Chowdhury 1

Afra Chowdhury

Professor Granillo

English 101

19 January 2020

An Emotion is Worth a Thousand Words

Emotions are stronger than they may seem. They are the driving force to logical thinking

and reason, and they compel people to think both with their hearts and their minds. Such

emotions that people may see in articles or essays are typically derived from Aristotle’s

rhetorical appeal called pathos. Pathos is a quality or trait that evokes emotions like sympathy

and sadness. This is a rhetorical strategy that strengthens Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay “Chance the

Rapper’s Golden Year” from his book ​They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.​ “Chance the

Rapper’s Golden Year” by Hanif Abdurraqib is about how American rapper Chance the Rapper

continues to spread positivity even through the severities of society, such as police brutality and

deadly attacks among minorities in America. By using deaths and tragedies, he kindles the

emotional appeal, creating a stronger argument. The main rhetorical strategy that Abdurraqib

uses to write “Chance the Rapper’s Golden Year” was the pathos appeal because he evokes

emotions such as sadness and sympathy through the use of diction and syntax. His motivation to

write the piece came based on his moral and emotional stance on the injustices minorities face in

America, such as police brutality. Although evoking emotion over logic can be baffling towards

argumentative essay, he uses the oppression that him and millions of people face in American

society to try to obtain sympathy and pity from readers, which leads to why Abdurraqib found

this essay important.

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Abdurraqib’s motivation to write “Chance the Rapper’s Golden Year” derives from the

attacks and massacres of black people because of the unjust system in America. For instance,

Abdurraqib discusses how in “July, three black men were shot and killed by police officers over

the course of just three days in Brooklyn, Baton Rouge, and Saint Paul” (Abdurraqib 10).

Abdurraqib uses this injustice as a way to motivate himself to write this piece because, for many

years, hundreds of lives have been lost due to racism and racial profiling against the black

community. Hanif Abdurraqib himself is a black poet and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio,

so it only makes sense for him to defend and mourn over his community, which is the main

target of police brutality. Throughout the years, Abdurraqib has lost many of the people around

him due to such tragedies, so he feels the need to represent them in order to let their spirits live

on. Another reason why this piece reaches such importance to Abdurraqib is because it is his

community that is facing such injustices. In most cases, a police officer killing a civilian over a

misunderstanding tends to be a black person; so in a way, it is like a personal attack upon

Abdurraqib. The personal attack leads to the feeling of anger and sadness, ultimately leading to

emotions, which drives this essay.

Abdurraqib uses the pathos appeal in “Chance the Rapper’s Golden Year” by utilizing the

death of innocent people and lost loved ones because it evokes sadness. For instance, in this

chapter, Abdurraqib discusses how “deadly attacks seemed to be a monthly occurrence, anchored

by the Pulse nightclub massacre… there were funerals I missed, and funerals I didn’t. People I

loved walked out of doors they didn’t walk back through” (Abdurraqib 7). Abdurraqib uses the

loss of innocent people and the death of loved ones as a way to appeal to emotion because it

automatically makes the audience sympathize and be more sensitive to this subject. By evoking
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sympathy and sadness, his audience will be more attentive to the story and its importance, which

is that the death of black people is so common. The metaphor he uses with people walking out of

doors and not walking back through them is a perfect use of diction because it allows the

audience to visualize people passing without the gory details. Visualizing the metaphors that

Abdurraqib creates eventually leads to his use of diction and syntax throughout the entirety of

the essay.

Abdurraqib’s use of diction and syntax creates an effective argument because the

metaphorical visuals give the audience something to think about. For example, in the chapter

Abdurraqib discusses how “maybe this is what it’s like to live in these times; the happiness is

fleeting, and so we search for more while the world burns around us” (Abdurraqib 10). For

context, Abdurraqib talks about how people tend to place themselves in a fantasy world—in his

case, the “Magnificent Coloring World”—in order to escape reality, which is people dying from

police brutality and shootings. Adding figurative and metaphorical parts of speech creates an

effective argument because it drives people to analyze and reflect on what Abdurraqib is saying.

Abdurraqib’s point is that people compensate for death by looking for happiness, and if

happiness escapes, they will look for something else that makes them happy. His use of strong

diction figuratively conveys that the world burns as people search for what they call happiness.

This prompts the reader to reevaluate the term happiness, and why the world seems to burn down

without it. But pathos, strong diction, and syntax are not the only ways that could strengthen his

argument.

Although some may argue that pathos was an ineffective rhetorical strategy because it

disregards logic and reason, he actually strengthens it by relating to his audience. For instance,
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Abdurraqib claims that “when you watch hope closely enough, manifested in enough people, you

can start to feel it too” (Abdurraqib 12). Sure, it is not a fact that everyone who sees hope closely

will be hopeful too, but it is something that many readers can relate to. Hope is a desire or an

expectation, and everyone has something in their life that they desire. And that is exactly where

Abdurraqib catches his audience’s attention. He takes a small aspect of something people all

have, and makes it so that people see through his point of view, which is Chance the Rapper’s

optimism. By claiming that hope is evident if one feels it, he implies that there is actually hope

around everyone; the only thing one must do is to look at things a little closer. Moving an

audience does not always come from logic or fact; it comes from creating an emotion or feeling,

like hope. Hope is not just a type of emotional appeal; it is a relatable one.

The main rhetorical strategy that Abdurraqib uses to write ​Chance the Rapper’s Golden

Year​ was the pathos appeal because he evokes emotion through the use of diction and syntax.

Some ways that Abdurraqib evokes emotions like pity and sadness is by explaining why he

wrote the piece, mentioning how people have died from attacks and massacres, and using words

that instigate a thought process. Although some may say that emotion is not effective as logic

and reason, it actually is, because emotion is more relatable than logic and reason could ever be.

That is why the pathos appeal is so important. It initiates people's emotions, which leads to the

reevaluation of the piece, which ultimately leads to people’s understanding of the essay as a

whole. The point of an argumentative or persuasive essay is to understand one’s point, and that is

all Abdurraqib wants; for someone to understand him. Getting people to understand the point is

not through statistics and facts, but by simply taking an emotion and making it theirs.
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Works Cited

Abdurraqib, Hanif. “Chance the Rapper's Golden Year.” ​They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us​,

Two Dollar Radio, 2017.