Preview

Just Walk On By Brent Staples Summary

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1189 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Just Walk On By Brent Staples Summary
In Brent Staples story, "Just Walk on By", the author underlines how black men are casualties of discrimination. First, he recalls his realization of how much his presence terrified other people, essentially a white woman, when he used to go out for strolls during the evening around the town. In spite of the fact that he understand that the world is seen to be progressively brutal and hazardous, he feels disappointed that African-American guys, particularly, are as yet being judged and misconstrued taking into account by their appearances. The author notice two cases where somebody misinterpreted him for a hoodlum and a companion who was a writer was flawed mistaken for a killer. These events, he states, are not uncommon. Presently so as to …show more content…
At the age of twenty-two, when Brent Staples attended the University of Chicago, he had to manage ladies continually giving him an apprehensive look when he was simply leisurely walking along the street. Staples make use of ethos by demonstrating his very own involvements of individuals feeling uncomfortable around since he is an African-American male. He senses that the lady "thought herself as the prey of a mugger, an attacker, or more regrettable". Likewise, he considers his self as "vague from the muggers who every so often saturated the region from the encompassing ghetto". Staples also uses ethos by expressing a sample from Norman Podhoretz paper, "My Negro Problem—And Ours". Podhoretz states "he cannot compel his nervousness when he encounters with black guys on specific streets". Ladies and men have that "hunch stance", as well as feel troublesome when black males are roaming the streets. Despite the fact that Staples needed to manage individuals surmising supremacist slurs towards him, he didn't let that influence his life. Staples utilize much striking symbolism to offer his readers some assistance with imagining the circumstances he needs to adapt to. The picture of Staples scarcely having the capacity to "take a knife to a raw chicken" shows the person who is reading that Staples is truth be told a safe individual. Similarly, Staples portrays white females who walk the road at night as appearing to "progress as if preparing their selves against being attacked." The ladies are strongly shielding themselves from black guys who they do not know centered especially on stereotypes of black men. These pictures encourage the reader’s capacity to completely encounter the profundity of Staples' story. His authority depicts this strategy from the earliest starting point of his story. The author expresses that his "first victim was a lady"

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    In the front part of the essay “ Just walk on by”, Brent tells a few little stories which are talking about how bad racism is hurting him. He is hurting for racism as a child, as an adult, as a student and as a journalist. People are giving a mark of bad people on him. However, in the last paragraph, he “whistles melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi....” (qtd. in Brent) and “Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttimes destinations seem to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune” (qtd. in Brent). He chooses the right way to make people think that he is a good person in side. He is not a threat. When most people are facing challenges…

    • 414 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A walk in the woods By: Dawson Pellegrin Alonso, a young explorer, took his adventure a bit too far when he got lost in a dark wooded area after thinking it would be a piece of cake. After hours of wandering without any trace of familiarity, he found himself in a marsh just off his trail, he walked right into a large quicksand hole, trapped in the quicksand that had sucked him into his hips. Knowing that no one is around, Alonso is determined to escape his fate of being swallowed by the sand. So in fright, he quickly grabs a nearby root of a half-sunken tree that was uncovered by the quicksand Alonso starts pulling as hard as he can but it feels like something is pulling on the other end trapping him like a rat keeping him from escaping and in that moment he sees two yellow eyes glaring at him from the bottom of the pit.…

    • 540 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the essay Just walk on by, author Brent Staples shares his experiences of living with the prejudged notion that he is someone to be feared because he is different from his peers. Brent Staples grew up in the small town of Chester, Pennsylvania where he was an outsider. He caught on to something that most of his friends probably had never thought about before or even felt that they had the right to think about. Somewhere along the line of his child hood Staples chose to rise above the normality of his peers. He chose to become what was unexpected of him and set new standards for his life. He decided to be a dreamer, however; when his dreams came true Staples quickly learned that changing the way he felt about himself internally did not mean that people would overlook judgment on what they saw externally.…

    • 1338 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    In "Black Men and Public Spaces" Brent Staples writes about his experiences with racism and how it changes his life. He also helps people who have not been victims of racism understand the effects of their actions whether intentional or not.…

    • 280 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Understanding that a large portion of his audience would be African Americans, Williams establishes his authority to write about the topic of racial profiling. To do this, Williams describes an incident where he himself, as an African American man, experienced racial profiling. While picking up trash, a white gentleman offered him a job to clean up his property; Williams thanked him but then said he would be busy writing his…

    • 71 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    It is no surprise that currently and throughout history people of color have faced discrimination. Brent Staples shares his personal experience with the issue in the essay, “Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space.” Unlike the Invisible Man, Staples was seen and by his appearance people fled from him, specifically white people. He addresses that he understands why people feel the need to cross the street and speed up. He explains that it a common view that black men are dangerous and that’s the only definition white people are given and therefore it is only natural to be cautious. Nevertheless the discrimination he feels is not justified by this fact nor does it bring comfort that the fear is not personal it is for the general race. Granted…

    • 249 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    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…

