Rhetorical Analysis Of The Sisters Of Color By Lorde

In fashioning her ideal audience, Lorde directly addresses both “white women” and her “sisters of Color” while also subsuming both under the broader category of “women” (Lorde). Lord thus acknowledges the existence of two distinct publics within her cohesive audience, assuming the anger of African American women—who, somewhat paradoxically in regards to historical stereotypes, may comprise Lorde’s “informed” audience—and presuming the relative ignorance of white women, who largely include the portion of the audience in need of “education.” Through constitutive rhetoric, Lorde provides each group an identity and due acknowledgement within her speech while also unifying them universally as women against the social construction of racism. For

It is such rhetorical social identification of the audience that forms a unified public through “discursive effects that induce human cooperation” (Charland) and that serves to not only unify black and white women, but also the African American community itself, which had experienced class stratification due to the national socioeconomic shift of the late twentieth century. Lorde further defines and bolsters her ideal audience by positing the fact that “mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, responding to racism” (Lorde). Lorde thus designates her constituted audience as retaining a certain potent potential in the recognized prominence and power of collaboration of white and black women as a sweeping force in the realm of social and political attitude concerning racism. This appeal to eminence serves to almost “legitimize” the coalition of Lorde’s ideal public while providing a certain motivation and purposiveness in the realization of her argument and in the promotion of the communication of anger as an essential means to combat ignorance and misconception of racial

Primarily, she cites a tropic history of patriarchy and “male construction of brute force” as the reasons why women so often fear and suppress anger—whether projected from others or their own—for “there was nothing to be learned from it but pain” (Lorde). Conceivably, Lorde thus fashions and presents a female victim narrative to her audience that bears “facet [in] community building, community-member aggregation and remedying internal fissures” (Saleh). As such, Lorde provides a certain pathos appeal—and perhaps even ethos appeal in referencing humanistic traditions—that further amalgamates her audience by designating male dominance as representative of a common shared “antagonism” demanding amalgamated rebuttal from both black and white women. Lorde thus importantly bridges the racial chasm in citing a larger discrepancy necessitating immediate remedial action within the inclusive category of