Attitudinal Analysis Of Feature Writing Of Racist Shooting Case In America

A Most American Terrorist:The Making of Dylann Roof is a featuring writing news written by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah.It describes the growing of Dylann Roof,who killed nine African-Americans in a church in South Carolina and became the first person sentenced to die for a federal hate crime in the entire history of the United States of America.It awarded Feature Writing Prize of the 102~ndd Pulitzer Prizes and the Feature Writing of the 53~rdd National Magazine Awards in the year of 2018.Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah,as an African-American reporter,spent months in South Carolina speaking with Dylann Roof's parents,friends,former teachers,and the victims'family members before completing this news and searching for an answer to what went into creating one of the coldest killers of our time.With the use of UAM Corpus Tool,this thesis analyzes the feature writing news,A Most American Terrorist:The Making of Dylann Roof,from the perspective of Appraisal Theory.It studies the usage and distribution of Attitude resources and the writer's stance to Dylann Roof's crime and reveals how the writer express her attitude through the usage of Appraisal resources.The results show that the usage of Affect,Judgment and Appreciation resources does not differ a lot.In terms of Affect,un/happiness resources are used most to describe the misery of the survivors and victims'families and their antipathy against the crime and the killer.Among Judgment resources,Capacity and Propriety resources are adopted most.Quality resources are the most of Appreciation.Capacity resources are used to build the image of Dylann Roof,while the Propriety resources and Quality resources are to make negative comments to Dylann Roof and the crime he committed.Negative resources occupy almost three quarters of all the Attitude resources used by the writer.From the analysis of Appraisal resources,it is apparent that the African-Americans represented by the writer consider that the killer,Dylann Roof is cruel,cold-blood,and driven by hatred.They show great sympathy to the grief of the victims,survivors and their families.In their opinion,the causes Dylann Roof's case include the spread of white-supremacist on the internet,the tolerance of racist insults to African-Americans in South Carolina,inappropriate speech of President Donald Trump about racism and the rage lay in Dylann Roof's unique psychopathology.Furthermore,the racism in South Carolina is constructed by the local history of plantation and slavery,the inferior and alienated feeling of poor white working-class and the tolerance of racist insults to African-Americans.This news also reflects the racist speech and policies of the American President,Donald Trump.The racists and white-supremacists regard Trump as a representative of their group since he often promulgates messages with racist cues and then denies them on the campaign trial.The white nationalist community dutifully perks up and sees those messages as a call to arms.On a white-supremacist website,there are frequented messages saying that Trump had willingly retweeted the name to raise the awareness of white people's plight and to help propagate it.Obviously,Trump's speech and policies about not only African-Americans,but also Mexican ethnicity,immigration and Muslims were all related to racial issues and made the division even more serious.