I chose this social media post to highlight a public figure’s honest review on the Black Lives Matter movement. Sometimes you can differentiate between a public figure’s view on this topic by what they post on social media and the caption they use. You ask yourself questions like: Is this to show concern? Do they actually care? Are they just posting a black screen? Was this a management move? I, therefore, wanted to analyze Harry Styles’s post on the matter. 

Harry Styles is a part of one of the most influential boy bands in the world, One Direction. He has his own solo platform and had multiple songs stay high in the charts according to Billboard Music, including his hit song “Watermelon Sugar”. Being the huge star that he is, he has quite the fanbase and followers who admire him; thus, him having 31.6 million followers on Instagram and 35.4 million followers on Twitter. With a movement like Black Lives Matter, what many black people would like is for someone of such a popular following to acknowledge what is going on and support the cause. 

With Harry Styles’s Instagram post, he used appeals such as logos, pathos, and ethos. The purpose of this post, I believe, was not to only show he supports the cause, but to educate his followers that do not know the true purpose of Black Lives Matter. He starts off his post saying how he does everything without fear because he has white privilege. When he starts off acknowledging what he has, it made the post more comforting. He knows that he is privileged and he owns up to it. This goes to him using logos as an appeal because he is stating facts about himself: he is a white man from the U.K. The entirety of the post revolves around the appeal of pathos. However, the ending of the post is what really appeals to emotions. He strategically put the following in all caps: “LISTEN, READ, SHARE, DONATE and VOTE. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. BLACK LIVES MATTER.” He puts emphasis on how important educating yourself is, how the situation has got completely out of hand, and ends with the strong statement of Back Lives Matter. Also, what I have noticed is when he talks about educating yourself, he uses a commanding tone almost like a requirement. He applies ethos and his credibility simply using his platform. He knows he has a lot of followers and he uses that to his advantage.  

1. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and toxic stresses are traumas children endure and suffer through even into adulthood. I compare it to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Examples could be: physical, mental, verbal, or emotional abuse, the loss of a parent, a car accident, a bully, racism.

2. Adversities like poverty, racism, and violence could impact a child’s development mentally. They could grow up thinking that it is all they deserve, and start to settle into those adversities. Meaning that if a child grows up in poverty, all they are going to acquire is poverty life, and start to think they cannot go further than poverty life.

3. ACEs can affect literacy because the trauma children endure can affect their academic performance in school. Since ACEs heavily impact a child’s life, they can affect brain development like I said before. Studies show that children who endure these traumas has a poor performance in school. Violence can extremely affect the academic development and performance in a child, because all the child knows and think of is the abuse they receive.

1. Her passion for children’s health is what I believed heavily impacted the Flint community. The lead in the water could have effected the children of Flint’s cognitive and behavioral problems. She had to go and find undeniable proof, proof that even the government cannot brush aside or call it a hoax, to get Flint to get back to receiving clean and healthy water.

2. What I make people aware of  is African American people in the health system. I do not just mean how they are treated differently when it comes to medical attention, but the diseases they have compared to others. For example, my mother has sickle cell anemia; it is actually nicknamed the “brown skin disease” because only people of color can get this chronic illness. Just from what I have witnessed myself being in the hospital with my mom, if you put a sickle cell patient and a flu patient on the same floor, doctors and nurses would give the flu patient whatever medication they need, but with a sickle cell patient, they would reduce the amount of pain medications for them, and if they ask for more, they are considered drug seeking. I just think it is important that people, especially people of color, can see the difference of treatment between patients. Most people do not know that sickle cell month is actually in September. Why? People are not aware about sickle cell anemia the way they should be.

3. What I can do is do my part. I always take care of the Earth any way that I can when it comes to the environment. I pick up after myself, pick up an trash that I see on the ground, and with my church, once a week throughout the entire summer, we go around with our sticks, gloves, and trash bags and find any thing trash related on the ground in our area and pick it up to either put in the trash or recycle.