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Keeping Close to Home by bell hooks Essay

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Because it is very credible, emotionally appealing, and slightly academically based, bell hooks's essay "Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education" is an essay that I consider to be very touching. While arguing in her essay that the rich class and the working-class should come to respect and understand each other, bell hooks employs three elements of argument: ethos, pathos, and logos. With her usage of ethos, hooks relates her experience as an undergraduate at Stanford. Providing an experience from a time before she went to Stanford, hooks uses pathos to inspire the audience. However, hooks uses logos by appealing to the readers' logic. These readers are the working-class and the privileged, the audience of her book: "Ain't I …show more content…

hooks felt hurt because her dad was a janitor. That was why it was so hard for her to look down on the working-class. Would it be easy for you to be able to suddenly look down upon your parents if they raised you to respect them? Because Stanford even accepted her into their institution, hooks felt as though she needed to act privileged. When she refused, the university and its students considered her rebellious; however, if she had not refused, she would have been ignoring and forgetting the values that she had learned from her parents. Using pathos by inspiring the audience and appealing to its emotions and values, hooks relates an example of the hard times in her relationship with her parents before she went to Stanford. In the example, she describes how her parents were reluctant to allow her to go because they felt that a closer college had a good education to offer, also. hooks also expresses how she became upset with her parents and how her mama felt as though bell hooks lacked appreciation for her. bell hooks's mama says to her, "Your childhood could not have been that bad. You were fed and clothed. You did not have to do without - that's more than a lot of folks have and I just can't stand the way y'all go on" (86). Later, when bell hooks attends to Stanford and notices how students constantly feel anger and

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