Kara Ireland
Dr. Guglielmo
ENGL 4240
December 7, 2018
“You,” White America
When considering the most marginalized groups in America, it has always disproportionally been people of color. Filling in later on the spectrum are women, Muslim-Americans, the LGBT community, Jewish and Catholic Americans and recently, immigrants. The oppressed wears many faces, while the oppressor has remained the same over several generations. White people are the most powerful demographic in America because they have created a system that inherently functions in their favor. As the default, automatic image of “The American,” the white man is largely responsible for letting diversity fail to prosper. Age-old ideologies are to blame, which orators like Angelina Grimké and Frederick Douglass recognize in their verbal texts. With hypocrisy, racism, and sexism fueling generations upon generations of men, white men in particular have evaded the pressures from the oppressed to make change.
Because of this persistent issue, Douglass’ “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” and Grimké’s “Speech at Pennsylvania Hall” have committed to illuminating the inequalities and holding the white majority accountable for their atrocities. Through the purposeful incorporations of varying pronoun usage, both of these rhetors strive to make their audiences sympathize with slavery. Grimké and Douglass venture to do so by intertwining their ethos with the crowd’s identity with first-person inclusive and subsequently separating themselves from them with second-person exclusive point of view. While many rhetors stick to prompting calls to action by only using second person, I argue that the most effective technique is to vary pronoun usage as Douglass and Grimké do. With consideration of Angelina Grimké and Frederick Douglass’ rhetorical strategies, I will analyze how they work to position their immediate, addressed audience through the deliberate modification of pronoun usage.
By the addressed audience, I intend to expand the scope of Bettina Gruber’s idea of “temporal anchoring,” (200). Gruber is a student from Utrecht University who was published in the J Comp German Linguistics journal for her studies on the indexical links between second person roles across English, German, and Dutch; she introduces the concept of temporal anchoring and summarizes the dense concept by claiming it “references the utterance in time, thereby restricting the interpretation to the utterance context” (200). Gruber has done her work under different circumstances, but I am stretching her findings to cover my topics because her ideas substantiate some of mine. With her notion of “temporal anchoring,” my arguments are founded with the intentions that all analysis is grounded with cognizance of the time period and immediate environment the text was composed or performed in (223). My mentions of the addressed audience are a reference to the primary, intended audience that was originally present during the speeches of Frederick Douglass and Angelina Grimké.
I chose these rhetors because their addressed audiences consist of the same demographic: white, mixed-gendered groups. Grimké and Douglass also deliver their speeches during the same time period: the mid-nineteenth century. The era is relevant to my argument because they are engaging in antislavery rhetoric while slavery is still legal and beneficial to their addressed audience. Slavery was not abolished until 1865; both of their positions are radical because the white majority did not sympathize with the enslaved people. Because the rhetorical situation is one in which Grimké and Douglass are trying to convince their addressed audiences of the brutalities of slavery, it can be assumed their audience has a mindset that counters their antislavery positions. Grimké’s speech was delivered in 1838, while Douglass’ was delivered in 1852; they are both denouncing it during the peak economical value of slavery, thus their stances were likely unpopular.
Frederick Douglass and Angelina Grimké have each fashioned orations heavy with Aristotelian appeals, which is not unusual. In fact, most decent rhetors rely on Aristotelian appeals, but Grimké and Douglass have placed themselves in a compromising position in doing so. They are compromised because their ethos, speaking as a woman and as a Black man, is immediately taking away from their rhetorical presence to an audience that adheres to misogynistic and racist codes. Speaking in spite of their marginalization is a sufficient contribution towards their ethos because it shows conviction in their topics. Grimké is boldly assuming a compromising position because she meets physical opposition as she notes the accumulating “mob” outside; Negro Universities Press also included “[just then stones were thrown at the windows,]” greatly substantiating the prominent life threats Grimké faced in speaking (1). Grimké faces potential injury for assuming her role as a rhetor as she realizes the potential of “the breaking of every window” in that charged environment (1). She is a powerful rhetor for not giving into the fear from the threats daunting her, which reveals not only her genuine devotion to abolition, but her confidence in her own ethos. She has deemed the content of her speech worthy of potential physical attacks, and that passion is a testament to her ethos.
