The Paralyzing Backbone
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To the current world, it is not instantly noticeable that racist issues are still current in America. Behind the false image that is put up by America, racist issues are still current. African Americans have yet to seen as everyone else and have yet to step into office. In Michael Barone essay “Irish and Blacks,” and excerpt from his 2001 book, The New American, he uses metaphor, factual support, and encouraging tone to urge Americans to change the system to include people of different bases into the “melting pot”.
The first device used by Barone to illustrate his point is metaphor. To begin with, Barone subtitled his book as How the Melting Pot Can Work Again. The “Melting Pot” acts as the current government that controls present America. Currently, there have never been black president to lead as a leader of America. Americans people have yet to grow the trust for Africans to make the same decisions that they have let whites to do. Some feel as if Africans lack the ability to think, which paralyzes Africans to have a less chance to lead todays leading businesses and powers. Within Barones essay, he includes “the new system had bad as well as good effects on black Americans and has probably retarded their movement toward becoming interwoven into the fabric of American life” (Barone 242). He compares America as a blanket that has yet to see the yarn of Africans as the same as themselves. To some Americans, they still view African Americans as different then themselves and dont include Africans as equal to themselves. In ascents, the Africans have yet been accepted to be “interwoven into American life”. This is helped because of the current system that paralyzes Africans by giving them a helping hand and making them seem less in the world. By affirmative action, it seem like Africans need a helping backbone to stand when others fought their way into the ranks. The current system makes people of different background and color look weak and do not help them but paralyzes them.
The second rhetorical device that Barone uses in his essay to make a strong point is factual support. Such as he uses with metaphor, he takes a punch at the affirmative action by writing “Ðthe system of racial quotas, preferences, and set-asides that has strengthened the sense of grievance, racial consciousnessÐ…” (Barone 242). He points out that affirmative action has created a sense of a race that needs help. If anything, it the paralyzing helps to create a feeling that they are weaker then the current Americans and can not be successful within American unless they are helped. Barone finishes that sentence “Ð… and, on elite campuses and in workplaces, the dysfunctional habit of mind which holds that the