Self-Assessment Essay

I wrote two essays for this class this semester, on top of producing a meme and a rhetorical analysis of that meme. There is one thing that connects all of these pieces of work to each other and that is the idea of race, whether it’s the n-word, gentrification, or hip-hop, race had something to do with all of these pieces of work. Middle school is where I would see the effects of all three of these topics, it is also where I would begin my fascination with Malcolm X the man whose boulevard I grew up on. Would see how many of my friend’s personalities would be defined by the music they listened to, this was at an age where we were all far more impressionable than we are now, so music had a much larger influence on us than it possibly could now that our brains are becoming less and less impressionable. I was into artists like Big L, MF Doom, Capital Steez and Kendrick Lamar. I would tell one of my friends about Big L and Capital Steez and he who was an Eminem fan would become infatuated with these artists, and this style of hip-hop known as boom bap. He eventually would become a rap artist himself and the other day he took a flight to california to perform at Shade 45. The music he listened to changed the way he dressed, spoke and expressed himself overall. My other friends would listen to artists like Lil Yachty, Playboi Carti, G Herbo, Chief Keef, and 69(which we all listened to heavily at the time). This could’ve been part of the reason many from my school would try things like smoking weed, taking benadryl or making fake cough syrup to imitate lean that rappers commonly drank in fact Playboi Carti would famously rap “Sippin wok make my heart stop”(Playboi Carti, (unreleased track), around 2016) wok is another word for lean. Two of the artists I mentioned were drill rappers, and the ones who listened to those rappers were more likely to join gangs, get arrested and commit crimes like robbery. Music shaped the way all of us viewed the world and the ways in which we all acted, so it’s safe to say that the more negative music our youth are exposed to, the more negative their actions will become. The most violent music that we were listening to back then was coming from 69, a person who has lost respect in the eyes of the youth, so his influence has been to a degree cut off. The drill music that we were exposed to back then however is much different from the drill music we are exposed to now, back then it was about struggle and having a good time, with occasional mentions of enemies. The only notable New York drill artist other than 69 was Bobby Shmurda, and he would get locked up before we would get to middle school but the point is that there weren’t many New York drill rappers. Today there are thousands upon thousands of New York drill rappers, multiple of them went to the same school as me, and they are all younger than me. My grade was more influenced by the struggle rap and the lit rap, but this generation being younger were more impacted by the likes of people like 69, so while there is not a single drill rapper from my school in my grade, there are about four from the grade below me. My grade was more laid back and the ones who were involved in street activities never took it to music, but the grade below me had people who were pure athletes when I met them gravitate towards a different path in life. Now that we have seen the difference between one grade, imagine what the younger generations will look like. New york drill rap is now the most popular form in the world, so the youth from New York will be most affected. During this same time in middle school my family had an incident where the white lady who lived above me came down to knock on our door and tell my mother that we were being to loud, I can’t remember her exact words but she decided to insult my whole family as if she was the one who had been living here since the building was built. I would also see the effects of race when a group of kids who grew up two blocks away from me, decided to rob a white girl from columbia university at night, one of them panicked and stabbed the girl in her torso leaving her dead. This case got international coverage, from BBC to CNN, however multiple other people had been killed in Harlem that same day. The park where this happened would be closed off for weeks and we would see a rise in police activity, as well as undercover cops. This is the significance of the three pieces of work I produced and how they connect.

In my phase 1 essay entitled “Neega Heega” I would write “I was later told that Bogdan’s father was concerned about bringing him to the middle school he and I attended because of it being majority black and hispanic”. I think that this perfectly relays the core of the issue being discussed in this essay and that issue is race and cultural background. He was raised by a father who had certain biased towards people of color so that would have rubbed off on his son in some type of way, I was raised by a mother who took my to East Harlem to pay respects to Martin Luther King every year on Martin Luther King day, as well as West Indian Carnivals in Brooklyn and African Day parades in the same borough. These are two drastically separate backgrounds, however we got along very well, until the issue of race was brought up. This shows that despite our differences, many of us can get along perfectly fine, and have normal conversation because we are all human, however it also shows that the issue of race can drastically affect the way we interact with each other. I think the best way I conveyed my emotions in this essay is when I stated “Before the exam started I had the urge to use the bathroom so I left the room and walked down the main hall to the bathroom. The bathroom reeked of piss and since this school was a very old facility so was the restroom, it was much smaller than the girls bathroom so there was often a line outside of it. When I got there Bogdan was in the stall so I went to the smelly urinal”(Philip Bannerman, Neega Heega, 2022). This takes the reader through, smell, the environment the main event happened in, my urge while in the testing room and context to how the whole building looked. I feel I did a good job with the essay overall, however I could have made it more universal.

