1. What do you think is the author’s main idea about his experiences as a black man in public space?
2. What are some examples he gives of how people treat him when he’s out in public, and how does he feel about that treatment?
3. What are some examples he gives of how he tries to adapt to the way people treat him, and what do you think of how he adapts to that treatment?
To get full credit for this discussion, please post your own thoughts and then respond to someone else, preferably someone who doesn’t have a response yet. You may respond to more than one person if you choose, but remember to be respectful.
BRENT STAPLES
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, 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.
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. 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 I soon 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.
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.
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-on-one street encounters.
Black Men and Public Space–Brent Staples (b. 1951)
Robert McGinley Myers
*Remember to complete the discussion topic on this essay in D2L by the end of the day of our next class.
Elsewhere–in SoHo, for example, where sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings shut
out the sky–things can get very taut indeed.
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 males 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.
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 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.
As a boy, I saw countless tough guys locked away; I have since buried several, too. They 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 in the streets. I came to doubt the virtues of
intimidation early on. I chose, perhaps unconsciously, to remain a shadow-timid, but a survivor.
The fearsomeness mistakenly attributed to me in public places often has a perilous flavor. 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. 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.
Another time I was on assignment for a local paper and killing time before an interview. 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. I took a
cursory look around, nodded, and bade her good night.
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.
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.
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.
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