Summary and Argument Analysis
Read “Black Men and Public Space” ( also called “Walk on By”) by Brent Staples. The link is provided below. Your essay should be written in paragraph form, and should include both a summary and analysis. The analysis should be at least as long as the summary.
Summary: Provide a brief summary of the article, being sure to follow the points we have discussed in class about summarizing (i.e., focusing on the main ideas, avoiding plagiarism, using quotes appropriately, etc.). Provide page #’s for in-text references.
Analysis – Your analysis should cover the points below.
a. Decide on the purpose of the essay. Is it to inform or to persuade? Provide support for your answer.
b. Discuss the answer to the following: What kinds of appeals – emotional, logical, ethical – does Staples use? Give examples of the kinds of appeals and discuss their effectiveness.
Use brief quotes and in-text references in your writing. You do not need to create a works cited entry for this paper.
This assignment should be approx. 400 words long. The entire assignment should be typed in paragraph form and submitted to turnitin under Analysis.
Note: No more than 15% of a paper may consist of quoted material.
Just Walk on By
by 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 23 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 raw chicken—let alone hold it 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 in Chicago, I could cross in front of a car stopped at a traffic
light and elicit the thunk, 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 who
crossed to the other side of the street rather than pass me. Then there were
the standard unpleasantries with police, doormen, bouncers, cab drivers,
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. Elsewhere—visiting
friends in SoHo, where sidewalks are narrow and tightly spaced buildings
shut out the sky—things can get very taut indeed.
Black men have a firm place in New York mugging literature.
Norman Podhoretz in his famed (or infamous) 1963 essay, “My Negro
Problem—and Ours,” recalls growing up in terror of black males; they
were “tougher than we were, more ruthless,” he writes—and as an adult
on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he continues, he cannot constrain
his nervousness when he meets black men on certain streets. Similarly, a
decade later, the essayist and novelist Edward Hoagland extols a New
York where once “Negro bitterness bore down mainly on other
Negroes.” Where some see mere panhandlers, Hoagland sees “a mugger
who is clearly screwing up his nerve to do more than just ask for
money.” But Hoagland has “the New Yorker’s quickhunch posture for
broken-field maneuvering,” and the bad guy swerves away.
I often witness that “hunch posture,” from women after dark on the
warrenlike streets of Brooklyn where I live. They seem to 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
talked. 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, against being set apart, 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 22
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 first
fights. In retrospect, my shyness of combat has clear sources.
Many things go into the making of a young thug. One of those
things is the consummation of the male romance with the power to
intimidate. An infant discovers that random flailings send the baby bottle
flying out of the crib and crashing to the floor. Delighted, the joyful babe
repeats those motions again and again, seeking to duplicate the feat. Just
so, I recall the points at which some of my boyhood friends were finally
seduced by the perception of themselves as tough guys. When a mark
cowered and surrendered his money without resistance, myth and reality
merged—and paid off. It is, after all, only manly to embrace the power to
frighten and intimidate. We, as men, are not supposed to give an inch of
our lane on the highway; w are to seize the fighter’s edge in work and in
play and even in love; we are to be valiant in the face of hostile forces.
Unfortunately, poor and powerless young men seem to take all this
nonsense literally. 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 22, 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 even 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 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 talks like
this all the time.
In “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” Podhoretz writes that the
hatred he feels for blacks makes itself known to him through a variety of
avenues—one being taken for a criminal. Not to do so would surely have
led to madness—via that special “paranoid touchiness” that so annoyed
Podhoretz at the time he wrote the essay.
I began to 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 happened 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 along streets less traveled by, 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
to the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country.
(1,604 words)
Questions to consider
1. Describe the author, Brent Staples. What is he like and what does
he look like, and why is this important?
2. Who is Norman Podhoretz and why does Staples talk about him?
3. What is the author’s main idea?
4. What do you think about Staple’s point? How can you relate this
to your life or something you know about (your schema)?