English 120: College Composition & Reading Course
Essay # 1 Prompt
Essay 1. Rhetorical Analysis: Explaining a Concept—
Identity
Final Draft Due:
Cited page
Week 4, Sunday at midnight. 1000 words minimum MUST include Work
Final Essays will be uploaded to Blackboard through SafeAssign in MS Word formatNOT copy/pasted or pdf. *No Late Essays will be Accepted*
Rhetoric is the study of how writers and speakers use words to influence an audience. A
rhetorical analysis is an essay that breaks a work of non-fiction into parts and then explains
how the parts work together to create a certain effect—whether to persuade, entertain or
inform. A rhetorical analysis should explore the author’s goals, the techniques used,
examples of those techniques, and the effectiveness of those techniques. When writing a
rhetorical analysis, you are discussing how the author makes an argument and whether or not
the approach used is successful. For this assignment, you will be reading the following essays
found under Readings:
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“Shooting an Elephant”
“The Myth of the Latin Woman”
“Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders his Power to Alter Public Space”
“Why Looks are the Last Bastion of Discrimination”
You will select ONE of the essays above and fully introduce the text you are analyzing and
provide a brief summary of the author’s intent. Then identify and describe how well the author
achieves his or her objective. In our weekly Discussion Board quizzes, we have explored the
topics of identity, self-identity, and stereotypes. You may bring elements of those discussions
into your analysis of your chosen essay.
You must provide examples (specific textual references, paraphrases, and direct quotes) from
the essay to support your claims.
Please note you are NOT agreeing or disagreeing with the author’s argument- ONLY
analyzing it.
1. Read, Analyze, Discuss, & Evaluate a Text
2. Identify Arguments, Strategies, & Structures used in a Text
3. Complete the Entire Writing Process: Invention/Prewriting,
Arrangement/Organization, Drafting/Revision, Editing/Proofreading,
& Final Polished Paper
4. Create a Clear Thesis and Topic Sentences for Body Paragraphs
5. Compose an Essay in MLA Format
50 points possible. The following rubric will be used in grading your essay:
☑ Your paper MUST be typed and in MLA format.
☑ Your DRAFT must be minimum 1000 words, +Works Cited page.
☑ You MUST have at LEAST 3 quotes supporting your thesis. MUST USE ALL
THREE QUOTE INTEGRATION TECHNIQUES (Colon, Comma, & Full
Integration). More quotes are welcome.
☑ Be sure to edit out any lapses in grammar, spelling, word choice, and sentence
structure.
☑ YOUR FINAL ESSAY AND WORK CITED PAGE NEED TO BE UPLOADED
AS A WORD DOCUMENT (not copy/pasted-not a pdf) TO BLACKBOARD AND
RAN THROUGH SAFE-ASSIGN by DUE date at midnight
How to Submit Your Essay to SafeAssignment:
You can only submit a SafeAssignment once.
1. On the course menu, select the link where SafeAssignment is located, “Essay Upload.”
2. On the Essay Upload page, look for the SafeAssignment and click View/Complete.
3. On the Upload SafeAssignment page, optionally, type your comments in the
Comment box.
4. Browse to select a MS Word (not a PDF) file to attach as your submission.
5. Select the Global Reference Database check box to upload your
paper to the Global Reference Database.
6. Click Submit
REMINDERS:
This is not a research paper. You should have one source on your Works Cited
page and that is the essay you select to analyze.
--Your paper needs to be written in third person impersonal (The author claims…).
--NO first person (I, me, we, etc.) or second person (you, yours, etc.).
--No contractions in academic writing (can’t=cannot).
--The essay title should be in quotes (“Shooting an Elephant”).
--Refer to full title of the essay and the author’s full name in your introduction ONCE.
--In the rest of your essay ALWAYS refer to the author’s last name (Orwell asserts…). Note: If
the -author has two last names you need to refer to them by both last names throughout your
essay.
--REVIEW MLA.
George Orwell
Shooting an Elephant
In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been
important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind
of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through
the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target
and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the
referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than
once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I
was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several
thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer
at Europeans.
All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing
and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically — and secretly, of course — I was all for
the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can
perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners
huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of
the men who had been flogged with bamboos — all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could
get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence
that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know
that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck
between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job
impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped
down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the
world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of
imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.