In my phase two meme, I used a simile to compare the relationship between “an unfaithful boyfriend and his love interests, and a landlord and his potential renters”(Philip Bannerman, Phase 2 Cover Letter, 2022). As explained in my first paragraph and my cover letter, gentrification is an issue that affects many inner city residents. I feel that the meme I used was appropriate because in many cases I can assume that the original renter feels betrayed when their landlord decides to raise the price to an unrealistic point that only a person coming from another neighborhood can afford.

In my phase 3 essay I used many pieces of evidence to connect 4 different times in hip hop. I defined these eras in my cover letter by saying “80s were all conscious to a degree, the groups from the 90s were gritty, the groups from the 2000’s were fashion forward and the groups from the 2010s were more violent”(Philip Bannerman, Kill Culture, 2022). I focused on particular rap collectives and individuals to make my point. I also sourced songs, interviews, books  and articles to add to my overall point.

I think I managed to check off most of the boxes on the list of skills I was supposed to develop this semester. I edited, drafted and revised during this class. I identified rhetorical strategies with the correct terminology, I used digital technology, located many sources and put them in MLA format. I feel I gained from this class and I intend to apply these skills to my next class.

Part 1

Your goal is not to critique or evaluate the text(s) or strategies. Instead, your task is to briefly review and reflect on the rhetorical situation. That is, your task is to introduce the text in which you have observed an interesting rhetorical strategy ~50 words); name and describe the rhetorical strategy you found of interest (~100 words); and explain what you found interesting about the rhetorical strategy (~100 words). As you explain what you found interesting, discuss what you suspect the author was trying to accomplish with this strategy. What was the purpose? Who is the intended audience and how did the author attempt to appeal to them? How might have the text/genre or context influenced the author’s choices?

Langston Hughes – Them For English B

Langston Hughes in this poem is illustrating the relationship between black and white Americans from the perspective of a college student living in Harlem New York. He questions if the page that he writes will be colored much like him, which I think is a reference to the feeling that as a black person you cannot escape the perception others have on you consequently.

I think this poem is mostly based on Pathos because the character Langston is portraying is questioning himself and the way in which the color of his skin forever impacts the path of his life. This poem also deals with Logos one example of this is when he states that sometimes blacks and whites get frustrated with coexistence, but in the same respect they learn from each other and therefore they are apart of each other. 

What I found interesting about Langston Hughes rhetorical strategies of classification and a narration, is that with them he created the illustration of a yin and Yang relationship between black and white Americans. First he shows the reader where he’s coming from and then shows where he fits within this relationship. I think the author was attempting to humanize the common experience shared by many black people. I think the intended audience was black and white New Yorkers and he appealed to this demographic by mentioning geographical details within New York in order to make the reader feel as if they were there themselves. The genre of poetry most likely made Langston Hughes want to touch the reader more personally.

Amy Tan wrote a story about the language barrier that her mother had when speaking English, and this is a story that is relatable to many with foriegn parents. Both of my parents were born abroad, my father in Ghana and my mother in England. My mother has been in America since she was 17 so her accent has faded, but my father’s accent is more notable. I can relate to when Tan said she sometimes felt embarrassed of her parents’ accents but for me it was the opposite, as a kid I thought it was cool that my mother was British because it made me different for everyone around me. My mother can probably relate to Tan’s mother in many ways but one way concerning treatment is that my mother was standing on the train and no one would offer her a seat even though she was pregnant with me at the time. This is most likely because she was a black women which can be a limitation in America, this is similar to how Tan’s mom was treated with less respect while awaiting results for her CAT scan. Another way I can relate is by being a black person, as a kid I would sometimes be treated with less respect due to my house not being as nice as my white friends or just being black in general. One time a white kid came over to my house and told his father “Philip is poor” after seeing the popcorn ceilings and wooden cabinets.

Amy Tan wrote a story about the language barrier that her mother had when speaking English, and this is a story that is relatable to many with foriegn parents. Both of my parents were born abroad, my father in Ghana and my mother in England. My mother has been in America since she was 17 so her accent has faded, but my father’s accent is more notable. I can relate to when Tan said she sometimes felt embarrassed of her parents’ accents but for me it was the opposite, as a kid I thought it was cool that my mother was British because it made me different for everyone around me. My mother can probably relate to Tan’s mother in many ways but one way concerning treatment is that my mother was standing on the train and no one would offer her a seat even though she was pregnant with me at the time. This is most likely because she was a black women which can be a limitation in America, this is similar to how Tan’s mom was treated with less respect while awaiting results for her CAT scan. Another way I can relate is by being a black person, as a kid I would sometimes be treated with less respect due to my house not being as nice as my white friends or just being black in general. One time a white kid came over to my house and told his father “Philip is poor” after seeing the popcorn ceilings and wooden cabinets.

