Rhetorical Analysis Essay

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Using Logos to Discuss Socio-Economic and Skin Color Privilege in “Gangsters—Real and Unreal” (Sample Rhetorical Analysis Essay) In Nelson George’s “Gangsters—Real and Unreal,” the author gives an overview of how the musical genre “gangster rap” came to be popular in the inner cities of the United States. Although the author says that gangsta rap “first appeared in the mid-‘80s,” traces the origins of the gangsta rap movement all the way back to events that occurred in America during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Vietnam War of the 1970s (George, 129). The author shows how the development of an illegal street drug scene directly influenced the development of gangsta rap music. He also makes a particular argument about the role of certain types of privilege in the growth of rap music with violent lyrics. Throughout the essay, the author makes his point by providing concrete historical facts, details, and definitions. In this essay, George relies on logos to show how socio-economic privilege and skin color privilege created the conditions that led young Black people to create gangsta rap music. Privilege is the idea that some people are basically born having certain advantages that other people don’t have. What makes privilege interesting is that the people who have it have not really done anything to earn it. In fact, most of the time, the people who have it don’t even realize that it is working in their favor in their everyday lives. This is why Peggy McIntosh calls privilege “unearned, and largely unacknowledged” (301). In this article, the author mainly discusses two kinds of privilege: socio-economic privilege and skin color privilege. Socio-economic privilege deals with social class and income level. People who have this kind of privilege belong to a certain social class, usually the upper-middle class or high class of people. They are

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