One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me
a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism — the real motives for which despotic
governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the
phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not
know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an
old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem. Various
Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant's doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a
tame one which had gone ‘must’. It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of ‘must’ is
due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it
when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey
away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons
and were quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody's bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruitstalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to
his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violences upon it.
The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had
been seen. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palmleaf, winding all over a
steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the
people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the
case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the
vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in
another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story
was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of ‘Go away, child! Go
away this instant!’ and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a
crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was
something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man's dead body sprawling in the mud.
He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people
said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot
on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a
trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to
one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of
unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked
devilish.) The friction of the great beast's foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon
as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend's house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back
the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and
told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically
the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all
shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he
was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it
would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting
the elephant — I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary — and it is always unnerving to have a crowd
following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing
army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and
beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and
dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the
slightest notice of the crowd's approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean
them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a
serious matter to shoot a working elephant — it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery —
and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant
looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of ‘must’ was already passing off;
in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did
not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn
savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the
least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces
above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be
shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with
the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the
elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me
forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the
hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in
front of the unarmed native crowd — seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet
pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns
tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure
of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the ‘natives’, and so in every
crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot
the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got
to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand
people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing — no, that was impossible. The crowd
would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man's life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.
But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that
preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I
was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always
seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast's owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was
worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had
got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them
how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he
might charge if you went too close to him.
It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and
test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout
came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft
mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much
chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful
yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would
have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn't be frightened in front of ‘natives’; and so, in general, he isn't
frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me
pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was
quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.
There was only one alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim.
The crowd grew very still, and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed
from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with
cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from
ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole, actually
I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward.
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick — one never does when a shot goes home — but I
heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought,
even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell,
but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful
impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time — it might
have been five seconds, I dare say — he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed
to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the
second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs
sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his
whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as
his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward
like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that
seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise
again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side
painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open — I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a
long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I
thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not
even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in
great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got
to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet
powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his
heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking
of a clock.
In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were
bringing dash and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the
afternoon.
Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he
was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed,
like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right,
the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth
more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in
the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others
grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
1936
THE END
BRENT STAPLES
Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space
Brent Staples (b. 1951) earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago and went on to become a journalist. The
following essay originally appeared in Ms. Magazine in 1986, under the title "Just Walk On By." Staples revised it slightly for
publication in Harper's a year later under the present title. The particular occasion for Staples's reflections is an incident that
occurred for the first time in the mid-1970s, when he discovered that his mere presence on the street late at night was enough to
frighten a young white woman. Recalling this incident leads him to reflect on issues of race, gender, and class in the United States.
As you read, think about why Staples chose the new title, "Black Men and Public Space."
My first victim was a woman – white, well dressed, probably in her early twenties. I came upon her
late one evening on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a relatively affluent neighborhood in an otherwise mean,
impoverished section of Chicago. As I swung onto the avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet,
uninflammatory distance between us. Not so. She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man
– a broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a bulky
military jacket – seemed menacingly close. After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up her pace and was
soon running in earnest. Within seconds she disappeared into a cross street.
That was more than a decade ago, I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student newly arrived at the
University of Chicago. It was in the echo of that terrified woman's footfalls that I first began to know the
unwieldy inheritance I'd come into – the ability to alter public space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought
herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking sleep,
not defenseless wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken – let alone hold one
to a person's throat – I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once. Her flight made me feel like an
accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally
seeped into the area from the surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that
a vast, unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians – particularly women – and me. And I soon gathered
that being perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a
corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a foyer somewhere, or make an
errant move after being pulled over by a policeman. Where fear and weapons meet – and they often do in
urban America – there is always the possibility of death.
In that first year, my first away from my hometown, I was to become thoroughly familiar with the
language of fear. At dark, shadowy intersections, I could cross in front of a car stopped at a traffic light and
elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver – black, white, male, or female – hammering down the door locks.
