each text was more successful. Overall our blog analyzes and compares the effectiveness of differing approaches used by MLK and the Black Panthers.

Tommy (Kairos)

The issues represented by the texts are still very relevant today, especially considering the events of the past year such as the riots caused by the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other similar cases. Racially charged protests are not simply a thing of the past. Determining which method of protest, whether it be a more aggressive and assertive stance of the Black Panther Party or the hope-filled non-violent stance of Dr. King, still remains a long unanswered question. Ultimately the answer probably lies in some happy medium between the two. However, we leave it up to the readers to decide which method has been more historically successful, and which approach would work better on the readers themselves.

Noah (Logos)

Our blog begins with analyses of the rhetorical situations of our texts and the major rhetorical arguments in each. We did this to introduce the texts, their backgrounds and the messages they convey to the audience. We then wrote about the rhetorical appeals used in each text to show how the authors intended to impart their arguments. Finally, we analyzed the audience that each text was designed for and the visual elements of each text. We used the analysis of the audience to show how each text was designed to target them. Overall, we introduced the texts and why they were important to get readers interested and engaged in our topic. Then we went into detail about the texts and the methods behind their reasoning and arguments to give readers insight about the texts. Lastly, we showed how the audience and visual elements of the texts further contributed to their purposes and show the impact of each text.

Ian (Pathos)

Although our blog focused on all of the appeals, we found that Dr. King and the Black Panthers especially appealed to the Pathos of their audiences. We not only wanted to examine the pathos of each text individually, but how they related to each other in a time of great social turmoil. We wanted to convey that the March on Washington was a sort of emotional high water mark of the civil rights movement; more progress towards equality was made in the coming years, but not quite to the level of expectations set in 1963. This sense of a letdown with the work of Dr. King was a strong influence in the creation of the Black Panthers. Tired of waiting, he Panthers worked to improve the lives of blacks directly rather than working for racial equality. The causation between the failures of Dr. King and the birth of the Black Panthers, especially in relation to their respective appeals to pathos, was very important, and we tried to highlight it in our blog.