AF: What I've realized, and Dee Brown Rhetorical Analysis Sample Essay

After looking through the blog tonight, I've come to realize that I may as well just assign the blog work (next one: after Thanksgiving break), and make it due the same week as assigned because everybody pretty much waits until the due date anyway.  I'm going to go ahead and try that method next time.

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This is a rhetorical analysis I wrote last year for Dee Brown's excerpted bit from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.   I read this book in high school (published in 1970; I graduated in 1975), and I remember it just completely broke my spirit for a while. I just couldn't believe our history.  Then I read Claude Brown's book Manchild in the Promised Land, which was a different kind of painful experience, and then Roots came out as a miniseries during my freshman year in college, and I remember gathering in the dorm rooms of my black friends as we watched it.  There was a beautiful black girl named Beryl Fletcher, and at some point one guy said, "Hey, Beryl!  Do you think Alex's people owned your people?"  I turned red, and said, "NO!"

Later, I went back and read Roots.  That pretty much did it for me. 

I didn't know it at the time, but I was shaping myself into a liberal with the books that I read.