That Ho Don't Fly

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Erick Arellano Josue Arrendondo English 115 20Sept2012 That Ho Don’t Fly “At the close of this millennium, hip-hop is still one of the few forums in which young black men, even surreptitiously, are allowed to express their pain”(603). This excerpt from Joan Morgan’s From Fly-Girls to Bitches and Hos poignantly expresses the overall motif of the piece. Morgan makes several assertions about the relationship between female degradation in hip-hop music and the failings and shortcomings of black men being the product of society’s prejudicial treatment and in some cases outright abandonment. She does so with too few literary tactics. Off the bat Ms. Morgan makes use of Ethos and Logos. However, for the majority of the work Ms. Morgan’s arguments and evidence are heavily Pathos in nature. Believing Pathos to be the weakest of the three, I feel Ms. Morgan has done herself a disservice by relying, it seems, almost entirely on it. Ms. Morgan’s use of Ethos and Logos is spotty at best. Ethos can be seen in the first paragraph when she uses terminology like, “our love jones for hip-hop”, ”homeboy’s clearly got it like that” and “gangsta leans”(602). This use of slang clearly suggests the audience she is trying to connect with is the black community. It also feels like she is showing them that she speaks their language to put them at ease as well as to ask them to not tune her out. Even when Morgan does use logical appeals her overreliance on emotional appeals weaken her logic. This is evident when she describes a US Census Bureau comparison about two parent black homes from 1960 to the present(602); however, she immediately precedes and therefore undermines it with an appeal to Pathos when she says, “The stats usher in this reality like taps before the death march” (602). This reference to death is being used as a tool to appeal to the audience’s emotional side. In all,
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