Burns Vs. Rash Essay

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On August 28th, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood up and spoke out about inequality from an African American’s perspective during the March on Washington. About forty years later, two women, Sara Abou Rashed, a Palestinian, and Diane Burns, a Native American, write about their struggles in America with inequality and hate speech. Even though Burns was older than Rashed when she wrote her poem, Rashed can pull at the heartstrings of her readers far better than Burns can. She executes this by using the appeal of pathos when connecting to her losses, and by using metaphors to sympathize with her audience in the poem "Welcome to America"(2016). The first and main difference in how both authors connect with their audience is how they emphasize …show more content…

She writes about "the way fear and revolution play tug of war on doorsteps, uproot loved ones from framed pictures on walls, steal a father from the dinner table"(Rashed 41-44). With such descriptive memories and experiences, using Pathos, the audience can sympathize with Rashed. Unlike in Burns’ poem where she guilts the audience, mainly white Americans, for what some of the population does. Instead of using her poem and pathos to urge the reader to do something in response, she makes the readers feel insignificant and the ones to blame. Furthermore, “Welcome to America” introduces another type of loss, or in this case, being lost. Throughout the poem, the audience is able to watch Rashed struggle to fit into her new, forced home. She is judged for being a Palestinian from Syria, looking like a ‘terrorist’, and dealing with a language barrier. Rashed writes about the grief of getting pulled away from her home, and losing it all in the process. Her friends “saw [her] house tear asunder like it was never there: the old gate, the dolls, grandma’s garden and every dream [they]’ve built on the roof with hands too small to plant

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