Phase 1 Cover Letter 

In this essay I talk about the experience I had with a white kid saying the n word around me in middle school. I go through the lead up to the story in depth, while giving background on the person who said it. I then speak on the incident and explain all the emotions going through my head which is something I was told to do in the feedback that I was given. I also spoke on the aftermath of the event by detailing the repercussions I was supposed to face as well as the reaction my mother had and my peers. I think I did a good job of illustrating how I felt throughout this process which led up to me slapping this kid, and I also gave the reader an idea of how the environment was like. I think I could have done a better job at making the essay universal, this was a big miss because it could have brought a whole new dynamic to the essay. I would have been able to bring in statistics as well as detailing the tensions between white and black people. I also would have spoken on the history of Ukraine where he is from, and tied it to the war that is going on now, where it has been reported that black people were being denied the ability to exit the country and board trains. This shows that racism is still a big issue in Ukraine today and I vividly remember my mother telling me about how there are a lot of bigotted people from Ukraine, this explains why Bogdan’s father didn’t want to bring his son to the middle school that I went to as he was concerned about the amount of black people there were at this school, something I was told by the counselor of the school as well as the deane. I think making this essay a universal one, it would have been more relatable for readers, while also adding a great amount of significance to the story. This would have helped make this story a more memorable event. It can be beneficial to have conversations like this as it can help bridge a gap between different ethnic groups, by adding a perspective that may be understandable to some. 

Overall I think I did a good job of detailing the main characters of this story one of them being me, and I think that it shows how words can have a heavy weight in a social setting when used by certain people.

Philip Bannerman, 9/13/22

Neega Heega

I was In the 8th grade in middle school and I had made a friend in my English class. His name was Bogdan, he was a short Ukrainian kid with glasses and braces. Me and Bogdan would joke around a lot in class and have discussions. I could tell by the way he spoke about certain situations that he was a conservative, he had a couple opinions that in today’s world are widely considered controversial. Bogdan was against the feminist movement and said that “All these feminists these days do nothing but complain, go to a third world country and see what it’s like”, I replied by saying “But women these days still go through a lot with things like discrimination in the workplace and sexual assault”. Bogdan wouldn’t buy this because he was firm on his beliefs. One of the more controversial opinions he had was on the holocaust, I can’t remember the specifics on where he stood on that topic but it would most definitely offend most Jewish people. 

Not that it’s okay but these opinions he had weren’t personal to me as a black male, but that changed at the beginning of one of our English classes. We were talking and I used to N word, and since he thought the way I said it was funny he decided to repeat after me. He faintly said it so I slapped him on the back of the neck and told him not to say that around me, from then on we were cordial, about three days later was the day of the math state exam. Before the exam started I had the urge to use the bathroom so I left the room and walked down the main hall to the bathroom. The bathroom reeked of piss and since this school was a very old facility so was the restroom, it was much smaller than the girls bathroom so there was often a line outside of it. When I got there Bogdan was in the stall so I went to the smelly urinal, while I was urinating I heard Bogdan talking to the people hanging out in the bathroom most of which were my friends, and for some reason he decided to play with the N word again, by saying Neega heega repeatedly(Neega Heega is a YouTuber). At this moment I felt disrespected so I said “say that again” he did and so I approached the stall and slapped him in the face two times as he said “but Philip I thought you were my friend” I then left the bathroom, when I got back my friend came to the room and told the people at my table that I had quote “slapped the shit out of Bogdan” we laughed about it, but the laughing stopped when the principle came to the room and asked me to talk to him in the hallway, all the satisfaction I had felt from slapping him was gone now that I was in trouble for it. The principle informed me that Bogdan had told him what happened and he reminded me that the school had a zero tolerance policy for violence meaning that I would be suspended for however long, he sent me back to my room and I then completed the math state exam. 

This was bad for me because it was the third time in the eighth grade that I had gotten in trouble in school, I was usually a good kid loved by his teachers but this year I wasn’t on my best behavior. The next day my name was announced on the speaker and I was told to come to the duene’s office, when I got there he told me to sit down. My mother was called and I was told I would have to do my work separate from the school for about a week but the time period was still to be determined. My mom was surprised to get this call and she was upset that I didn’t tell her about the incident so that she could be better prepared to talk to the duene when he called. She wasn’t upset that I slapped Bogdan because she felt he deserved it. My friends were also behind me when it came to this issue and they had no issue with my action, to this day they joke with me about that day by saying “Philip I thought you were my friend”(That’s the main reason I remember that quote so well).

I was later told that Bogdan’s father was concerned about bringing him to the middle school him and I attended because of it being majority black and hispanic. I stopped talking to Bogdan after the incident but at prom me and him had a cordial conversation and that was that. I never ended up getting suspended most likely because it was the end of the year and Bogdan wouldn’t face any punishment which my mother had an issue with since they were going to suspend me for about a week. From this incident I learned not to use any act of violence at school as it will be taken seriously, in the moment I wasn’t thinking about the consequences at all, I was acting purely off of emotion. Me as of now is less likely to handle the situation the way I did, violence is a last resort to get your point across.

