Rhetorical Analysis Of A Date Which Will Live In Infamy

The way speeches, songs, quotes, mottos, and slogans are put out to Americans daily and influence how we see the things that have happened and are happening in the world. Throughout history, America has been greatly impacted by the way messages are sent to American people. People view words and sayings differently based on the person saying it and the audience.
FDR’s speech, A Date Which Will Live in Infamy, seems like he wants Americans to want to go to war. Throughout the speech, he uses more emotional words or phrases like, “suddenly and deliberately attacked,” “deliberately planned,” and “premeditated invasion.” Those along with many other phrases follow the theme of “infamy”. FDR repeats “last night Japanese forces attacked…” multiple

times throughout the speech. If he hadn’t repeated the phrase “last night”, listing off the different places wouldn’t have been as impactful as saying it over and over again.

It draws more attention the words attacked and Japanese, so Americans would then associate Japanese people with bad things. A lot of Americans associated all Japanese-Americans with the Japanese people who attacked Hawaii, even though they didn’t have anything to do with the attack. FDR wants to get a big emotional response from Americans and from Congress. He tells the American people, “With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God,” which means he wants to go to war with Japan. Fighting back could make the issues between Japan and the US worse and more people would end up dying. The American people listened to what he had to say, even if it wasn’t 100 percent true. Americans

became afraid of the Japanese-American immigrants that came to the US because of of the attack on Pearl Harbor and because of what FDR said in this speech. Japanese immigrants in the US wouldn’t have to feel afraid to go outside if FDR hadn’t accused Japan as a whole. He greatly impacted how white Americans and Japanese-Americans lived their lives after pearl Harbor.
In Birmingham’s Racial Segregation Ordinances, African American and white people weren’t allowed to be anywhere near each other.

They weren't allowed to eat in the same restaurant, “unless such and colored persons are effectually separated by a solid partition extending from the floor upward to a distance of seven feet or higher.” In today’s society, people of different races are allowed to eat wherever they want. Even though there are still a lot of people that are still racist towards African Americans, we’ve come along way in accepting them. African American and white people weren't allowed to “play together or in company with each other in any game game of cards or dice, dominoes or checkers.” If they were seen playing the same game, the African American person would be punished for being around the white person, not the other way around. These laws impacted how people lived their lives. African Americans lived in fear because they could get arrested or hurt over nothing. They were made out to be dangerous and people white Americans didn’t want to be

around.
The song This is America, is a good interpretation of how some people view how African Americans are treated. There are many potential symbols within the video that relate to history. Throughout the video, Childish Gambino, or Donald Glover, embodies Jim Crow, which were segregation laws enacted by Southern states. The lyrics, “Yeah, this is America, guns in my area, I got the strap, I gotta carry 'em,” goes into how African Americans feel the need to carry guns with them a lot because of the fear of violence that white Americans have put on them. The pants he was wearing resemble Confederate soldier pants. Also, the way he handed the guns off to the other people with the red cloths seemed like guns are treated better than Americans do. Throughout the video he dances with a group of teenagers which distracts from what’s happening in the background. Anyone who listens to the song can understand that African Americans have had a hard time throughout history, even though it has gotten better in recent years. When the shootings happen in the video, like the shooting of the choir, which is supposed to represent the Charleston Shooting in 2015, Glover is proving that shootings are becoming normalized in America. In the lyric, “This a celly, that's a tool,” he is referring to the live streaming and videotaping of police brutality and shootings. Cellphones and videotapes can be used as proof that police brutality sometimes isn’t the fault of the person being attacked, but the officers fault. The police can say a totally different thing than what the video shows. The way videos are portrayed throughout the media impact the country. We are able to see the real story story, no matter what it is.
The way words are put out to Americans and the rest of the world impact how we, along with other countries, view our government and authority figures. We’ve come along way with accepting each other as people and realizing that even though everyone’s different, we’re all still people. Words impact people’s daily lives whether that impact is good or bad.