Black Men and Public Space: An Essay Analyzing on How Actions Can Mold a Whole Race
My first victim was a woman-white, well dressed, probably in her early twenties. I came upon her late one evening on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a relatively affluent neighborhood in an otherwise mean, impoverished section of Chicago. As I swung onto the avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet, inflammatory distance between us. Not so. She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man-a broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a bulky military jacket-seemed menacingly close. After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up her pace and was soon running in earnest. Within seconds she disappeared into a cross street. (Pg. 419)
In the beginning sentence of his essay, you can see that there’s an ironic twist to it since the way he words it’s like he’s done some sort of crime, specifically a murder. But really, his “victim” was just someone that due to the place that she was and the time that it was, took the decision of running away from Mr. Staples, even if he didn’t pose an immediate threat, but because he looked like he could, after all, he was bigger than her, both in height and width and possibly stronger than her. But besides his size and his build, a factor that determined her to take that decision was because he was black.
Yes, the action that the woman takes does injure Mr. Staples, as he posed no threat to the woman but because he was black and his physical characteristics of a mountain she mistook him for a mugger, rapist, or even a murderer, when he was just walking to try and kill his insomnia, this event is the first of many that makes Mr. Staples realize that he has an ability, like he says, “the ability to alter public space in ugly ways.” But this cursed ability that he has wasn’t because he wanted to have it, it’s actually because of the actions that other black people have taken that affect this view of themselves. According to US Census Bureau, “13.3 percent of Americans are Black or African American and 76.9 percent of Americans are White (this percent includes Hispanic and Latinos)” (Bureau) and according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Black offenders committed 52 percent of homicides recorded in the data between 1980 and 2008. Only 45 percent of the offenders were white.” Now if you look at it, the numbers do look similar, there only being a difference of 7 percent. But what you must see is that the African American population is only a 13 percent and yet they have a higher homicide rate than whites, a population that is much higher than the black one. Because of the actions that a minority group inside of the African American community, the ones that do the crime, the rest of community suffers with them. Like the old saying goes, one bad apple spoils the whole bunch.
Works Cited
Jarmin, Ron. “Census”. Gov. 2017
Cooper, Alexia and Smith, Erica L. “Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008” 2011
Staples, Brent. “Black Men and Public Space” 1986
I think that stereotypes are fault of the society and we as part of it need to fix those erratic ideologies. This passage is an excellent example about why stereotypes are wrong and need to be fix.
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