    • 688 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    He says in article In this article he uses several ethos. He states that “Perhaps it was because in Chester, Pennsylvania, the small, angry industrial town where I came of age in the 1960s, I was scarcely noticeable against a backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and murders. I grew up one of the good boys, had perhaps a half-dozen fistfights. In retrospect, my shyness of combat has clear sources.”, which leads the reader to believe that he grew up in a rough small town in Pennsylvania, but was not affiliated with the gang warfare backdrop. Another example of ethos is when he says “The most frightening of these confusions occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I worked as a journalist in Chicago. One day, rushing into the office of a magazine I was writing for with a deadline story in hand, I was mistaken for a burglar.”, he tells us that he works as a journalist and was mistaken for a burglar in his own work place, because he was a black man rushing into a building. While Brent Staples uses ethos, he also uses pathos. In the first paragraph he uses phrases like “worried glance” and “menacingly close” to show emotion through the article. Brent Staples says “Unfortunately, poor and powerless young men seem to take all this nonsense literally. As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried…

    • 571 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Shelby Steele uses a select choice of ethos, logos, and pathos to convey feelings “On being Black and Middle Class.” He strongly uses ethos in his essay, because he gives a plethora of logical examples and ideas about his statements. For example, he states, “What became clear to me is that people like myself, my friend and middle-class blacks generally, are caught in a very specific double bind that keeps two equally powerful elements of our identity at odds with each other.”Steele uses innocence and guilt in his essay to make the reader to feel bad that the whites were considered more powerful than the blacks. He uses ethos, logos, and pathos throughout his whole essay in order to describe emotion, reasoning, and the character of the speaker.…

    • 761 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Dick with Ears!

    • 783 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The next article, “Black Men and Public Space.”, is about a man, Brent Staples, coming home and following behind a white woman. He describes how scared the woman gets when she notices the man behind her and goes into great detail how race, gender, and class play a big role in society and government. Mr. Staples also gives a strong ethical statement. “As a softly who is scarcely able to take a knife to a raw chicken-let alone hold one to a person’s throat-I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once.” The quote before states, “… it was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into-the ability to alter public space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking sleep, not defenseless wayfarers.” This quote and Brent Staples as well are trying to say that not all Negroes are rapist, let alone muggers, and that they can actually be treated as actual humans. Brent Staples also has a very strong thesis. This thesis states, “My first victim was a woman-white, well…

    • 783 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Brent Staples

    • 829 Words
    • 2 Pages

    While surfing the web, I found out some very informative information about the life of Brent Staples. Brent Staples was an intelligent man, not just an ordinary man from Chester, Pennsylvania. He earned various degrees as different universities and colleges like a BA from Widener University in 1973, and a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1977. He was a professor of psychology at various universities in the states. Writing is one of Staples’ specialties and he has been a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Times. He writes editorials about culture and politics. Staples also put efforts into other things such as; periodicals, including Literary Cavalcade, Columbia Journalism Review, and the Los Angeles Times. “Among his frequent topics are race relations, the effects of the media, and the state of education. His memoir Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White (1994) won the Anisfield-Wolff Book Award in 1995. "Just Walk On By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space" takes a look at the effect some of his nighttime walks have had on people. This essay was first published as "Black Men and Public Space" in 1986 in Ms. Magazine.”…

    • 829 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The media places labels on Staples as dangerous, mistrustful, and someone to be cautious of constantly. Another example of his imagery can be seen when he describes himself as, ”a soft who scarcely able to hold a knife… let alone to a person’s throat.” This description shows the type of person the author uses as a comparison to the symbol that is correlated with himself. His use of imagery presents his persona as misunderstood by the symbols people associate him with. Additionally, Staples shows the type of person he truly is through his personal anecdotes and the unfortunate experiences he goes through due to the attachment of symbols. A personal anecdote Staples uses is the constant fear in women on the streets he walks on as “their purse straps across their chest bandolier style...though bracing themselves against being tackles.” This is an occurrence Staples experiences on a daily basis as a result of the labels attached to a black man. Although Staples is a rather quiet and soft man, society views him as dangerous and one to avoid and watch at all times. This causes Staples to become “surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed at once.” The labels forces Staples into a corner…

    • 915 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Brent Staples essay “Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space” is mostly about how being a black man in today’s society has caused people to stereotype him and misjudge him only because of his color of skin. Black men’s are seen as bad people when in reality, the black man who people judge are innocent civilians just like any other people with different race. Staples uses figurative language, writing techniques, and diction to tell his past experiences and the effect it has caused in his…

    • 832 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    As Staples says, Black men have a very bad reputation of being a mugger, a rapist or even worse (P115, paragraph 2). Therefore, many people are afraid of them. However, from time to time, Staples had learned a way to change his perception or level of threat to others by putting attention to his physical behavior. As Staples says, a broad six feet with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pickets of a bulky military jacket, certainly is a threat to any women walking at night. (P115, 1) However, Staples notices if he walks slower and gives the frightened people more room then it would lower the level of threat ness.…

    • 485 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In Brent Staples’ personal essay “Black Men and Public Space”, he tells the readers what happen to a young black man in an urban setting. He pinpointed that people often stereotype you because of color, race, gender, culture or appearance. In addition, the author expresses to us that he notices the space between him and other people, such as women on the street. Some people may disagree that women set a certain amount of space when walking by a black man on the street. This statement is not true and public space is not about race, gender, color, culture, or appearance.…

    • 852 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays