The moment Kimberlé Crenshaw started speaking, I was hooked. Instead of going straight into her speech she began by immediately engaging her audience. I found it very interesting that she asked all of them to stand up and started listing the names of the African Americans that have been killed by the police over the last two and a half years. She separated the names into gender, to show that the first half – men, were recognized more than the women who have died. She used a strategic way to introduce her point from the very beginning. Crenshaw explains that there are two topics that are presently being talked about often: police violence against African Americans and violence again women. The two issues have not been integrated and analyzed as a whole. Throughout her speech, she used hand gestures accordingly to go along with what she was saying, her call to action was clear, and although she was talking about a serious topic, she threw in a couple of jokes to lighten up the audience and keep them engaged.

One of the statements Crenshaw made that grabbed by attention was “Well, the answer is that this is a trickle-down approach to social injustice and many times it just doesn’t work. Without frames that allow us to see how social problems impact all members of a targeted group, many will fall through the cracks of our movements, left to suffer in virtual isolation.” This is when I really strayed to understand what she was saying. I paused the video and started thinking, and then realized how many groups we seek justice for, but yet succeed at excluding certain people from those subject to the injustice, who in fact also need the attention; especially how we differentiate issues between men and women. As a person who’s interested in politics, Kimberlé Crenshaw really grabbed my attention. I wasn’t even there and she had my attention the entire time. I think her speech, maybe did not make a huge difference. But it most definitely left an impression and caught people’s attention.

         In “Moving Beyond Pain” the author praises the way Beyoncé’s music video Lemonade depicts black female bodies but also exposes readers to how the video fails to celebrate the idea that women can move past pain instead of simply enduring it.  The video clearly positively illustrates black female bodies by “ . . . placing them at the center, [and] making them the norm,” but the author explains that it goes beyond that. The author explains that this very illustration of the black female body transgresses societal boundaries and “ . . . its purpose is to seduce, celebrate, and delight – to challenge the ongoing present day devaluation and dehumanization of the black female body.”  They go further into explaining that the video is “ . . . the construction of a powerfully symbolic black female sisterhood that resists invisibility, that refuses to be silent.”

         However, the author then challenges their original statement by saying that “ . . . this radical repositioning of black female images does not truly overshadow or change conventional sexist constructions of black female identity.”  The author explains that the video portrays “black women as always being the victim and as expressing their pain and emotions through anger. She points out two things the video lacks: an illustration that “ . . . men must do the work of inner and outer transformation if emotional violence against black females is to end” and also a representation that “It is only as black women and all women resist patriarchal romanticization of domination in relationships can a healthy self-love emerge that allows every black female, and all females, to refuse to be a victim.” The video Lemonade shows both a positive representation of black women bodies but also shows that women must endure pain instead of being able to move past it.

         I first found this article extremely confusing because of the authors initial statement: “Beyoncé’s visual album, Lemonade, was WOW – this is the business of capitalist money making at its best.”  I didn’t know what the author would be focusing on but it became more clear as I continued reading.  I especially like the part where the author mentions: “ . . . when violence is made to look sexy and eroticized, as in the Lemonade sexy-dress street scene, it does not serve to undercut the prevailing cultural sediment that is acceptable to use violence to reinforce domination, especially, in relations between men and women.”  I feel this is very important to note that although this video portrays a very important message it also enhances society’s ideas that using violence to portray pain (especially when it comes to men) is acceptable therefore reinforcing the violence will inflict change.

Christopher Lebron’s article provides an insight on the negative representation of Black men in the movie “Black Panther” that I was blind to before.  The article provides the information necessary to open reader’s eyes to the reality that black men are esoterically illustrated in the film industry.  Although difficult to recognize, Lebron goes in to speak about Killomonger specifically.  He says that, “Killmonger isn’t a hero or villain so much as a receptacle for tropes of inner-city gangsterism.”  He backs up his startling claim by describing that the movie only depicts Killomonger’s ravish impulses, his “evil” characteristics, and his starvation for revenge instead of focusing on the bigger picture and his primary goal: to use Wakanda’s resources to help against the mistreatment of Black American men.  This is a goal his father originally had before his own brother killed him on suspicions of treason.  Lebron’s criticism of the movie provides a completely different view: maybe Killomonger isn’t the enemy he’s put out to be and the rest of them are for refusing to help the people who are struggling; the people who look just like them, without the protection Wakanda provides they too would be facing unjust prejudice.  The article really makes you re-evaluate who the real villains are here.

