About Us

Hello and welcome to our blog. We are four students in Professor Bayly’s 12 PM ENGL 101S class, Kane, LaKiyah, Parker, and Sidd. Our blog is focused on two texts from the 1960s that discuss the issue of police brutality. The reason why we picked the Malcolm X speech was that Malcolm X is a well-known civil rights activist who deeply cared about the negative impacts of the police force on the black community, and the reason we picked the article from The Atlantic was because it provided live snapshots of various civil rights events from the 1960s, in which police officers can be seen brutalizing innocent people. We were moved to look at police brutality in the 1960s because we feel it is still a problem today and thought that looking at our history would give us a better insight into the issue as it stands today.

The overarching stasis of both texts are evaluation and definition, understanding what police brutality is, arguing its prevalence, and determining its valence. The Malcolm X speech had the additional stasis of cause and effect in outlining the methods that the police used to influence the public’s perception of black people and facilitate the brutalization of black people. Both of our texts argue that police brutality was a horrible act in the 1960s and is still an ongoing issue throughout our modern day society. The two texts are eye-opening and made to raise awareness about the injustices and inequality inherent in the fabric of America. Overall, our blog amplifies the negligence endured by the African American community and the fact that something needs to occur in order to repair the damage.

As mentioned earlier, police brutality is still a problem today. Almost everyday there are newsflashes or recordings of police taking aggression to the next level, therefore police brutality establishes itself as a contemporary kairotic movement. It really shows how the kairotic movement of the past still applies today, and we hope our readers will understand how police brutality is a problem of the present and not just the past.

In our blog, we analyzed the logos of the two texts we chose to study. At the same time, we also had to apply the rhetorical appeal of logos to the structure and style of the blog itself. While examining the logical entreatments is one thing, it became clear to use that it was equally as important to implement our own use of logos in order to further prove our argument. By styling our blog in a way such that the posts of the rhetorical appeals for the two texts came in a sequential order, the readers were able to have the chance to compare them in an easy way. Starting with the audience’s of the two texts and continuing with ethos, pathos, logos, stasis, and kairos, our blog was formatted in this specific way to allow the readers to make their own connections between the two texts. For us, it was clear that the major argument was that police brutality in the 1960s was a serious issue across the nation that garnered little attention or support, but this may have not been so obvious for our audience, and we hope that our style helped our viewers come to this realization as well.

It is important to us that our readers come away with the understanding that not only was police brutality an issue throughout the 1960s, but also today. We chose a speech and various pictures as our texts because we believed it allowed the viewers to have a greater emotional attachment to the issue so they would be more sympathetic to the issue. As a whole, we believe our texts did a great job of doing that. But throughout our blog posts, we often made it clear that although this was a serious and emotional problem in the 1960s, it is still something that haunts our society today. Malcolm X warned us in his speech that something needed to be done quickly or else America would be extremely corrupted, and we are approaching that time where action must occur. Little has been done to improve this specific situation, and we hope that our audience understands this as well after reading our blog.

Stasis in Pictures

Stasis theory refers to the four most common types of claims in academic argumentation, which means that it is often used to find what is at the heart of a specific argument. In the 1964 Civil Rights picture of an African American woman being carried away by multiple policemen, many of the principles of the stasis theory can be vividly interpreted. For starters, I think that this picture does a great job of plainly presenting the fact that police brutality is a real and serious issue. From the caption, we can also infer that this came from a race-related riot, further proving that police brutality specifically targeting African Americans is a definite problem. What is hard to understand from the picture is determining what specifically causes these issues, but when we consider how this is still a major problem in our society today, we can infer that little has been done to aid it. The one takeaway a viewer of this picture should have is that something needs to be done about it – you can just see the pain on the black woman’s face, and this should never happen in our society.

