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Fear Of A Black President Analysis

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A study of anecdotal evidence in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Fear of a Black President raised this question: is the use of arguments based on narrative a principle all writers can use? To improve my understanding, we looked for emotionally charged accounts in other assigned essays. Our results suggest that ____ works best when the author has established his or her ethos. Within Fear of a Black President by Coates, there are two main examples of anecdotal evidence. At the beginning of the piece, Coates describes President Obama’s response to the Zimmerman shooting. Although he is piecing together a narrative, Coates’s description reads as fact. The story he relates is explicitly linked to his main argument. Coates states that Obama’s speech after the Zimmerman shooting politicalized the matter because up until that point, “he ha[d] become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being ‘clean.’” This directly …show more content…

He lays out the story very differently than he lays out the earlier anecdote. He seeks to humanize the victim, adding that he was killed,”near the home of his girlfriend and 11-month-old daughter.” In doing so, he enables us to imagine ourselves or our friends in such a situation. His narrative, however, can only succeed in moving the reader if he has successfully conveyed ethos. The turning point in Coates’s description of Jones is the sentence “he was also my friend.” To have the emotional resonance Coates intends, we must accept that as an educated and intelligent black man, Coates embodies the idea of twice as good. If we do, we can assume that Jones also worked twice as hard, yet died anyway. This anecdote resonates emotionally, giving the piece pathos and kairos, in the sense that the fear of more deaths can spur us to

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