At first the title of this article was startling to me because I strongly believed that there couldn’t possibly be something wrong with this movie, and yet I was proven wrong.  Lebron provides a medium so that the rest of society can see a message that most of us would be insusceptible to because these are not things we’ve gone through.  It was hard for me to place the particular strategies that Lebron uses in this piece to influence his viewers but his use of the movie’s details are what I found the most interesting.  I noticed how well detailed his analysis is and how he uses those facts to defend his stance.  I found one of the most interesting lines from Lebron’s piece to be: “T’Challa offers Wakanda’s technology to save Killmonger’s life—it has saved the white CIA agent earlier in the film. But Killmonger recalls his slave heritage and tells Panther he’d rather die than live in bondage.”  When I watched the film I had never captured the real meaning of Killomonger’s line and how it relates to history and the basis of the contradictory conflicts of this film.  Lebron strategically used details of the story that viewers might have simply brushed off.  His analysis brought to light an issue that is not predominantly talked about and that needs to be addressed in the film industry.

In “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?,” James Baldwin addresses the way a language evolves and goes on to describe how “black english” evolved and grew into a language.  Baldwin explains how people evolved a language to “ . . . describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order to not be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.” In other words, he is saying that people evolve a language in order to be able to control the circumstances or situations they live in or in order to avoid being overwhelmed and consumed by a life or situation that they cannot control.  He also mentions that language is a form of identification when he says that “ . . . It reveals the private identity, and connect one with, or divorces one from, the larger public, or communal identity.” The language someone speaks helps identify them or distinguish them as part of a larger group. For example, in England and America, English is spoken but each has its own characteristics that help compare one to the other which makes both languages incomprehensible to each other.  Baldwin then goes on to explain how black English emerged when he says that the language came to existence out of a means of “brutal necessity.” They had to create a language that the white man wouldn’t be able to understand for their own protection. Slaves did not come into this country speaking the same language and if they did, slavery would have never lasted as long as it did. This directly connects to his previous point where he says “What joins languages, and all men, is the necessity to confront life, in order, not inconceivably, to outwit death.”  Black English evolved by means of survival.

In addition, I found it interesting when Baldwin says, “He cannot afford to understand it.  This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.”  Here he’s talking about how white men could not afford to understand the language that has evolved as black English because it would reveal to them to the truth of the lives they lived.  It would reveal to them how cruel and evil they were and why this language had to be created in the first place. Understanding this language would finally reveal to them the reality they refuse to face and see for themselves.  I found this interesting because the reason a language evolved could reveal the reality of something to a greater public which is something that seems obvious to me but also complex.

I wasn’t really confused on anything other than the phrases he used in the second paragraph on the second page such as “let it all hang out.”  Overall I found this article to be extremely interesting and it made me think about our language and how it affects the way we see the reality we live in.

          Before I began reading “The Rhetorical Situation” by Lloyd F. Bitzer I thought a rhetorical situation was a situation that has not occurred in reality but that society was talking about it or giving a response based on something that only existed within their imagination.  However, after reading the passage I learned that a rhetorical situation is a discourse that inspires change when Bitzer states, “ . . . it functions to produce action or change in the world; it performs some task.” In a rhetorical situation the discourse inspires change surrounding the topic of discussion.  For example, a discourse on basic human rights would cause the public to persuade lobbyist to speak on the enforcement and further respect of people’s rights. He goes on to explain that “ . . . it is the situation which calls the discourse into existence” (Bitzer 2). In other words, a situation is what inspires discourse that will then inspire change and action.  A discourse can not inspire a situation and then inspire change, the situation already needs to be in place for a discourse to be written. Furthermore, I found it interesting when he mentioned that a rhetoric is pragmatic and always persuasive. On page three Bitzer mentions that, “ . . . a work of rhetoric is pragmatic; it comes into existence for the sake of something beyond itself . . .”  A rhetorical situation comes into existence as a way to deal with things sensibly. It is created not only for the sake of writing great discourse but in order to have some kind of impact.  He also mentioned that a rhetoric is always persuasive. I was confused at first as to why a rhetoric would be persuasive but as I continued to read it became more clear. The exigence inspires the utterance based on a issue or problem which will in a sense be used as a means to persuade the public to take action and to speak out in relation to the context of that exigence.  In a rhetorical situation the written piece will lead to a response in which the public will speak out and take action therefore making it persuasive. In whole I found the article repetitive but oddly enough the repetition of the concepts of the essay was what finally made me comprehend a rhetorical situation and how a rhetoric comes into existence.