Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man: Ethos 1 key example

As promised, the narrator provides four examples of Black American's "originality and artistic conception:" the cake-walk, Uncle Remus stories, Jubilee songs, and ragtime. The examples themselves function as logos because the narrator is providing evidence readers may not have considered to make his point. All of these elements of Black culture have been, to varying degrees, appropriated into "mainstream" culture. That is to say, they have been consumed (especially by white people) without acknowledgment that they come from Black creators. In fact, they were all woven into minstrel performances, in which white performers caricatured Black people and their culture for a profit. The narrator reclaims these art forms as examples of Black ingenuity.

His defense of Black artistry also functions as ethos. Politicians and academics who opposed the extension of civil rights and voting rights to Black Americans often claimed that Black people were incapable of governing themselves. They should not be a protected or represented group, these white supremacists argued, because they were incapable of producing the artistic culture that anthropologists recognized as the hallmark of a civilization. The Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century was in part a response to this argument: one reason Black Americans had for producing such a rich array of art—and specifically art that focused on their experience of being Black in the United States—was to prove that there was such a thing as African American art and culture. By citing not only examples of Black Americans' successes but specifically of their "originality and artistic conception," the narrator builds his people's collective ethos in the eyes of white readers who might have heard the argument that they are "uncivilized."