To who struggle with their voice – Rhetorical Analysis Essay

In a TedTalk (February 2016), Safwat Saleem shares his story of how he grew up with a stutter and a Pakistani accent that he was never proud of. He eventually found life in his voice when he began to use his own for his animated characters. However, he lost his confidence in his voice when negative comments started to rile up on a YouTube video he created. He felt that his voice was not a something normal. But he has eventually come to learn that what is “normal” mostly comes from expectations and to feel normal you have to go against this “normal”. Saleem’s uses of various historical anecdotes gives a logical reasoning to drive this message across people like him who has or is going through this struggle.

“Normal is simply a construction of what we’ve been exposed to.” (8:57) Saleem exemplifies this with a historical anecdote about how many ancient literatures contains very few mentions of color. The popular theory behind this situation is that “cultures begin to recognize a color only once they have the ability to make that color.” (6:02) The analogy that Saleem makes here is that while many different cultures (colors) exist around us, we are unable to see it until exposed to it (making the color). Saleem’s reasoning here is that people have not been exposed to his accent, his voice and so people find it odd and not normal for them. This exposure to different culture is still lacking in United States, a country with half of its population from a minority background. Saleem’s gives a statistic, “that in 2014, only about 11 percent of the books had a character of color. And just the year before, that number was about eight percent, even though half of American children today come from a minority background.” (8:06) The issue that Saleem’s brings up is first, people in the majority don’t realize that they are similar to minorities at a young. And second, the stories that these minority children consume do not have characters like them. It can be concluded by the audience that Saleem and themselves felt their voices were not “normal” simply because they were not exposed to it growing up. That is to say that your voice is normal, it is just that people have not been exposed to this normal.

What we have and have not been exposed can affect how we view discrimination. Saleem gives various example of issues such as, “resumes with white-sounding names get more callbacks than resumes with black-sounding names” or “when a female or minority student does not succeed.” He repeats the same reasoning that this happens is because “we think it’s normal.” Saleem also mentions that studies show that discriminations of these kind are mostly a result of favoritism to people who you relate to as opposed to intent harm. With this, he comes to an informed opinion that not relating to people starts an early age. He supports that with statistical data of character of color in children’s book as mentioned earlier. Saleem poses a question to his audience that he accept this pre-existing notion of this narrow definition “normal” or challenge. Saleem decides to challenges this “normal” with his work, his voice, his, accent, and by being at the TedTalk. He makes an analogy that just as ancient civilization took centuries to realize the colors around them, it will take us the time to define a new norm.

Safwat Saleem manages to define “normal” means and overcome when he struggled to be “normal”. To make his audience understand an abstract meaning of “normal” in society, he uses historical anecdotes to familiarize how a “normal” comes to exist. To explain why did not feel normal, he gave statical data of how his voice was not normalize for him to feel normal. In conclusion Saleem decides to the current notion of “normal” in order for society to see what is.