Brent Staples Parallel Time: Growing Up Black And White

In 1986, in Brent Staples memoir Parallel Time: Growing Up Black and White, he wrote a selection called Black Men and Public Space. Throughout the essay Staples talks about the injustice and racial profiling that he receives as a black man in society. This causes him to change certain aspects that he does on a daily basis to make the people around him feel less threatened. Unconsciously, Staples presents ways on how he and society systematizes him and other black males.
The very first paragraph of the selection sets the tone of how society views him . In this paragraph, Staples talks about his first “victim” and how she was scared of him because of the idea that he could have been a criminal. This is where the systematization starts. This very incident
In paragraph five, he states that the fears that women think of when they see him are “ not a hallucination.” By this he means that all the fears that women have are very much real. Fears of being robbed, assaulted, raped, etc.can actually happen and are often done by black men. Because of these accusations that society has convinced Staples to believe, he starts to see himself as that potential robber, assaulter, or rapist that the women in society believe that he is or is capable of becoming. It also doesn’t help that we as a black culture portray ourselves to be those murderers, muggers, and rapists, in social media, music videos, and on reality television. It only causes society to view us as those types of criminals. Then we complain when we are stereotyped by others but we are the ones putting out that image for everyone to see. But also, society plays a big role in over representing us as criminals through media outlets and agreeing that we are criminals that need to be feared. This goes to show that we as a black culture are feared based off of a few people’s