As I read Sophia Kerby's essay "The Top 10 Most Startling Facts about People of Color and Criminal Justice in the United States". I start to encounter an immense amount of Rhetorical Appeals. For an essay that is fairly compact, It Contains a great amount of information and has extremely good arguments full of logic. Right off the back, I notice a strong use of diction. The author appears to be well educated in Criminal Justice, making her extremely credible. For example, In the beginning of the first paragraph she expresses how she feels about the matter which brings up pathos by using emotion and wanting to connect with the audience. Another example would be, “While people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned”. In this section Sophia Kerby uses Logos to appeal the statistics of imprisonment rate in the U, S making a strong claim with reason and proof.
As I continue to read Sophia kerby's essay I start to take note of her examples and Facts on Criminal Justice. For one, “African Youth Have higher rates of juvenile incarceration and are more likely to be sentenced to adult prison”. When I read this section of her essay it truly made me sick. As a colored person myself, having to be incarcerated as a juvenile while knowing another person who is non-colored, who most likely committed a crime much harsher than me wouldn't receive the same punishment would absolutely tilt me in every way.
Lastly, as I started to finish up on Kerby's essay I took a strong note in paragraph thirteen. As it stated “These racial disparities have deprived people of color of their most basic civil rights, making criminal-justice reform the civil rights issue of our time.” This line impacted me immensely, as I totally agree with her. Criminal Justice needs to be disintegrated off this planet. So many people have fought and lost their lives for our civil rights, and this issue still continues to this day.