Phase 2 Cover Letter 

This meme was a simple one about how landlords treat renters in gentrified neighborhoods. Gentrification is an issue that the black community has been struggling with more and more over the years. We used to occupy places like Seneca Village and SoHo, places that are inhabited by the super wealthy today. Red Lining is something that has caused many ghettos to be created including the neighborhood I grew up in, in fact my exact location was within the red line as well as the rest of Harlem New York. Taxi drivers wouldn’t even drive past 110th street because they considered it too dangerous, so black people from Harlem would actually sometimes have to ride in limousines, just to get to work. But as time progressed the neighborhood would begin to change, and as more white people arrived, Harlem became more commercialized, all of a sudden stores like Whole Foods and Shake Shack which had no locations uptown would move into Harlem. This is the significance of the meme, I think I did a good job of basically illustrating the mindset certain landlords have when they see renters who have  a more stable income and are more likely to pay on time. I think I could have spoken about in part three more on how gentrification has not only affected me but how it has affected the people around me by giving examples and or potential scenarios. I think the classification of the meme as a simile was correct, and I think that it fit the task at hand quite well, in terms of the dynamic between an unfaithful boyfriend and his love interests, being comparable to a landlord and his potential renters. I feel like I could have taken Maggie’s suggestion to specify what each person in the meme represented, but I feel that it was more digestible to just say black, white and landlord anyone would understand that point pretty easily. 

I think the issue of gentrification will continue to push black people into worse conditions as time goes on. However the bright side is that there are already black people taking advantage of this by buying land in lower income neighborhoods before they become gentrified and bringing in huge profits, when a big company decides to purchase the land and build properties on it. I feel one of the best ways to combat gentrification would be for the people who were in that neighborhood before gentrification to buy up the cheapest property around and keep it and pass it down to their children, until there is a point the community owns the neighborhood it lives in.

My part 2 was about how property landlords can be biased in favor of white renters as opposed to the black renters who occupy their property. This relates to me as it has a lot to do with gentrification, which is something my neighborhood has a lot of, and I have seen how this has affected other neighborhoods as well like the south Bronx. As time continues to progress gentrification is becoming more and more pronounced, and this has everything to do with location as this process happens in inner city neighborhoods. As the world sees this phenomenon take place its influence is spread. A place that I would be able to publish this meme would be on a conscious meme page most likely on Instagram. The intended audience for this meme would be residents of inner city neighborhoods in order to make them more aware of the situation at hand, as well as landlords in order to make them conscious of this bias that they may or may not have. The purpose of this meme was to show what gentrification looks like visually.

One rhetorical strategy I used is the overall simile that the me is, it is comparing the dynamic between an unfaithful boyfriend and his love interests, and a landlord and his potential renters.

Phase 3 Cover Letter(Kill Culture)

In this essay I spoke on the evolution of hip hop and its effect on inner city communities all over the world.I took the reader from the origin of Hip-Hop in the 80s all the way to the present day, giving the reader background as well as full updated context on the topic at hand. The feedback I was given was to add quotes, and talk about why music has become more negative and why, as well as specifying that lean is made in The US and a couple of more critiques were made. I made sure to add a couple more quotes, including one from NBA Youngboy from his song “I Hate Youngboy”, and in my conclusion I made sure to talk about why music has become more negative over the years. In this essay I educated the reader on slang terms used in hip-hop culture as well as the differences between each era by highlighting important individuals from each decade to show as evidence for how the genre has changed. From groups like Run DMC and Public Enemy, Beastie Boys to groups like Mobb Deep and Wu-Tang Clan, to the Neptunes and Roc Nation, to O block and 4KT. The groups I mentioned from the 80s were all conscious to a degree, the groups from the 90s were gritty, the groups from the 2000’s were fashion forward and the groups from the 2010s were more violent. This is the overall best way to differentiate each decade of hip-hop up to now in my personal opinion. The sad part is that it looks like this next generation will be defined the same way as the 2010s, which shows a lack of diversity in the trajectory of a genre that can have detrimental effects on the youth. I also go into to many different statistical pieces of evidence that show there has been a rise in crime in the last couple of years, during the same time drill has only gotten bigger and more spread out. I also spoke on the fact that this isn’t just an American issue but it is a world issue as we are now seeing kids from London to Ghana to Ireland all attach themselves to drill music. 

I think I did a good job at providing information about this topic, as well as breaking down each era of this genre and distinguishing them. I also used quotes from a variety of sources including interviews, songs and articles. I feel I could have done better by predicting what the future holds in a more full manner as well as showing an opposing argument, and the good side of this era of hip hop.