On less traveled streets after dark, I grew accustomed to but never comfortable with people crossing to the
other side of the street rather than pass me. Then there were the standard unpleasantries with policemen,
doormen, bouncers, cabdrivers, and others whose business it is to screen out troublesome individuals before
there is any nastiness.
I moved to New York nearly two years ago and I have remained an avid night walker. In central
Manhattan, the near-constant crowd cover minimizes tense one-on-one street encounters. Elsewhere – in
SoHo, for example, where sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings shut out the sky – things can get
very taut indeed.
After dark, on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live, I often see women who fear the worst
from me. They seem to have set their faces on neutral, and with their purse straps strung across their chests
bandolier-style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves against being tackled. I understand, of course,
that the danger they perceive is not a hallucination. Women are particularly vulnerable to street
violence, and young black males are drastically overrepresented among the perpetrators of that violence. Yet
these truths are no solace against the kind of alienation that comes of being ever the suspect, a fearsome
entity with whom pedestrians avoid making eye contact.
It is not altogether clear to me how I reached the ripe old age of twenty-two without being
conscious of the lethality nighttime pedestrians attributed to me. Perhaps it was because in Chester,
Pennsylvania, the small, angry industrial town where I came of age in the 1960s, I was scarcely noticeable
against a backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and murders. I grew up one of the good boys, had
perhaps a half-dozen fistfights. In retrospect, my shyness of combat has clear sources.
As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried several, too. They were babies,
really – a teenage cousin, a brother of twenty-two, a childhood friend in his mid-twenties – all gone down in
episodes of bravado played out in the streets. I came to doubt the virtues of intimidation early on. I chose,
perhaps unconsciously, to remain a shadow-timid, but a survivor.
The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a perilous flavor. The most
frightening of these confusions occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I worked as a journalist in
Chicago. One day, rushing into the office of a magazine I was writing for with a deadline story in hand, I was
mistaken for a burglar. The office manager called security and, with an ad hoc posse, pursued me through the
labyrinthine halls, nearly to my editor's door. I had no way of proving who I was. I could only move briskly
toward the company of someone who knew me.
Another time I was on assignment for a local paper and killing time before an interview. I entered a
jewelry store on the city's affluent Near North Side. The proprietor excused herself and returned with an
enormous red Doberman pinscher straining at the end of a leash. She stood, the dog extended toward me,
silent to my questions, her eyes bulging nearly out of her head. I took a cursory look around, nodded, and
bade her good night.
Relatively speaking, however, I never fared as badly as another black male journalist. He went to
nearby Waukegan, Illinois, a couple of summers ago to work on a story about a murderer who was born
there. Mistaking the reporter for the killer, police officers hauled him from his car at gunpoint and but for his
press credentials would probably have tried to book him. Such episodes are not uncommon. Black men trade
tales like this all the time.
Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not to do
so would surely have led to madness. I now take precautions to make myself less threatening. I move about
with care, particularly late in the evening. I give a wide berth to nervous people on subway platforms during
the wee hours, particularly when I have exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering a
building behind some people who appear skittish, I may walk by, letting them clear the lobby before I return,
so as not to seem to be following them. I have been calm and extremely congenial on those rare occasions
when I've been pulled over by the police.
And on late-evening constitutionals I employ what has proved to be an excellent tension-reducing
measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers. Even
steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem to relax, and occasionally they even join in
the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections
from Vivaldi's Four Seasons. It is my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in
bear country.
For Discussion and W riting
1. How does Staples describe himself? How is he sometimes seen by others?
2. Staples begins his essay by discussing the effect of his presence on another person. However,
others’ reactions to his presence affect him in return, and he spends much of the essay explaining
the emotional and practical effects he experiences as a consequence of his interactions. How is
the complication and paradox of these situations expressed by the last sentence about Staples’
whistling classical music being the “equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know
they are in bear country” (paragraph 12)?
3. The person with whom you find yourself identifying in a story sometimes depends on your own
identity. With whom did you identify at the start of Staples’ essay, and how did it affect your
reading of the full piece?
Why looks are the last bastion of
discrimination
!
By Deborah L. Rhode
Published: Sunday, May 23, 2010
In the 19th century, many American cities banned public appearances by "unsightly"
individuals. A Chicago ordinance was typical: "Any person who is diseased, maimed,
mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting subject . . . shall
not . . . expose himself to public view, under the penalty of a fine of $1 for each offense."
