Rhetorical Analysis Of Bell Hooks Keeping Close To Home

It is quite shocking for students in college to talk about their parents with no respect. Bell Hooks, a southern black girl from a working-class background in Kentucky, who has never rode on a city bus, or even an escalator, explains her feelings about going away for college in Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education. She took her first plane ride to Stanford University where she received her bachelor’s degree. She examines and challenges intertwined assumptions about race, class, and academia. She is credible in using ethos by giving her personal experience as an undergraduate at Stanford, and educational background about leaving home and how being underprivileged at a university where most people are privileged can cause one to think hard about the decision they have made. To a southern black girl who has never experienced life outside of the country living she was used to, to attend Stanford University was not only “frightening but utterly painful” (Hooks 418). In the beginning of the story Bell feels as if everyone can criticize her for choosing to go away for college but she cannot say anything in return.

By doing this she explains how working-class parents were afraid for their child to enter the real world because they felt they might grow to be ashamed of their background, or they wouldn’t want to return home, or only come home to prove that their life will be better than their parents. “Class realities separated me from fellow students” (Hooks 419). In most class meetings, class disparity was not a topic of discussion and Hooks never discussed how she began to feel a sense of guilt when she thought about the brown skin Filipina women who got paid to clean the college living areas or how she tried to make an effort to send money home to help her mother out. Even though Hooks knew she would be receiving a good education she also knew she had the option to rebel at any