Analysis Blog #2

In “Race by the Numbers,” Orlando Patterson supports his claim with statistics, history and political analysis. All these three evidences are persuasive and give him a high level of credibility but I think it also depends on the audience that reads him. Statistics are more credited to those who follow their lives and beliefs by numbers and rates, but sometimes mathematics is almost helpless when the information collected from surveys or the census, in this case, is misused or the facts are not straight enough. History is a very accurate source of evidence. It is limited and has no changes. It is objective in a sense that it can’t be based on personal interpretations or assumptions; it’s just what literally happened in the past. The political analysis is probably the most likely to be challenged because it consists of a series of personal subjective conclusions. It’s based on people’s beliefs and self-experience not on written texts impossible to be changed. This kind of support that Patterson uses can also become biased and fall on persuasive fallacies because it uses a lot of self opinion and sometimes prejudiced language.

Eric Zorn states in his article “Family a Symbol of Love and Life, but Not Politics” that we need to take family back. What this means is to stop looking at the family structure as monopolizing viewpoints have come to define it and pretend to have everybody believing in one specific conservative form of family. The word “family” has a special resonance in all of us and to have family and represent family for others is what being wholly human is. No matter what kind of situation a person is in, if it’s a single-parent household, an homosexual relationship with adopted children, grandparents raising grandsons as their own children, heterosexual couples with natural biological families, older siblings helping the young ones to succeed and providing for them, etc, family is always something subjective. People need to take back the meaning of family, what they individually think it is, or how they personally want to define it.