Although the government is no longer in the business of enforcing such discrimination, it
still allows businesses, schools and other organizations to indulge their own prejudices.
Over the past half-century, the United States has expanded protections against
discrimination to include race, religion, sex, age, disability and, in a growing number of
jurisdictions, sexual orientation. Yet bias based on appearance remains perfectly
permissible in all but one state and six cities and counties. Across the rest of the country,
looks are the last bastion of acceptable bigotry.
We all know that appearance matters, but the price of prejudice can be steeper than we
often assume. In Texas in 1994, an obese woman was rejected for a job as a bus driver
when a company doctor assumed she was not up to the task after watching her, in his
words, "waddling down the hall." He did not perform any agility tests to determine
whether she was, as the company would later claim, unfit to evacuate the bus in the event
of an accident.
In New Jersey in 2005, one of the Borgata Hotel Casino's "Borgata babe" cocktail
waitresses went from a Size 4 to a Size 6 because of a thyroid condition. When the
waitress, whose contract required her to keep an "an hourglass figure" that was "height
and weight appropriate," requested a larger uniform, she was turned down. "Borgata
babes don't go up in size," she was told. (Unless, the waitress noted, they have breast
implants, which the casino happily accommodated with paid medical leave and a bigger
bustier.)
And in California in 2001, Jennifer Portnick, a 240-pound aerobics instructor, was denied
a franchise by Jazzercise, a national fitness chain. Jazzercise explained that its image
demanded instructors who are "fit" and "toned." But Portnick was both: She worked out
six days a week, taught back-to-back classes and had no shortage of willing students.
Such cases are common. In a survey by the National Association to Advance Fat
Acceptance, 62 percent of its overweight female members and 42 percent of its
overweight male members said they had been turned down for a job because of their
weight.
And it isn't just weight that's at issue; it's appearance overall. According to a national poll
by the Employment Law Alliance in 2005, 16 percent of workers reported being victims
of appearance discrimination more generally -- a figure comparable to the percentage
who in other surveys say they have experienced sex or race discrimination.
Conventional wisdom holds that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but most beholders
tend to agree on what is beautiful. A number of researchers have independently found
that, when people are asked to rate an individual's attractiveness, their responses are quite
consistent, even across race, sex, age, class and cultural background. Facial symmetry
and unblemished skin are universally admired. Men get a bump for height, women are
favored if they have hourglass figures, and racial minorities get points for light skin color,
European facial characteristics and conventionally "white" hairstyles.
Yale's Kelly Brownell and Rebecca Puhl and Harvard's Nancy Etcoff have each reviewed
hundreds of studies on the impact of appearance. Etcoff finds that unattractive people are
less likely than their attractive peers to be viewed as intelligent, likable and good.
Brownell and Puhl have documented that overweight individuals consistently suffer
disadvantages at school, at work and beyond.
Among the key findings of a quarter-century's worth of research: Unattractive people are
less likely to be hired and promoted, and they earn lower salaries, even in fields in which
looks have no obvious relationship to professional duties. (In one study, economists Jeff
Biddle and Daniel Hamermesh estimated that for lawyers, such prejudice can translate to
a pay cut of as much as 12 percent.) When researchers ask people to evaluate written
essays, the same material receives lower ratings for ideas, style and creativity when an
accompanying photograph shows a less attractive author. Good-looking professors get
better course evaluations from students; teachers in turn rate good-looking students as
more intelligent.
Not even justice is blind. In studies that simulate legal proceedings, unattractive plaintiffs
receive lower damage awards. And in a study released this month, Stephen Ceci and
Justin Gunnell, two researchers at Cornell University, gave students case studies
involving real criminal defendants and asked them to come to a verdict and a punishment
for each. The students gave unattractive defendants prison sentences that were, on
average, 22 months longer than those they gave to attractive defendants.
Just like racial or gender discrimination, discrimination based on irrelevant physical
characteristics reinforces invidious stereotypes and undermines equal-opportunity
principles based on merit and performance. And when grooming choices come into play,
such bias can also restrict personal freedom.
