Intention

Corina Zappia’s main intention with the article “Losing Whiteness When You Lose Your Father” is to inform about the topic of identity and mixed ethnicity. 

She relies on ethos to establish her reliability, as she explains that she has different ethnicities: “ ‘I’m half Filipino... and like, half Italian/Hungarian descent... like half Caucasian... I’m half white…’ ” (l. 80). Moreover, her personal stories help readers connect with her and get to know her. For example, Zappia inserts humor and irony when she shows how society believes her father – being white – cannot have a different-colored family (ll. 29-31).

Towards the end of the article, Zappia introduces parallelism in her finishing sentences to show that she struggles to find a new identity for herself after her father’s death: “This was your father, these are your sisters. And this is you” (ll. 120-121). With this ...