Speaker
Greg Garrett is a man with a passion for knowledge. In his article, "When Should A Racist Film Be Required Viewing? Right Now," Garrett prioritizes the education of all relevant matters, no matter how offensive they may be.
Occasion
Garrett wrote about the racist, Ku Klux Klan-centered film The Birth of a Nation not just because he had taught his college students about this film in the semester but because he noticed the intense refusal the rest of America feels towards watching it.
Audience
The target audience of Garrett's article is American history teachers and people who protest the viewing of The Birth of a Nation. He intends to convince them to stop avoiding the film.
Purpose
Garrett knows The Birth of a Nation is evil, and he knows everyone else knows it. However, Garrett also knows about the impact the film has made on American history, such as the doubling of the membership size of the NAACP, and he wants people to stop ignoring it because doing so disrupts the full story.
Subject
The article discusses the idea that hearing a story from a different perspective, even if it is a horrific one, can have value in learning. This is expressed by Garrett's interest in the use for knowledge of a 1910s film whose protagonists are Klansmen and whose antagonists are African Americans.
Tone
Greg Garrett's tone throughout the article is the epitome is forthrightness. Even in his title, Garrett does not pause to try to convince people that he is not racist; instead, he writes what he has to write and leaves it up to the audience to believe what they want about him. It comes across clearly that the author's one and only interest is to teach all of history without limitations. The article exhibits a forthright tone when Garrett states, "The Birth of a Nation occupies a strange shadow status in our culture, one of the most important American movies ever made, yet one that is rarely watched and even more rarely discussed." His bold claim about the movie's importance held no hesitation and Garrett spoke without regrets about this curious portion of history.