I have now read 111 pages of Race. The arguments that began in the early part of the book are solidifying now. That is to be expected since I am near halfway through.
Marc Aronson seems to be keeping his writing consistent in terms of format and methods he uses to persuade me. I shall elaborate on that...
The main argument that was solidified was, in his own words "The argument that dark-skinned people of African heritage are inferior was a global creation." (pg. 97). Just to give a bit of a rundown on how Aronson accomplished that, he started with two ideas: slavery and people who were different being regarded as inferior.
Both ideas were developed with similar usage of rhetoric. With slavery, he showed that it was never originally meant to be done with solely Africans. He summarized this with the statement, "slavery flourished in Europe and Africa long before the idea of race was invented. But the slave trade that began in the 1400s took place on a massive scale, and that was different." (pg. 98). The other idea, that people who were different were regarded as inferior, he explained came from people seeing other religions as inferior. He brought these ideas together towards the end explaining that the idea of Race came about when religions characterized foreign people who had different physical characteristics as people meant to be slaves. The plentifulness of African slaves led to the modern misbelief that blacks were always the inferior and enslaved.
But I'm not going to go too much into a review of the reading I've done. But for those of you who haven't/aren't reading Race, I thought it best that I include the gist of what Aronson talked about.
The real topic of conversation I'd like to get into with this post is the rhetorical methods used by Aronson to get his point across. He did it with a vast amount of historical information. This included tellings of movements put in place by prominent leaders, beliefs that impacted decisions and with them history, and (one that I found very effective) included images of artifacts that gave a clearer view of these movements and beliefs.
One such example of an image of an artifact can be found on page 72. It shows pictures of "monstrous men" as people during the middle ages believed they looked. including the image certainly helped me to understand these beliefs and how extreme they were better than descriptions of them could have. And it helped to explain why Europeans looked down on them so much.
The inclusion of images was used very frequently in parts 2 and 3. I'm going to assume that's because Aronson saw that he had an effective way to use it to get his argument made.
Alright, that's where I'll stop for now. Overall I'm taking away that Marc Aronson is a great writer. (Which explains why his rhetorical strategies work so well on me)
Certainly pictures can be very effective. It's interesting that the images certainly don't seem to highlight dark skin as an aspect of the differences of these people. What other techniques do you find effective in the book?
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