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...…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 is no such thing. The essay ends with Lorde deriding the hypocrisy of “white” America and describing her feeling of disgust for everything in D.C. from that point on. In this manner she passes on her disgust to the reader, who, having experienced the trauma through the eyes of a little girl, understands exactly where Lorde is coming from. This is how Lorde rhetorically conveys the problem of racism to her audience.

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