Consider Nikki Youngblood, a lesbian who in 2001 was denied a photo in her Tampa
high school yearbook because she would not pose in a scoop-necked dress. Youngblood
was "not a rebellious kid," her lawyer explained. "She simply wanted to appear in her
yearbook as herself, not as a fluffed-up stereotype of what school administrators thought
she should look like." Furthermore, many grooming codes sexualize the workplace and
jeopardize employees' health. The weight restrictions at the Borgata, for example,
reportedly contributed to eating disorders among its waitresses.
Appearance-related bias also exacerbates disadvantages based on gender, race, ethnicity,
age, sexual orientation and class. Prevailing beauty standards penalize people who lack
the time and money to invest in their appearance. And weight discrimination, in
particular, imposes special costs on people who live in communities with shortages of
healthy food options and exercise facilities.
So why not simply ban discrimination based on appearance?
Employers often argue that attractiveness is job-related; their workers' appearance, they
say, can affect the company's image and its profitability. In this way, the Borgata blamed
its weight limits on market demands. Customers, according to a spokesperson, like being
served by an attractive waitress. The same assumption presumably motivated the L'Oreal
executive who was sued for sex discrimination in 2003 after allegedly ordering a store
manager to fire a salesperson who was not "hot" enough.
Such practices can violate the law if they disproportionately exclude groups protected by
civil rights statutes -- hence the sex discrimination suit. Abercrombie & Fitch's notorious
efforts to project what it called a "classic American" look led to a race discrimination
settlement on behalf of minority job-seekers who said they were turned down for
positions on the sales floor. But unless the victims of appearance bias belong to groups
already protected by civil rights laws, they have no legal remedy.
As the history of civil rights legislation suggests, customer preferences should not be a
defense for prejudice. During the early civil rights era, employers in the South often
argued that hiring African Americans would be financially ruinous; white customers, they
said, would take their business elsewhere. In rejecting this logic, Congress and the courts
recognized that customer preferences often reflect and reinforce precisely the attitudes
that society is seeking to eliminate. Over the decades, we've seen that the most effective
way of combating prejudice is to deprive people of the option to indulge it.
Similarly, during the 1960s and 1970s, major airlines argued that the male business
travelers who dominated their customer ranks preferred attractive female flight
attendants. According to the airlines, that made sex a bona fide occupational qualification
and exempted them from anti-discrimination requirements. But the courts reasoned that
only if sexual allure were the "essence" of a job should employers be allowed to select
workers on that basis. Since airplanes were not flying bordellos, it was time to start hiring
men.
Opponents of a ban on appearance-based discrimination also warn that it would trivialize
other, more serious forms of bias. After all, if the goal is a level playing field, why draw
the line at looks? "By the time you've finished preventing discrimination against the ugly,
the short, the skinny, the bald, the knobbly-kneed, the flat-chested, and the stupid,"
Andrew Sullivan wrote in the London Sunday Times in 1999, "you're living in a
totalitarian state." Yet intelligence and civility are generally related to job performance in
a way that appearance isn't.
We also have enough experience with prohibitions on appearance discrimination to
challenge opponents' arguments. Already, one state (Michigan) and six local jurisdictions
(the District of Columbia; Howard County, Md.; San Francisco; Santa Cruz, Calif.;
Madison, Wis.; and Urbana, Ill.) have banned such discrimination. Some of these laws
date back to the 1970s and 1980s, while some are more recent; some cover height and
weight only, while others cover looks broadly; but all make exceptions for reasonable
business needs.
Such bans have not produced a barrage of loony litigation or an erosion of support for
civil rights remedies generally. These cities and counties each receive between zero and
nine complaints a year, while the entire state of Michigan totals about 30, with fewer than
one a year ending up in court.
Although the laws are unevenly enforced, they have had a positive effect by publicizing
and remedying the worst abuses. Because Portnick, the aerobics instructor turned away
by Jazzercise, lived in San Francisco, she was able to bring a claim against the company.
After a wave of sympathetic media coverage, Jazzercise changed its policy.
