Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

After reading the essay by Brent Staples, react to the following. How relevant is Staples essay (written and published in 1986) today? Given our reading on race and ethnicity, what do you think about the ways he goes about alleviating fear in others? Do you think these methods would be helpful today? Do you think black men have the same effect on public space currently, as Staples experiences over 30 years ago?Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

ORDER A PLAGIARISM-FREE PAPER HERE

Papers should be APA style and at least two pages in length.

Article for Assignment 1

Black Men and Public Space, by Brent Staples

Brent Staples (b. 1951) earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago and went on to become a journalist. The following essay originally appeared in Ms. Magazine in 1986, under the title, “Just Walk on By.”Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

My first victim was a white woman, 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, uninflammatory 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.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

That was more than a decade ago. I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student newly arrived at the University of Chicago. 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. As a softy 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.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay. Her flight made me feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area from the surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that a vast, unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians – particularly women – and me. And soon I gathered that being perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a foyer somewhere, or make an errant move after being pulled over by a policeman. Where fear and weapons meet – and they often do in urban America – there is always the possibility of death.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

In that first year, my first away from my hometown, I was to become thoroughly familiar with the language of fear. At dark, shadowy intersections, I could cross in front of a car stopped at a traffic light and elicit the thunk, thunk, thunk of the driver – black, white, male, or female – hammering down the door locks. On less traveled streets after dark, I grew accustomed to but never comfortable with people crossing to the other side of the street rather than pass me. Then there were the standard unpleasantries with policemen, doormen, bouncers, cabdrivers, and others whose business it is to screen out troublesome individuals before there is any nastiness.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

I moved to New York nearly two years ago, and I have remained an avid night walker. In central Manhattan, the near-constant crowd cover minimizes tense one-one-one street encounters. Elsewhere, in Soho, for example, where sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings shut out the sky – things can get very taut indeed.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

After dark, on the warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live, I often see women who fear the worst from me. They seem to have set their faces on neutral, and with their purse straps strung across their chests bandolier-style, they forge ahead as though bracing themselves against being tackled. I understand, of course, that the danger they perceive is not a hallucination. Women are particularly vulnerable to street violence, and young black men are drastically overrepresented among the perpetrators of that violence. Yet these truths are no solace against the kind of alienation that comes of being ever the suspect, a fearsome entity with whom pedestrians avoid making eye contact.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

It is not altogether clear to me how I reached the ripe old age of twenty-two without being conscious of the lethality nighttime pedestrians attributed to me. Perhaps it was because in Chester, Pennsylvania, the small, angry industrial town where I came of age in the 1960’s, I was scarcely noticeable against the backdrop of gang warfare, street knifings, and murders. I grew up one of the good boys, had perhaps a half-dozen fist fights. In retrospect, my shyness of combat has clear sources.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried several too. There were babies, really – a teenage cousin, a brother of twenty-two, a childhood friend in his mid-twenties – all gone down in episodes of bravado played out on the streets. I came to doubt the virtues of intimidation early on. I chose, perhaps unconsciously, to remain a shadow – timid, but a survivor.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a perilous flavor. The most frightening of these confusions occurred in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, 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 as a burglar. The office manager called security and, with an ad hoc posse, pursued me through the labyrinthine halls, nearly to my editor’s door. I had no way of proving who I was. I could only move briskly toward the company of someone who knew me.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

Another time I was on assignment for a local paper and killing time before an interview. I entered a jewelry store on a 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. I took a cursory look around, nodded, and bade her goodnight.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

Relatively speaking, however, I never fared as badly as another black male journalist. He went to nearby Waukegan, Illinois, a couple of summers ago to work on a story about a murderer who was born there. Mistaking the reporter for the killer, police officers hauled him from his car at gunpoint and but for his press credentials, would probably have tried to book him. Such episodes are not uncommon. Black men trade tales like this all the time.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

Over the years, I learned to smother the rage I felt at so often being taken for a criminal. Not to do so would surely have led to madness. I now take precautions to make myself less threatening. I move about with care, particularly late in the evening. I give a wide berth to nervous people on subway platforms during the wee hours, particularly when I have exchanged business clothes for jeans. If I happen to be entering a building behind some people who appear skittish, I may walk by, letting them clear the lobby before I return, so as not to seem to be following them. I have been calm and extremely congenial on those rare occasions when I’ve been pulled over by the police.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

And, on late-evening constitutionals I employ what has proved to be an excellent tension reducing measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem to relax, and occasionally they even join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. It is my equivalent of the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

How relevant is Staple’s essay (written and published in 1986) today?

Staples’ essay is highly relevant in today’s society in different ways. The essay narrated is about the stereotyping of the black man as a criminal. Criminalizing the African American race is evident in today’s society, with examples of police brutality. According to Smiley &Fankule (2016), the black man began with the historical institution of slavery, where the black man was considered a brute. This image has since evolved to a black man’s image as a thug given the fight for justice that African Americans have undergone. Over the years, the black man’s portrayal and consideration as a thug lead to the stereotyping and criminalizing of the black race. In Staples’ essay, the young man is walking along a path, with his hands pocketed, and a white woman runs away, having felt the need to protect herself from a black man, who could be a thug.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

This stereotyping is evident in today’s society, given the incidences of police brutality. For instance, a recent scenario was George Floyd, who was stereotyped as a thug for issuing a bad check, and the police failed to do proper investigations, nailing him to the ground and suffocating him to death.Further investigations show that Floyd’s check was acceptable. Mass incarceration of the black man is another example of how Staples’ essay is relevant today. The stereotyping of the black man as a thug leads to preconceived notions that black men are criminals, and the system tends to reign hard on men from this community.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

1. What do you think about the ways he goes about alleviating fear in others?

I think that the man’s measures to alleviate fear in others are unnecessarily inconvenient because he sometimes has to wait for people to clear a lobby before he can access it. Sometimes he has to watch his behavior when he wears jeans because he will be perceived as a thug, mentally exhausting. I also think that the measures he takes are dehumanizing because no one should feel the need to continually be cautious around others for fear of being considered an unfit member of society.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

1. Do you think these methods would be helpful today?

I doubt that the methods the man uses to alleviate fears in others would be helpful today. While the notion that black men are thugs may not be applied everywhere, there is institutionalized and systemic racism in America against black men, which exposes them to dangers such as incarceration or arrest. Law enforcement has joined the civilians in profiling black men as thugs and apply brutal means when handling them. Therefore, even if one was to use these methods to alleviate fears in others, there is an additional problem: law enforcement.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.

1. Do you think black men have the same effect on public space currently as Staples experiences over 30 years ago?

I do not think that black men have the same effect on public space currently. In some situations, they have the same effect; however, the stereotyping of the black man as a thug or criminal is now more institutionalized or systemic than being as personal as it was in the 1980s. I think it is more common to find a black man experiencing police brutality than a woman running away or avoiding sharing public spaces with black men because she feels unsafe. The problem is now at the macro-level, which is worse.Black Men and Public Spaces Essay.