- Parker Knott

Kairos in the Pictures

These pictures presented to us by Alan Taylor are an embodiment of kairos. The Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964, but segregation and racism still persisted for quite a while. And it was these build up of events that allowed these collection of pictures to be so powerful. For example, starting with picture #1, a woman is carried roughly by police to a van. This is only effective because it was a common thing of the time period, and it sparked a lot of resentment within the black community. Moving on, we see a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. and civil right leaders talking with president Lyndon B. Johnson. Now out of context, this means nothings; after all, it is just a couple of guys chatting. But with the events going on at the time, people look at their conversation as progression and ascension to greater societal equality. Furthermore, we look at picture #13 and see white youths protesting for black civil rights. Once again, this picture is built upon and given meaning through kairos. Every single one of these pictures has elements of kairos, and every single picture combined utilize kairos, which shows how it is an essential element of this collection.

Kairos in the Malcolm X Speech

Anger, resentment, aggravation. These are all the feelings we receive when listening to Malcolm X's speech on police brutality, and these are all the feelings that represent the black communities. Therefore, Malcolm X is able to utilize kairos to his advantage. During this period of the time, the Civil Right's movement was at its peak, and intolerance to white on black violence was on the rise. Using this to his benefit, Malcolm X produces a moving speech, which is able to open the eyes of the people and spur society towards greater racial equality. For example, he talks about the treatment of black communities, and states how the police " trample on that man's civil rights, and human rights." Additionally he references how the police declare that 99% of the blacks are criminals, and that "as long a man is part of the negro community, then the police are justified."  This is a clearly depicts the ongoing resentment and the Civil Rights movement going on within the 1960s, which shows that kairos is a essential and effective element within this speech.

Stases of the Malcolm X speech

In his speech, Malcolm X talks about the portrayal of black people in the media as criminals and how the white public is convinced by such portrayals to believe that black people are deserving of the horribly violent and oppressive tactics that the police use in profiling and targeting black people. The arguments that Malcolm X makes in this speech are mostly stases of evaluation. He evaluates the "controlled press" as something that negatively impacts the image of the black community, and he evaluates the unjustifiably large presence of the police force in black neighborhoods as detrimental to these neighborhoods and the people within them. X purports that the media is controlled by the police and releases unfair representation of black people as violent and criminal, so that white people who have not had deep interactions with black people are convinced of a heavily negative stereotype of black people. This negative stereotype makes the white people feel that the police is justified in their maltreatment of black folk. Additionally, X asks the audience how it is possible that with the increased presence of the police force in black communities, there is still so much crime? He answers this question himself by telling them that the police must be in cahoots with criminals in these communities so to weaken them from the inside.

Logos in the Pictures

Although pictures typically do not contain logos, Alan Taylor utilizes them in a way in which they do. How does Taylor appeal to our logic? Well throughout these pictures I found myself questioning whether the actions in them were logical, or made sense. For example, in picture #5 Ivory Ward sits in his car with a bullet hole on his windshield. To many, it does not make sense for the a man to shoot at peaceful people sitting in their car, so why should a white man be able to shoot at an African American. This is clearly an appeal to our innate logic. Additionally, within these pictures there is a plethora of textual evidence. In picture #3, children hold up signs that tell us segregation is wrong, which is an attempt to convince us with reason and logic. Furthermore, in picture #4 the klu klux klan holds out hateful signs, which tell "Negroes" to stay out. These signs go against logic, because why should African Americans be excluded. Why aren't white men excluded? To extend, multiple pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. are used, and he is an embodiment of reason and logic. In combination, all these pictures produce a strong appeal to logos, although not apparent at first.

- Kane Gui

Ethos for article

African Americans were the spotlight of this text, Alan Taylor uses ethos throughout her article in order to point out the unethical acts of police brutality. Taylor drops names such as Martin Luther King and movements that took place in 1964, building up her credibility for the audience to comprehend what she is trying to get across. I believe intrinsic ethos was used primarily through the article, persuading the audience to agree with her posts. For example, in the first post pathos and ethos play hand in hand, building up emotion for the African American woman and persuading the audience to believe that police brutality did exist. The ethos in the article added to the efficacy by presenting a view point of right versus’ wrong without actually saying “hey this image was extremely unjustified and you should hate police”. By posting the images and leaving credible captions the audience is able to assume their own conclusion. Lastly, the Atlantic, which is the website of the post, is known as being a liberal credible source so just by the place that the article is on provides a strong ethos based relationship between reader and post.