A Rhetorical Critique of David Brooks People Like Us

In David Brooks' People Like Us passage on the issue of diversity, Brooks takes a personally emotional perspective of the way in which Americans don't appreciate how diverse our nation is while relatively homogeneous (Brooks 136). His argument is weakened, however, through a bias and hypocrisy that his diction conveys. He claims that grouping ourselves with those who we are most alike is in our nature to, and in doing so, we separate ourselves from those who are different. Using certain statistics as evidence, Brooks points out that the social segmentation created by society will always exist.

He argues that no matter where we go, we cannot find a neighborhood that is diverse in which no one is alike. Brooks utilizes the idea of human...