Those rhetors have sufficiently presented the facts on the basis of their arguments by naming the visible differences: the divergence between themselves and white men. Frederick Douglass establishes himself first as a black man, then as a former slave by choosing to “see ... from the slave’s point of view” (Douglass 4). By establishing their ethos first and foremost, that rhetorical strategy organically paves the road for their impactful speeches because they offer the degree of differentiation. In sharp, poignant addresses, both Grimké and Douglass purposely employ their ethos as necessary. Because they have marked themselves as one distinct entity from the demographic in power, the white man, their speeches draw attention to the disparity between the two.
In what Katherine Henry has dubbed the “rhetoric of exposure,” Grimké and Douglass seek to share the grotesque realities of slavery to provoke change (2). The concept behind the “rhetoric of exposure” is that it essentially: “refigured publicity as something that exposed the “private” rather than protecting it” (Henry 1). Henry has conducted an extensive analysis regarding the rhetoric of exposure on many of Grimké’s pieces and has been published by The John Hopkins University Press. Her findings are relevant to my claim because they draw attention to how Grimké and Douglass exploit the differences between their privilege versus those who are enslaved.
Grimké first exploits the inequalities in a compelling anecdote of her observations of slavery. Grimké employs the rhetoric of exposure by recounting how she “witnessed for many years [slavery’s] demoralizing influences and its destructiveness to human happiness” (1). Grimké simultaneously assumes a pathetic approach with the concept of the dehumanization of the slave and further enacts the rhetoric of exposure. She also caters to the freedom and joys experienced by her addressed audience that the slave is not afforded. To evoke sympathy within her addressed audience, she suggests “man cannot enjoy [mirth and happiness] while his manhood is destroyed” (Grimké 1). Her discussion of happiness as a foreign concept to slaves is a nod towards pathos since she is attempting to sway them emotionally. By attributing emotions to the enslaved people and referring to them as men, Grimké organically begins to dismantle their harmful and apathetic sentiments through her own example.
By making the rhetorical choices to address the audience directly, using the exclusive “you,” Douglass and Grimké attempt to provoke an air of accountability from the masses. This technicality is important to identify because although Grimké is white, and while Douglass is a man, they are both barred from the rights and privileges accompanied by being a white man. These two rhetors offer a lens to examine how the disparity between one component of identity can influence the authority of a person; moreover, that lens offers a way to consider what influences the permeability of their messages and the rhetor’s ability to position the audience.
Grimké’s “Speech at Pennsylvania Hall” was controversial with respect to its radical empathetic sentiments towards slavery. While her speech relies mostly on pathetic appeals, delving into grievous accounts of her own encounters with slavery, she does differentiate herself from the silent majority by transforming the intentions of first and second-person. Grimké demonstrates the complexities of identity when she begins extracting beneficial parts of it to pursue her argument. Grimké has self-identified as a “Southerner,” a woman, and indirectly, being of the white majority as she switches between first and second-person in the eighth stanza of the verbal text (Grimké 1). Grimké reinforces her abolitionist ideas due to using that shift towards the end of her speech by reframing her addressed audience and evoking a sense of responsibility. Grimké places the audience in a state of familiarity by referencing “we,” often, and it is implied that she means her other white counterparts within the addressed audience since when she intends reference to slaves, she mentions them as such (5).