This is not to overstate the power of legal remedies. Given the stigma attached to
unattractiveness, few will want to claim that status in public litigation. And in the vast
majority of cases, the cost of filing suit and the difficulty of proving discrimination are
likely to be prohibitive. But stricter anti-discrimination laws could play a modest role in
advancing healthier and more inclusive ideals of attractiveness. At the very least, such
laws could reflect our principles of equal opportunity and raise our collective
consciousness when we fall short.
Deborah L. Rhode is a Stanford University law professor and the author of "The Beauty
Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law."
The Myth of the
Latin Woman:
/ Just Met a Girl
Named Maria
Judith Ortiz Cofer
On a bus trip to London from Oxford University where I was earning some graduate
credits one summer, a young man, obviously fresh from a pub, spotted me and as
if struck by inspiration went down on his knees in the aisle. With both hands over
his heart he broke into an Irish tenor's rendition of "Maria" from West Side Story.
My politely amused fellow passengers gave his lovely voice the round of gentle
applause it deserved. Though I was not quite as amused, I managed my version of
an English smile: no show of teeth, no extreme contortions of the facial muscles—I
was at this time of my life practicing reserve and cool. Oh, that British control, how
coveted it. But Maria had followed me to London, reminding me of a prime fact
of my life: you can leave the Island, master the English language, and travel as far
las you can, but if you are a Latina, especially one like me who so obviously belongs
to Rita Moreno's gene pool, the Island travels with you.
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Many Voices, Many Lives
This is sometimes a very good thing—it may win you that extra minute of
someone's attention. But with some people, the same things can make you an
island—not so much a tropical paradise as an Alcatraz, a place nobody wants to
visit. As a Puerto Rican girl growing up in the United States and wanting like most
children to "belong," I resented the stereotype that my Hispanic appearance called
forth from many people I met.
Our family lived in a large urban center in New Jersey during the sixties, where
life was designed as a microcosm of my parents' casas on the island. We spoke in
Spanish, we ate Puerto Rican food bought at the bodega, and we practiced strict
Catholicism complete with Saturday confession and Sunday mass at a church
where our parents were accommodated into a one-hour Spanish mass slot, performed by a Chinese priest trained as a missionary for Latin America.
As a girl I was kept under strict surveillance, since virtue and modesty were, by
cultural equation, the same as family honor. As a teenager I was instructed on how
to behave as a proper senorita. But it was a conflicting message girls got, since the
Puerto Rican mothers also encouraged their daughters to look and act like women
and to dress in clothes our Anglo friends and their mothers found too "mature" for
our age. It was, and is, cultural, yet I often felt humiliated when I appeared at an
American friend's party wearing a dress more suitable to a semiformal than to a
playroom birthday celebration. At Puerto Rican festivities, neither the music nor
the colors we wore could be too loud. I still experience a vague sense of letdown
when I'm invited to a "party" and it turns out to be a marathon conversation in
hushed tones rather than a fiesta with salsa, laughter, and dancing—the kind of
celebration I remember from my childhood.
I remember Career Day in our high school, when teachers told us to come
dressed as if for a job interview. It quickly became obvious that to the barrio girls,
"dressing up" sometimes meant wearing ornate jewelry and clothing that would be
more appropriate (by mainstream standards) for the company Christmas party than
as daily office attire. That morning I had agonized in front of my closet, trying to
figure out what a "career girl" would wear because, essentially, except for Mario
Thomas on TV, I had no models on which to base my decision. I knew how to dress
for school: at the Catholic school I attended we all wore uniforms; I knew how to
dress for Sunday mass, and I knew what dresses to wear for parties at my relatives'
homes. Though I do not recall the precise details of my Career Day outfit, it must
have been a composite of the above choices. But I remember a comment my friend
(an Italian-American) made in later years that coalesced my impressions of that day.
She said that at the business school she was attending the Puerto Rican girls always
stood out for wearing "everything at once." She meant, of course, too much jewelry,
too many accessories. On that day at school, we were simply made the negative
models by the nuns who were themselves not credible fashion experts to any of us.
But it was painfully obvious to me that to the others, in their tailored skirts and silk
blouses, we must have seemed "hopeless" and "vulgar." Though I now know that
most adolescents feel out of step much of the time, I also know that for the Puerto
Rican girls of my generation that sense was intensified. The way our teachers and
Cofer/The Myth of the Latin Woman
205
classmates looked at us that day in school was just a taste of the culture clash that
awaited us in the real world, where prospective employers and men on the street
would often misinterpret our tight skirts and jingling bracelets as a come-on.
