Rhetorical Analysis Audre Lorde The Fourth of July

Audre Lorde’s “The Fourth of July”: A Rhetorical Analysis Audre Lorde’s experiences as a young girl traveling by train to Washington, D.C., a symbol of whiteness, and her first realization of the fact of racism and segregation in the Jim Crow era serve as the subject of her personal narrative.

Lorde sets up the essay by identifying her innocence as a child and puts the reader into the shoes of the child—the girl she was in 1947—with the first line: “The first time I went to Washington, D.C., was on the edge of the summer when I was supposed to stop being a child.” By indirectly indicating her age (she tells the reader she had just graduate the 8th grade in the next line), Lorde reveals the perspective from which the essay will be told.

This has the effect of disarming the reader of prejudices or preconceived notions—for children have none of these: their eyes and ears are open with curiosity and wonder. They want to know the world. The trouble for Lorde was that, at that age—having been protected from racism by attending a Catholic school in which she was the only non-white—she had no idea that segregation existed in society.

Her trip to D.C.—the nation’s capital—on the nation’s day of birth opened her eyes to the reality of Jim Crow. As a result, the essay is filled with a righteous kind of anger that only a child could express.

But Lorde does shout her anger: she reveals the frustrations first—the revelations of racism and the ways her parents tried to protect her from it; and, finally, when the protection is lost and the fact of racism is fully revealed to her and the reader, the righteous indignation towards all the “white” emblems of bigotry in American society feels justified. This type of experiential rhetoric makes the reader feel the message directly (Sowell, Bundy).

The first revelation comes on the train ride when Lorde states that she wants to eat in the diner car because it is something she has never done before. Her mother runs through a list of reasons for why she doesn’t want to do that—none of which have a thing to do with the fact that blacks were not permitted to sit and eat in the diner car at that time.

Lorde shows her mother discussing the uncleanliness of the hands of the people handling the food. In a sense, this is true: their hands are not clean because on them is the hate of racism. But Lorde rejects her mother’s excuses as being only half-true: her mother does not refer to the racist laws that prevented them from eating like equals in the car. The second revelation is the fact that they are going to D.C.

in order to make up for Lorde’s older sister being told she could not go with her class because the class would be staying in a hotel where blacks were not permitted. This rouses the anger of the father who promises that he will take everyone to D.C.—but still the issue is not discussed. Lorde emphasizes the need to talk about this issue by showing how stifling life is when it is not discussed.

The third revelation blows the lid off the little girl’s mind: she and her family tour D.C. and stop to get ice cream. But they are told they may not sit at the counter and eat. Her parents are upset because they feel they should have known better.

They are embarrassed—but Lorde herself is angry: she finally realizes what it is her parents have been trying to hide from her—the fact that she lives in a racist society that has one set of privileges for whites that blacks are not permitted to enjoy. She is angry about the ignorance that has been forced on her but also about the country that she has spent so much time applauding in school for its equality when in reality there.