#19 - Concept Reference, Author Agreement

[valentina07]

Why is answer choice A right?

I had eliminated it because in the passage it mentions that the "Popular Front initially appealed to African-American communists"

[Jeff Wren]

Hi valentina,

The key word in the line that you quoted is "initially." Also note later in that sentence "because it seemed to open new strategies for blunting repression (my emphasis).

In other words, the Popular Front seemed appealing to African Americans at first, but then they lost interest as they noticed certain changes taking place.

The main discussion of the Popular Front and how it introduced factors that hampered the political appeal for African Americans is actually in fourth paragraph. This paragraph begins by stating that African American involvement in Communism declined during the Popular Front. The paragraph then lists several factors that made it less appealing to African Americans, such as a "retreat from attacks on white chauvinism" (lines 40-41) and "the party's increasing cautiousness" (line 45).

[PresidentLSAT]

The support I used for my answer was that I inferred that the decline of African American participation implied that there had been factors that hampered the appeal of communism among AA.

Is it correct?

[Adam Tyson]

That's accurate, President, but I don't know that it's enough to support answer A. Did it decline because of factors it introduced, or because of something external to it? I might lose interest in comic books, but that doesn't mean the comics changed. Maybe I changed? Maybe something else came along that diverted my attention?

I think we can find even better support in the text, such as all of the rest of the text in the 4th paragraph, which tells us about some of those factors. That's where we find out that what drove down participation among African Americans was something about the Popular Front itself.