Mixed cultural signals have perpetuated certain stereotypes—for example, that
of the Hispanic woman as the "Hot Tamale" or sexual firebrand. It is a onedimensional view that the media have found easy to promote. In their special vocabulary, advertisers have designated "sizzling" and "smoldering" as the adjectives of
choice for describing not only the foods but also the women of Latin America.
From conversations in my house I recall hearing about the harassment that Puerto
Rican women endured in factories where the "boss men" talked to them as if sexual
innuendo was all they understood and, worse, often gave them the choice of submitting to advances or being fired.
It is custom, however, not chromosomes, that leads us to choose scarlet over
pale pink. As young girls, we were influenced in our decisions about clothes and
colors by the women—older sisters and mothers who had grown up on a tropical
island where the natural environment was a riot of primary colors, where showing
your skin was one way to keep cool as well as to look sexy. Most important of all,
on the island, women perhaps felt freer to dress and move more provocatively, since,
in most cases, they were protected by the traditions, mores, and laws of a Spanish/
Catholic system of morality and machismo whose main rule was: You may look at
my sister, but if you touch her I will kill you. The extended family and church structure could provide a young woman with a circle of safety in her small pueblo on the
island; if a man "wronged" a girl, everyone would close in to save her family honor.
This is what I have gleaned from my discussions as an adult with older Puerto
Rican women. They have told me about dressing in their best party clothes on Saturday nights and going to the town's plaza to promenade with their girlfriends in
front of the boys they liked. The males were thus given an opportunity to admire
the women and to express their admiration in the form of piropos: erotically charged
street poems they composed on the spot. I have been subjected to a few piropos
while visiting the Island, and they can be outrageous, although custom dictates that
they must never cross into obscenity. This ritual, as I understand it, also entails a
show of studied indifference on the woman's part; if she is "decent," she must not
acknowledge the man's impassioned words. So I do understand how things can be
lost in translation. When a Puerto Rican girl dressed in her idea of what is attractive
meets a man from the mainstream culture who has been trained to react to certain
types of clothing as a sexual signal, a clash is likely to take place. The line I first
heard based on this aspect of the myth happened when the boy who took me to my
first formal dance leaned over to plant a sloppy overeager kiss painfully on my
mouth, and when I didn't respond with sufficient passion said in a resentful tone:
"I thought you Latin girls were supposed to mature early"—my first instance of
being thought of as a fruit or vegetable—I was supposed to ripen, not just grow into
Womanhood like other girls.
It is surprising to some of my professional friends that some people, including
those who should know better, still put others "in their place." Though rarer, these
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Many Voices, Many Lives
incidents are still commonplace in my life. It happened to me most recently during
a stay at a very classy metropolitan hotel favored by young professional couples for
their weddings. Late one evening after the theater, as I walked toward my room with
my new colleague (a woman with whom I was coordinating an arts program), a
middle-aged man in a tuxedo, a young girl in satin and lace on his arm, stepped
directly into our path. With his champagne glass extended toward me, he exclaimed, "Evita!"
Our way blocked, my companion and I listened as the man half-recited,
half-bellowed "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina." When he finished, the young girl
said: "How about a round of applause for my daddy?" We complied, hoping this i
would bring the silly spectacle to a close. I was becoming aware that our little group I
was attracting the attention of the other guests. "Daddy" must have perceived this
too, and he once more barred the way as we tried to walk past him. He began to
shout-sing a ditty to the tune of "La Bamba"—except the lyrics were about a girl
named Maria whose exploits all rhymed with her name and gonorrhea. The girl
kept saying "Oh, Daddy" and looking at me with pleading eyes. She wanted me to
laugh along with the others. My companion and I stood silently waiting for the man
to end his offensive song. When he finished, I looked not at him but at his daughter.