Grimké’s mention of “we” gets more complex, however, as she strives to implicate who that pertains to (abolitionists, or the “silent spectators”), when she states: “to work as we should in this cause, we must know what slavery is” (Grimké 4). There is a distinct shift in her intentions when she mentions how “if they have witnessed the cruelties of slavery ... an insensibility has ensued which prepares them to apologize even for barbarity,” because she has presumptively chosen not to address the audience as “you,” nor implicate them with her with first-person (Grimké 2). “We” subsequently becomes “they,” as she proposes the differences between her ideologies and those who “have naturally become callous,” which she later generalizes by name as “The South” (Grimké 2). Similarly, she reframes the audience and distances them from her examples with phrasing such as: “why, then, do they not contradict what we say? They cannot” (Grimké 4). By semantic nature, using “we” and “they” within the same sentence indicates some kind of separation. The choice to skew her language is rhetorically charged because she is playing to her addressed audience and coaxing them towards her argument by first establishing familiarity, then accountability.
While Gruber’s claim that “second-person pronouns frequently appear in contexts in which they refer to people in general rather than to the actual addressee of the utterance” holds some truth, Grimké’s use was deliberately towards the addressees (199). The deliberate use is important because she is positioning the addressed audience according to her aspirations that they will be swayed in favor of abolition. “Women of Philadelphia ... allow me to entreat you to come up to this work” even summons them as such, as she requests their contributions towards her cause (Grimké 4). This second-person shift is distinctive from herself because while she is also a woman, she has identified herself as a “Carolinian,” thus nullifying the notion that her second-person incorporation was general (Grimké 3). She separates herself again this time by siding with women and denoting that “men may settle this and other questions at the ballot-box, but you have no such right” (Grimké 5).
However, within the same paragraph, Grimké substitutes first-person for second-person and garners an effective sense of unity towards advocating against slavery by vilifying men. She replicates this strategy by reminding her addressed audience that “men who hold the rod over slaves, rule in the councils of this nation: and they deny our right to petition and to remonstrate against abuses of our sex and of our kind” (Grimké 5). In the same breath, Grimké has demonstrated how the same demographic has failed both white women and slaves. Because of her sly employments of malleable pronouns, she has efficaciously placed her audience in a position to resonate with her sentiments. She achieved this in a coy endeavor to use ethos to heighten her stance by illuminating the various ways white men have undercut the same addressed audience she is speaking to. By interacting with other grievances, Grimké is “[working] to homogenize an entire society” by indoctrinating them with alternative perspectives that humanize the slave; that aforementioned society is composed of people who have fallen victim to the white men’s power structure in some way or another (DelConte 205). Matt DelConte’s denotation was characterized by a semiotic analysis of various narratives. Even so, the connotation supports my argument because there are parallels between “the inclusiveness of the you pronoun [lumping] readers and protagonist together” and Grimké’s choice of pronouns. The choice not to specify who she means exactly invites a larger audience. Grimké is no protagonist, but she does rally people for her cause with "you," understanding that she sometimes includes herself within the audience as she modulates between first and second person.
While Grimké is able to disengage parts of her identity to appeal to the addressed audience, Frederick Douglass is not afforded with the same opportunities. He is secured with being Black, being a man, and being a former slave to advocate against slavery, but his ethos precedes him because his addressed audience does not resonate with his stance. The people making up his addressed audience are likely white, with racist sentiments due to the prevalent culture in 1852. Because of his intuition regarding his addressed audience, Douglass first has “to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race” in a lengthy account of grueling slave jobs that feasibly only man could accomplish (Douglass 5). Douglass comes equipped with a jarring account of the dehumanization of his people when he revisits the conditions in which they live. While listing off jobs carried out by slaves, he begs the question: whether or not “man is entitled to liberty” (Douglass 5). Liberty is an intangible concept to those born into slavery, not to those who benefit from the experience.
