The Word Illegal is a Racial Slur: The Rhetorical Analysis - Essay Example

The author has used latest decision of AP to relinquish the term “Illegal” as his base of argument and has interwoven it with Republican party’s biased political strategy of depicting and labeling all the Latinos as “illegal”. Along with it, he has further established his rational argument with the prime examples of illicit acts of David Vitter and Bernie Madoff, who did not receive any penalty for their illicit conducts due to their ethnicity (Sirota). However, the author has well articulated his article with literary techniques.

He was later used the strategies of back-story for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (2008) and eucatastrophe for GOP conducts towards slandering colored people. Thus, the term “illegal” proclaims that it requires immediate action from the respective authorities to remove the subjects from the territory, to cease their movement and to castigate them for their illicit actions. The term “xenophobes” is used by the author to emphasize the fearful disposition of native people due to the increased number of immigrants in America.

Therefore, their undue stay on the land comes under the term “illegal”, which becomes non-reactive with the ethnicity for the white people, but assumingly becomes a serious threat when used for colored people. Hence, Sirota has shown disdain for such segregation especially, by the political parties and media representatives who shape the perceptions of the general public. Thus, such inept propaganda is only disrespecting Latino culture. With this sentimental approach, the author has used open-ended question for his readers for objectivity and has interlinked it with further established social phenomena’s associated to cast and creed racism.

Sirota has put forth the social racist terms, media’s role to spread them without being rational and eventually, he has integrated them with realistic instances to further prove the authenticity of his proclaims. He has generated an article to acknowledge the bigotry prevailed in the society due to racist views towards Latino nation owing to “illegal” propaganda of politicians. Sirota has taken an informative approach in the first paragraph, critical in the second paragraph, sentimental approach in the third paragraph and empirical in the rest of his article.

The conclusion of the essay calls for rationality as he has left the tactic of being defensive and has concluded his argument with a suggestive tone. Thus, it leaves the option of rationality in the reader’s court, which is a wise tactic, as it enables the reader to accumulates the aforementioned information and decipher it eventually according to author’s will. However, this article does not resolve the issue of illegal immigrants belonging to any ethnicity; it only addresses the use of the term “illegal” for the whole Latino nation as a slur.

Thus, the objective of the article was to condemn the bigotry against Latinos, but the fact of the increased “illegal immigrant” population remains the same. According to Chris Christie, being in the USA without proper credentials is not a transgression and the people committing it cannot be sent to the penitentiary. However, they are only deported, so how does “illegal” action in its literal term, accounted as a criminal act.