TOW #15 – “How MLK can get you out of your ‘Trump Slump’” by John Blake

             starts with identification. Blake targets his audience with an opening consisting of a question in order to pull in those he aims to reassure with his article. By asking if his audience is currently enduring one or more of the three distinct issues provided, he narrows down and essentially announces who the writing is for before even going into the article itself. He determines that target audience to being going through a ‘Trump Slump’, an essentially despondent and long-lasting phase caused as a result of the election, and his work is attempting to become a means to get the audience out of it through the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.

Blake breaks down his article into three parts: MLK’s true objective, his resilience, and his action. He reminds his audience that Trump is neither our future nor is he the worst event to occur in history. He reminds his audience that Trump supporters should not all be dubbed as racists, and to disassociate from them would be dishonoring the spirit of King. He reminds his audience that MLK never gave in to the disasters, and there were quite a lot of them, and so we should not give in either.

His use of the word “dishonoring” is what initially sticks out to me in the introduction. As a person of color and someone who is indeed going through what was labelled to be a ‘Trump Slump’, disconnecting myself from any and all people who happen to support Trump at all, I was almost surprised to receive that sort of response to my behavior. This is how it most likely was for others in my similar state of mind, and it prompts the reader to keep reading to figure out what we are doing wrong with what seemed to be the logical course of action.

Blake builds his credibility through his comparisons to historical events, exposing the parts that occurred behind the scenes of the victories of MLK, the parts that included the defeats and disasters of the Civil Rights Movement as well as MLK’s true personality as one for African Americans as well as poor white workers. He takes the extent of just how terrible Trump’s presidency should seem to us and puts it into perspective using the past, reminding us of how people have gotten through tough times before through sheer willpower, and his argument is only backed up by outside support. Rev. William Barber, a leader of Moral Mondays which is a movement inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., also agreed with Blake’s reassuring argument. "It's not worse than slavery, Jim Crow. It's not the first time that America has elected a racist president in terms of policy. Trump's election is as American as apple pie," Barber had said in response to hearing Trump’s election to be the worst thing in history. The logical reasoning and expert testimony overall helped to convince and thus calm some of my nerves over Trump’s soon-to-be presidency.