Therefore, modifying his ethos is not as simple because he does not have the same accommodations. Neil Leroux supplies that his addressed audience may meet him with “possible disbelief and apathy,” giving Douglass grounds for the way he began (37). With this provided context, his collective “you,” would not automatically engage the white man who sees him as another, lesser species than him. Douglass was clever to begin his oration by acknowledging their ethos first and pandering to his addressed audience. He renders their fathers “wise” and “good” men as he attested their nationalism with: “your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country” (Douglass 3). By revering his addressed audience’s ancestors, they will have a more favorable outlook on his position as a rhetor, thus making them more attuned to his views. By laying down that initial groundwork, Douglass is cherry-picking when to embrace and emphasize his role as a “synecdochic representative of the whole Negro slave people” as crowned by Leroux in his analysis of him (40).
Douglass then introduces a stark contrast to his previous rhetorical methods as he addresses the “sense of disparity between [them]” (4). His blunt inquiry of “what have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence,” isolates himself from his addressed audience by effectively using second-person to show opposition between the two (Douglass 4). Because Gruber has identified that “the default interpretation is still reference to the addressee and that the speaker-referring variation can only be deduced from the context,” it then becomes clear that the implications of his first-person usage are not to be conflated with the implications of his second-person usage, as he is noting two contrasting entities (223). The original context of Gruber’s claim is centered around the variance amongst English, Dutch, and German, however; Gruber was originally prone to describing the intentions of using you in those different cultural instances. Nonetheless, the point persists, and I borrow from it to assert how Douglass distinguished himself from the audience with only the use of pronouns. From that, Douglass has ventured to position his addressed audience in an estranged relationship from himself.
Leroux seconds that by describing his rhetorical decisions as the “[development of] the distance between you/yours and I/mine” (40). His observation is directly related to my analysis because Leroux has posited an in-depth study of “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.” The variance of interpretation prompts an attention-switch that makes the addressed audience privy to his argument. Leroux has determined the nature of the attention-switch “involves the author turning the attention of the addressed audience from one specific issue or belief to ideas that subsume the original issues” (36). Douglass’ execution of this was rather abrupt, but his stance was well maintained throughout his speech. The attention-switch occurred after forming a base of fellowship amongst the addressed audience. The most distinctive mode of estrangement between Douglass and his addressed audience is done by calling attention to the dissonance between “the rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence” because it is only “shared by [them], not by [him]” (4). He seamlessly integrates his point into his addressed audience by reiterating that it does not apply to the slave, after announcing that he sees through the eyes of the slave prior to it. His overarching claim regarding the abolishment of slavery is always on the surface of whatever means he uses to cater to his addressed audience.
Douglass persuasively repositions his audience to be susceptible to reflection and makes the segue for how they are to be held accountable when he asks them a direct question, following his major points about antislavery. Douglass poses the question: “what to the slave is the fourth of July,” then he resolves to answer it (Douglass 6). By providing the answer that it is merely “a day that reveals to him ... the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim,” Douglass reinforces his overall abolitionist ideologies (6). Prompting a question and granting an answer is another rhetorical move both Douglass and Grimké make use of to manipulate the placement of their addressed audiences. In Grimké’s execution of it, she posed the question: “what has the North to do with slavery,” and her answer immediately followed: “cast out first the spirit of slavery from your own hearts, and then lend your aid to convert the South” (Grimké 1).
Grimké has yet again effectively transformed her pronouns to the second-person as a direct call to action. Borrowing from DelConte’s notion that “the you narratee is distinct from the narrator,” I argue when choosing to employ second-person pronouns, the you is intentionally distinct from the rhetor (208). DelConte was hypothesizing about you’s function in a narrative, but you functions similarly beyond the semiotic scope. The intentionality of using you is born out of ceasing to “[create] a bond with [the] addressed audience, then, [using] images and grammar to develop and exploit a gap” (Leroux 38). Much like Douglass’ endeavors to praise the fathers of his addressed audience, Grimké equates herself to her addressed audience and then capitalizes on that relation to grant their responsibilities towards change.