I advised her calmly never to ask her father what he had done in the army. Then
I walked between them and to my room. My friend complimented me on my cool
handling of the situation. I confessed to her that I really had wanted to push the jerk
into the swimming pool. I knew that this same man—probably a corporate executive, well educated, even worldly by most standards—would not have been likely to
regale a white woman with a dirty song in public. He would perhaps have checked
his impulse by assuming that she could be somebody's wife or mother, or at least
somebody who might take offense. But to him, I was just an Evita or a Maria: merely
a character in his cartoon-populated universe.
Because of my education and my proficiency with the English language, I have
acquired many mechanisms for dealing with the anger I experience. This was not
true for my parents, nor is it true for the many Latin women working at menial jobs
who must put up with stereotypes about our ethnic group such as: "They make good
domestics." This is another facet of the myth of the Latin woman in the United
States. Its origin is simple to deduce. Work as domestics, waitressing, and factory
jobs are all that's available to women with little English and few skills. The myth
of the Hispanic menial has been sustained by the same media phenomenon that
made "Mammy" from Gone with the Wind America's idea of the black woman for
generations; Maria, the housemaid or counter girl, is now indelibly etched into the
national psyche. The big and the little screens have presented us with the picture
of the funny Hispanic maid, mispronouncing words and cooking up a spicy storm
in a shiny California kitchen.
This media-engendered image of the Latina in the United States has been documented by feminist Hispanic scholars, who claim that such portrayals are partially
responsible for the denial of opportunities for upward mobility among Latinas in
the professions. I have a Chicana friend working on a Ph.D. in philosophy at a
Cofer/The Myth of the Latin Woman
207
major university. She says her doctor still shakes his head in puzzled amazement at
all the "big words" she uses. Since I do not wear my diplomas around my neck for
all to see, I too have on occasion been sent to that "kitchen," where some think I
obviously belong.
One such incident that has stayed with me, though I recognize it as a minor
offense, happened on the day of my first public poetry reading. It took place in
Miami in a boat-restaurant where we were having lunch before the event. I was
nervous and excited as I walked in with my notebook in my hand. An older woman
motioned me to her table. Thinking (foolish me) that she wanted me to autograph
a copy of my brand new slender volume of verse, I went over. She ordered a cup
of coffee from meA, assuming that I was the waitress. Easy enough to mistake my
poems for menus, I suppose. I know that it wasn't an intentional act of cruelty, yet
of all the good things that happened that day, I remember that scene most clearly,
because it reminded me of what I had to overcome before anyone would take me
seriously. In retrospect I understand that my anger gave my reading fire, that I have
almost always taken doubts in my abilities as a challenge—and that the result is,
most times, a feeling of satisfaction at having won a covert when I see the cold, appraising eyes warm to my words, the body language change, the smile that indicates
that I have opened some avenue for communication. That day I read to that woman
and her lowered eyes told me that she was embarrassed at her little faux pas, and
when I willed her to look up at me, it was my victory, and she graciously allowed me
to punish her with my full attention. We shook hands at the end of the reading, and
I never saw her again. She has probably forgotten the whole thing but maybe not.
Yet I am one of the lucky ones. My parents made it possible for me to acquire
a stronger footing in the mainstream culture by giving me the chance at an education. And books and art have saved me from the harsher forms of ethnic and racial
prejudice that many of my Hispanic companeras have had to endure. I travel a lot
around the United States, reading from my books of poetry and my novel, and the
reception I most often receive is one of positive interest by people who want to
know more about my culture. There are, however, thousands of Latinas without the
privilege of an education or the entree into society that I have. For them life is a
struggle against the misconceptions perpetuated by the myth of the Latina as whore,
domestic, or criminal. We cannot change this by legislating the way people look at
us. The transformation, as I see it, has to occur at a much more individual level. My
personal goal in my public life is to try to replace the old pervasive stereotypes and
myths about Latinas with a much more interesting set of realities. Every time I give
a reading, I hope the stories I tell, the dreams and fears I examine in my work, can
achieve some universal truth which will get my audience past the particulars of my
skin color, my accent, or my clothes.
I once wrote a poem in which I called us Latinas "God's brown daughters." This
poem is really a prayer of sorts, offered upward, but also, through the human-tohuman channel of art, outward. It is a prayer for communication, and for respect.
In it, Latin women pray "in Spanish to an Anglo God/with a Jewish heritage," and
they are "fervently hoping/that if not omnipotent/at least He be bilingual."
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