Brent Staples and Richard Rodriguez’s autobiographical essays both start out with a problem, but they deal with it in different ways. Brent Staples’ “Just Walk on By” deals with the issue of racism and social judgment he faces because he is African-American, while Rodriguez’s essay “Complexion,” details the self-hatred and shame he felt in his childhood because of his skin color. Both of these essays deal with race, appearance, and self-acceptance, but the authors write about them in different ways. When looking at the similarities and differences together, the points of these essays have a much stronger message about how to deal with discrimination. These essays seem to have different stories, but both have many apparent similarities. In Brent Staples’ essay he discusses how society treats him like a threat and how he can do nothing about it. Likewise, in Richard Rodriguez’s essay, he talks about how he feels that society judged his skin color to be too dark and ugly. Both men felt like outcasts in their surroundings and neither could do anything to change that. Because of this discrimination, both men had to change their lifestyles. Staples adapted to how society viewed him and learned to live that way. For example, he always made sure to keep a certain distance between him and other pedestrians at night to make sure they felt safe. Rodriguez states many times in his essay how much he wanted to just be shirtless in the sun, but could not do it because he was sure his friends would judge him. So although he had urges to do certain actions, he held them back to adapt to the way he felt that his family and his friends saw him. Another similarity these two authors share is how they handled this hate. Staples writes that he learne... ... middle of paper ... ...like Staples’ methods. Both of these essays deal with racism, self-acceptance, and adapting to life’s challenges, but they show them from different views and methods. “Just Walk On By” started out as Staples’ sad life story, but turned into the story of a man who eventually came to terms with the difficulties he would deal with in his life, and he faced them with a positive attitude. “Complexion,” unfortunately, ended with Rodriguez feeling self-defeated and believing he would never find a resolution to his problem. He did not want to ignore the issue of his skin color, but let it slowly take over his life. Seeing them side-by-side, these essays start out with the same problem, but eventually go in completely different directions near the end. Staples and Rodriguez dealt with the racism and social judgment on the inside and both had radically different resolutions.
Both memoirs—John Griffin’s Black Like Me and Dick Gregory’s Nigger—examine race marginalization as it existed in mid-twentieth century America. Griffin’s Black Like Me intimately explores the discrimination against the black community by whites to expose the “truth” of racial relations and to “bridge the gap” of communication and understanding between the two races through a “social experiment”—an assumption of alterity (Griffin 1). In Nigger, Gregory also recounts personal racial discrimination as a black man trying to survive and succeed in a discriminatory society. But unlike Griffin’s experience, Gregory’s memoir progresses from a position of repressed “Other” to a more realized, dominant identity. However, the existence of a dual persona
The transition of being a black man in a time just after slavery was a hard one. A black man had to prove himself at the same time had to come to terms with the fact that he would never amount to much in a white dominated country. Some young black men did actually make it but it was a long and bitter road. Most young men fell into the same trappings as the narrator’s brother. Times were hard and most young boys growing up in Harlem were swept off their feet by the onslaught of change. For American blacks in the middle of the twentieth century, racism is another of the dark forces of destruction and meaninglessness which must be endured. Beauty, joy, triumph, security, suffering, and sorrow are all creations of community, especially of family and family-like groups. They are temporary havens from the world''s trouble, and they are also the meanings of human life.
Brent Staples, who was a journalist for the New York Times, and studied mental philosophy at the University of the Chicago, shows the different subject positions in his published version of the “Just Walk on By: A Black Man Ponders His Power to Alter Public Space”, and his draft version of the “Just Walk on By”. Brent Staples wrote two different versions of the essay, but the essay’s subject position is pretty different to the reader. Also, each subject position describes the same situation quite differently by illustrating each way of looking based on dissimilar perspectives. In his published version, he describes himself as “I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student newly arrived at the University of Chicago”(Staples 240). Also, the published version says, “To her, the young 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”(Staples 240).
In this essay, Dr. Brent Staples recounts his first time unintentionally scaring a young white women located in Hyde Park, Chicago. He recounts her worried posture, her hurried steps, and her repeated glances before she took off down the road. Dr. Staples, being a person of color, took slight offense to this. Before he had never really thought much about his skin color being a factor of intimidation, but rather just a piece of “normal” discrimination. It was the mid 1970’s after all, and it was no secret to anybody
As MLK begins his article, he uses pathos to bring attention to his dispute. He starts by announcing, “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait”... But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your brothers and sisters at whim;... when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park....when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?” (4) MLK utilizes the topic of family to allure empathy; using this topic ensures that any reader may relate to his current situation. He discusses family falling to death, the idea of a child, at a very young age, having to endure blunt and hurtful racism. MLK presents examples of devastating situations in order to connect with the reader. As both articles, “Letters from Birmingham Jail” and “Consider the Lobster” discuss various situations, they are also using
Brent Staples’ piece “Black Men and Public Space” first published in 1986 in a liberal feminist magazine “Ms.” An African American, Staples was often the victim of racial prejudice throughout his young-adulthood. The publication, mostly directed toward white, feminist, affluent women, was supposed to send a message about racial prejudice and empathy. Staples develops his purpose, that people should be empathetic toward African Americans, through self-blaming tone, imagery, and ethical appeal.