Another cunning method of controlling the placement of the audience is done through both rhetors’ effective tendency to refer to the church as a third-person entity. “The church” becomes synonymous with “they” as Grimké denounces their tendency to turn a blind eye to the outcries of the abolitionist movement. Grimké employs another rhetorical pronoun shift as she claims the church’s counter interests “[make] them dumb on [antislavery measures] and every other unpopular subject” (Grimké 1). In scrutinizing the contextual implications through the temporal anchoring approach as introduced by Gruber, I argue that Grimké’s condemnations of the church include her addressed audience. With respect to the period, the early nineteenth century, Christianity was the most widespread religion amongst white Americans. Thus, such church-going people might be indirectly summoned in Grimké’s accusatory rants, craftily implicating them, though disguised by second person. To an unassuming listener, the incognito jab might not resonate as strongly as the direct use of “you,” because it does not draw attention to its terminology as overtly. Employing the pronoun shifts beneath the radar heightens the impact of her words because they have the potential to linger subconsciously.
I chose Angelina Grimké because she is not merely an advocate. Her rhetoric has the potential to incite change because she plants the seeds of her argument within her addressed audiences and sows them accordingly. Beyond only urging her addressed audience to soul-search for sympathy, she shows them how to do so with first-hand examples; she invites them to be put in the slaves’ place by substituting the slaves with their own kind, ensuring some level of resonance.
Douglass gives me the same impressions. He is a former slave who has not only earned the validated status of a man by his white counterparts, but who has simultaneously won their respect and recognition as a rhetor. I also think his poise is worth noting because he was always “restrained in tone, offering substantive argument without aggressive confrontation” (Leroux 41). Douglass spoke in such a refined manner and met his opposition with realities rather than emotionality. Douglass accepted his role with elegance which likely dismantled many assumptions held by his addressed audience. By founding his arguments in logos rather than pathos, he demonstrated his grasp of rhetoric. In rooting all of his examples in the rhetoric that was already in circulation, Douglass narrows the scope of indignant backlash because there are few alternative responses to well-conducted, proposed evidence.
From Grimké and Douglass, one can replicate how to assess the audience they intend to address by noting where their values differ. Deciding on the most practical ways to exploit that difference can then be done through an assessment of the privileges enjoyed by that demographic. Studying the audience and anticipating which points of contention to draw upon would help to define how to vary pronoun usage. Knowing when to point the finger can be just as effective as knowing when to be subtle with one’s implications. Cognizance of when to highlight that difference and the appropriate means of doing it can be the catalyst or the downfall of the argument’s penetration. A conglomerate of those techniques will have produced an effective rhetor. Following their examples, one can learn how to use language deliberately, with every utterance having been a calculated stroke of brilliance.
Works Cited
DelConte, Matt. “Why You Can’t Speak: Second-Person Narration, Voice, and a New
Model for Understanding Narrative.” Style, no. 2, 2003, p. 204-219. EBSCOhost,
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&db=edsglr&AN=edsgcl.108267994&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Douglass, Frederick. “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Mass Humanities, 2018,
http://www.masshumanities.org/files/programs/douglass/speech_abridged_med.pdf.
Henry, Katherine. "Angelina Grimké's Rhetoric of Exposure." American Quarterly, vol. 49 no. 2,
1997, pp. 328-355. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/aq.1997.0015
Grimké Weld, Angelina. “Speech at Pennsylvania Hall.” PBS, 2018,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2939t.html.
Gruber, Bettina. “Temporal and Atemporal Uses of ‘You’: Indexical and Generic Second
Person Pronouns in English, German, and Dutch.” The Journal of Comparative
Germanic Linguistics, no. 3, 2017, p. 199-227. EBSCOhost,
doi:10.1007/s10828-017-9090-4.
Leroux, Neil. “Frederick Douglass and the Attention Shift.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly,
no. 2, 1991, p. 36-46. EBSCOhost,
login.proxy.kennesaw.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true
&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.3885517&site=eds-live&scope=site.