“A black man ponders his power to alter public space.” By Brent Staples

“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 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 chose two quotes from this essay because the way they mirrored each other caught my attention. I really appreciate the intersectionality that Staples introduces in his essay. As a reader, his introduction had me drawn in immediately, and as a woman, I was also feeling a little conflicted about his opening example. On the one hand, I did not doubt the validity of his experience for a second, and on the other hand, I was thinking of all the ways that women have to avoid danger and keep themselves safe while walking at night. He goes on to acknowledge that and shows the ways he goes about keeping himself safe by intentionally making himself seem less threatening. He also points out that these precautionary steps are needed because being perceived as a threat is what can be the most dangerous and, too often, deadly to black men in this country. I have often heard people beg the comparison of what women think about to keep themselves safe while walking down the street and what, if anything, men think about to keep themselves safe. This essay was a good reminder that those specific comparisons are only referencing white men. There are, indeed, a good number of life-saving things that black men, like women, unfortunately have to think about while walking down the street.

Staples’ thesis makes clear that, in this country, there has been and still is a societal fear of black men. He shows examples of this through personal examples and those of colleagues in every decade since the 60s. He also pulls on examples of this in literature through the racist essays of Podhoretz and Hoagland. This essay makes apparent that there is still so much work to be done in our society to dismantle the “unwieldy inheritance” that so many generations of black men are born bearing.