Rhetorical Analysis Of The New Sovereignty By Shelby Steele

“We are wrong to think of democracy as a gift of freedom it is really a kind of discipline that avails freedom.” (Steele 458) Shelby Steele is an author, professor, and well known commentator on race relations. He has a Ph.D. in English, an M.A. in sociology, and has written several books on racial issues. He focuses mostly on race relations and the issues that ensue from racial biased programs. His mother and father were both active in the civil rights movement and the things they did during it made an impression on his values, the article he wrote displays these values. Steele’s article “The New Sovereignty” targets an open minded audience who are under the so called “New Sovereignty” it also targets an open minded nationwide audience who
Steele does this when he writes “By the 1970s more than 60 percent of the American population…would come under the collective entitlement of affirmative action.”(Steele 456) Steele is able to appeal to the audience’s logical response in which persuade the audience to see how big it has gotten and help change it. The quote is used to help make his argument valid and giving him credibility with facts to better persuade Steele’s audience of the people under affirmative action, Steele also writes “Today there are more than five hundred separate women’s studies programs in American colleges and universities.”(453), to convey to the audience of the people under this affirmative action of how big and spread out these programs are and to persuade the audience to respond by changing how the programs are, and to change them go away from the exclusiveness the programs have now by changing them to be integrated, one example Steele had was to change the programs to instead of having women’s English just have English and have everyone be equal. The statistical references Steele makes go hand in hand with the historical ones. They both help him gain credibility and they help reach the audience by demonstrating how they have changed, the reasoning behind the change and to the extent they have
The reader can deduct that he is only targeting an open minded audience because if a person were to have a closed mind, then their stand on the situation would not waiver. He wanted to persuade these audiences to question and move away from collective entitlements, and to change the way the programs are run in order to get back to actual integration rather than the reverse discrimination that has caused a separation. Steele’s implementation of rhetoric helped persuade his audience with the different choices he used like the use of historical and statistical data on how integration has changed, with anecdotes to get his audience to know why he cares about this “New Sovereignty”, and through the use of moral reasoning to convey to his audience the negative effects of collective entitlements. Steele effectively persuaded his audience specifically to question and challenge the way the programs are run so they can start moving towards true integration, and did this well with the choices of rhetoric he