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Compare and Contrast
Michael Amieiro
Literature 1
9/28/12
Compare and contrast essay

In both Essays “Just Walk On By” by Brent Staples and “The Myth Of The Latin Women” by Judith Coffer, both authors talked about how people stereotyped in the world especially by self situations. But to me there’s a difference between thinking your being stereotyped to misunderstanding. Both of these articles talks about the authors and how they were stereotyped for either being Hispanic or black but I believe one of them is right and the other is a misunderstanding. The way I can depict this is the three topics that differ the authors and their essays. Their details are different and their tones and somewhat of their urban past because one grew up in in the United States and one grew up in Mexico. In the essay “Just Walk On By” Brent Staples gives details of his stereotype of a tall Black male wearing camo clothes and a women looking at him and running away “To her, the youngish black man- a broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into his pockets of a bulky military jacket-seemed menacingly close… she picket up her pace and was soon running in earnest”(Staples, Brent). Another example is how a woman pulls a dog on him just because of the way he looks. “ I entered a jewelry store on the city’s affluent Near North Side. The Proprietor excused herself and returned with an enormous red Doberman Pinscher straining at the end of a leash. She stood, the dog extended toward me, silent to my questions, her eyes bulging nearly out of her head” (Staples, Brent). Now compare it to the essay of Judith Coffer, in the “Myth Of The Latin Women” Coffer is too vague with her stereotype in her essay, Coffer was excused for a waitress in a restaurant “An older woman motioned me to her table. Thinking (foolish me) that she wanted me to autograph a copy of my brand new slender volume of verse, I went over. She ordered a



Cited: Page: 1) Cofer, Judith. ‘The Myth Of The Latin Women. “Patterns OfExposition.20thED.RobertA.Schwegler.Pearson: NewYork.2012.Print

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