The introduction to this article begins with a personal narrative about his own experiences as an African American teenage
He does so by giving personal accounts of this horrific discrimination and utilizing descriptive vocabulary that get the audience to notice a sense of knowledge within the author. He begins to discuss the judgment he faced by stating “I grew accustomed to but never comfortable with people crossing to the other side of the street rather than pass me” (Staples, 189) which allowed the audience to step into the Staples’ shoes and somewhat experience the treatment he endured on a daily basis due to his appearance. The author also justifies his credibility by giving further examples such as when he was racially profiled in a jewelry store to the point where a woman worker brought out a red Doberman pinscher. By implementing these appeals to ethos, Staples was able to effectively convince the audience that he was a credible witness regarding these unjustifiable acts by describing to the reader events that he himself experienced. He was able to put forth this example which not only various African-American males could relate to, but also one that he himself personally endured which assisted in further strengthening his argument and successfully pulling the audience towards his
Thomas uses pathos in order to demonstrate the difficulties she had to endure while growing up as an interracial child. She goes in depth concerning the treatment she received from both racial spectrums. Thomas presents her first example of unfair treatment from a black person’s perspective by stating how whites reacted when they found out her true identity beyond her physical appearance. She states, “I have had friends never speak to me again, parents forbid their children to play with me, job offers suddenly evaporate…when people found out my father is black” (416). Thomas distinctly uses these examples mainly because they are synonymous with the racial boundaries that blacks endure in an everyday American society. Furthermore, these examples grab the emotions of the reader, especially if the reader is black. To further the influence of pathos in the essay, Thomas changes her direction by focusing on how the black community did not accept her, knowing of her mixture. She provides her second example of society’s ignorance by explaining her...
In my essay I have chosen the essay “ black men and public space” by Brent Staples, and “ on seeing England for the first time” by Jamaica Kincaid . In Staples essay he shows us what does it mean to be a black man who walks in the night, living between people “ white people” who sees a criminal or a “mugger” when they look at him , because of the color of his skin that makes him stranger . And Kincaid explains how she felt as a stranger in her home town as well as in England when she went there . And both of Staples and Kincaid share the feeling of the fear, different types of fear ,as they both been through racism from people around them in different ways , in one hand Kincaid had the fear of losing her identity , and her culture identity and thus losing herself , while Staples had the fear of facing others fears of him, and both never did any harm to white people but they been suffering from white people and under they control and under their judgement .
In the article, “A Letter My Son,” Ta-Nehisi Coates utilizes both ethical and pathetic appeal to address his audience in a personable manner. The purpose of this article is to enlighten the audience, and in particular his son, on what it looks like, feels like, and means to be encompassed in his black body through a series of personal anecdotes and self-reflection on what it means to be black. In comparison, Coates goes a step further and analyzes how a black body moves and is perceived in a world that is centered on whiteness. This is established in the first half of the text when the author states that,“white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence,”
Brent Staples focuses on his own experiences, which center around his perspective of racism and inequality. This perspective uniquely encapsulates the life of a black man with an outer image that directly affects how others perceive him as a person. Many readers, including myself, have never experienced the fear that Staples encounters so frequently. The severity of his experiences was highlighted for me when he wrote, “It also made it clear that I was indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area from the surrounding ghetto.” (135) Having to accept that fact as a reality is something that many people will never understand. It is monumentally important that Staples was able to share this perspective of the world so others could begin to comprehend society from a viewpoint different from their
In Brent Staples’ "Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space," Staples describes the issues, stereotypes, and criticisms he faces being a black man in public surroundings. Staples initiates his perspective by introducing the audience in to thinking he is committing a crime, but eventually reveals how the actions taken towards him are because of the fear linked to his labelled stereotypes of being rapists, gangsters and muggers. Staples continues to unfold the audience from a 20 year old experience and sheds light onto how regardless of proving his survival compared to the other stereotypical blacks with his education levels and work ethics being in the modern era, he is still in the same plight. Although Staples relates such burdens through his personal experiences rather than directly revealing the psychological impacts such actions have upon African Americans with research, he effectively uses emotion to explain the social effects and challenges they have faced to avoid causing a ruckus with the “white American” world while keeping his reference up to date and accordingly to his history.
In “Black Men in Public Spaces” the author talks about multiply situation where he was treated different for being an African American. Staples said,” 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” (161.) Then there is “Right Place, Wrong Face, which is focused on and African American man that is wrongly accused of a crime because of his race. White said, “I was searched, stripped of my backpack, put on my knees, handcuffed, and told to be quieted when I tried to ask questions” (229.) The two articles have many similarities. Both articles have two educated African America men who get treated different because of their race. Staples and White both have situations where they are being stereotyped by society because there black
Both Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes were great writers but their attitudes towards their personal experience as an African American differed in many ways. These differences can be attributed to various reasons that range from gender to life experience but even though they had different perceptions regarding the African American experience, they both shared one common goal, racial equality through art. To accurately delve into the minds of the writers’ one must first consider authors background such as their childhood experience, education, as well their early adulthood to truly understand how it affected their writing in terms the similarities and differences of the voice and themes used with the works “How it Feels to be Colored Me” by Hurston and Hughes’ “The Negro Mother”. The importance of these factors directly correlate to how each author came to find their literary inspiration and voice that attributed to their works.